As a karateka (a person that does karate), people often say to me “Karate is no good in real fighting situations. No one in the UFC uses it!”.

Obviously, this frustrates me, and I don’t react beyond saying “So what would you use in a real-life fight?” as most people’s opinions on this are based on what they read rather from experience.

Mixed Martial Arts

Now I’ve been doing karate for 14 years and through that time MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) has become more and more prominent and is popularised via the UFC events and broadcasts. UFC seems to be synonymous with MMA in people’s minds so let’s look fighters, past and present that are karate based. One thing to note before we do: MMA is MIXED Martial arts so most MMA practitioners use more than one martial art when they compete e.g. Karate with Brazilian jiu jitsu.

Guy Mezger “The Sandman”

one of the early pioneers of UFC.

·         Won UFC in 1997

·         6th Dan in  Kyokushin Karate

Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson.

When it comes to overall striking in MMA, don’t look any further. He has a great UFC record. Recently Jesse Enkamp AKA “The karate Nerd” did a video with him 

You’ll be hearing a lot more from Jesse as we’ve been allowed to use some of his blogs and videos. His brother Oliver Enkamp is also an MMA fighter!

George St. Pierre:

The Canadian is famous for always entering the Octagon in gi and headband with Karate symbols

·         UFC Middleweight Championship

·         UFC Welterweight Championship

·         Third most consecutive title defences in UFC history (9)

·         Most wins in UFC title fights (13) (tied with Jon Jones)

I don’t have a lot of experience in MMA / UFC but I know some of our instructors are fanatical about it. <Cough> Rachael Sensei and Rob Sensei! However, you can check out this article for more karate in MMA details or this one to see more people who have been sucesful at using karate in MMA.

Real Fighting

Is karate any good in real fighting situations? You bet it is! However, don’t forget the main premise of self defence is first not to put yourself in a situation where you need to fight, and if you do, get away from it ASAP!

That being said, in karate we obviously practice fighting (sparring) but within the confines of the rules we follow it might not work as well as it could “on the street”. That’s oxymoronically because we fight to keep each other safe! We wouldn’t do that on the streets. Rather than focusing on specific techniques which do work, but are hard / impossible to leard from a blog, we’ll look at something in the karate we all do that’s hidden in plain sight but has a lot of “nasty” in it.

Kata!

This surprises many new karateka, but hidden within many techniques in kata is a fighting move that can not only be useful in a fight, but is downright dirty. We tend not to emphasise this too much because there are young children around, but it’s there and is described by the term Bunkai. Litterally, "analysis" or "disassembly". It’s what we use to describe what the moves in a kata could be used for in a real-world scenario.

In Heian Nidan the knife hand (Nukite) strike is actually to someone’s windpipe.

In Heian Godan there are two places where we strike to the crotch area. Senseis often say smilingly that this is to the inside of the opponent’s leg, however for gentlemen, there is a better explanation……

In Heian Yondan there is a bit where we actively grab the opponent’s ears and use them to ram them into our knee. You don’t do that in sparring!

The male Japanese team won the recent team kata competition at the Dubai 2021 World Championships. After the kata they give an amazing bunkai demonstration of the kata (Please forgive the Spanish commentary, but this was the best video)