'MegaPoint,
I understand why karate people punch with the other arm chambered near the hip - I just don’t believe that the reasons given are worth the lack of power and keeping the head unprotected. Here’s some points:
If I want to teach someone how to elbow behind them - I’ll show them how to throw an elbow.
The punching style of karate is definately not quicker than boxing and does not promote speed. If you want to increase the speed of your punches you want less focus (i.e. Kime). Too much focus stops the punches being free flowing. Also, pulling your left arm back will not make your right punch faster. If you want to speed up your right punch, pull your right hand back quickly first so you get a stretch-reflex in your pec.
Locking your hips at 90 degrees is not going to help you develop power, it will just stop you getting more torque into your punches.
Keeping your shoulders down will not make your punches more powerful either. Watch a boxer throw a right cross and their shoulder will come up, allowing them to get more hips and shoulder power into the punch. The raised shoulder also protects the jaw from being hit with a left hook.
Put a boxer in against a karate guy and the boxer will have faster, more powerful punches, and will also be a harder target to hit because he fights with his hands up protecting his jaw and because he won’t be trying to block punches but parry and slip them.
Once again it comes down to this - is karate bad at punching ? No.
Is it as good as boxing ? No.
As far as grappling I’m not too sure what the origins are. I haven’t studied Goju in about twelve years.
“Once again, it is ridiculously PC,and inaccurate, to make the claim that all arts are equal when it comes to fighting.”
Very few things in real life are “equal” in the way people would wish them to be. That’s just reality.
For what its worth, “styles” are based on the founder’s ideas, and years of development. The objectiveness we’re looking for tends to come from proper training.
If you were to ask me I would say that both situational relativity and objective truth can exist together and at the same time. If someone constantly wants to compare the “equality” of a proper right cross and a proper finger flick when it comes to knocking someone out…the right cross will win every time. This is because the right cross is objectively more powerful than the finger flick in terms of knockout power. You can train the finger flick as much as you want with speed, power, accuracy, etc. But it will never be a right cross. The two are NOT equal in the realm of knockout power.
However… the finger flick can attack what the right cross cannot. There is a time and place for it. If it’s trained correctly it can become a very dangerous weapon in its own right. And try as you might, your right cross will NEVER become the finger flick. That’s just objective reality.
So in terms of whether it is the style or the art…I do not think all ideas are equal to each other, so yes it is very possible to base an art on faulty logic. However, that being said, I do not see that in martial art to tell the truth. Or at least very rarely. Most of the time, it is the person’s training methods that are not up to par with objective reality. Not necessarily his art.
I don’t know if that helps, but that’s my two yen.
Don’t know where this fits but a MT guy I was talking to the other day had some trouble with a fighter he called a TKD master. Seems that the TKDM used the tactic of using alot of double kicks, one low to buckle the leg and then one high to the head or body. The MT fighter is pretty good and switched to boxing to win on points. Now the TKDM may have studied some MT but he used TKDs quick double kicks to shut down the MT fighters kicking game. So to me it’s some the fighter and some the style. In many ways the art is just a box of tools and it’s up to the person to build something with it.
Wish I could have seen the fight, but all I got to see was the guys bruises.
