In addition to Aikido I am considering Shotokan as my next art. As always it comes down to the teacher/school and ones motivation but I would like to hear comments you guys my have on Shotokan. My back ground is in American Kenpo.
Good idea…
Really rigid with deep-assed stances but in my opinion there are more good Shotokan stylists than “American” Kenpo guys. How the hell is Chuan Fa an American art anyway?
Shotokan is “school-boy’ karate. It’s watered down but it’s better than any American Kenpo, Ed Parker Kenpo, Mitose " the beater and killer of defenseless old folks” Kenpo, or any other money-making Westernized supposed Kenpo junk.
The only true Kenpo is Ryukyuan Kenpo: Matsumura Kenpo or the like…
I take shotokan and love it. But your first inclination is correct: find a good school first, in any art, and you’ll be better off.
For more info about shotokan check out this site: 24fightingchickens.com
K. Mark Hoover
Omegapoint,
You hit on my problem with american kenpo, money. I do believe that an instructor has the right to earn a living, but I find the tuition and contracts a bit much.
Budokan,
Thank you for the site. I will check it out shortly.
just to chime in
I took kempo for about a year and didn’t really like it at all. I have a friend who studied Shotokan for 5 years & i HATE sparring that mug. He’s been studying Capoiera for the past 2 years now, and abit of JJJ. But his foundation is Shotokan, and honestly, i’ve SEEN him WHOOP A$$ in more than a few fights where it woulda been a trip to the hospital if he lost. So i guess it depends alot on your instructor(and your willingness to hand out a beat down when push comes to shove) but I personally think Shotokan is a great art. just my 2 cents. 
In mildness is the strength of steel
My experience with Shotokan is very breif. I do recommend reading “Karate-Do: My Way Of Life” by Ginchin Funokoshi, founder of Shotokan. (He would sign his art and poetry “Shoto”…a names derived from his long solitary walks through the pine tree forests…and his students called his karate “Shoto-kan”). It is good, I think, to try to understand the founder’s background and history of the art.
“She ain’t got no muscles in her teeth.”
- Cat
it depends on the instructor, but a good , traditional shotokan school will develop very strong legs, and teach you good body mechanics for power punches.
“You guys have obviously never done any real fighting if you are mocking spitting”
Spinning Backfist
Shotokan Strikes
So what are the hand strikes and kicks found in shotokan? American Kenpo has a broad range of strikes which have a reacurring pattern in the system.
I trained traditional shotokan for a couple of years in college. It’s better as a traditional martial “art” than a fighting art, but the training we did would prepare you to fight better than most “traditional” schools you encounter.
Jimmy is right about the hand strikes. In our school, the most powerful weapon was the reverse punch (basically, a right cross, assuming you’re right handed). Many of the sparring techniques were built around setting up a way to deliver a very hard right to the face or solar plexus.
Sound limited? Well, it is. But having a good right cross is always a good thing.
I also gained some reasonable hand-eye coordination/timing, hand-speed, and body toughening from the sparring drills.
Keep in mind, though, that in a traditional shotokan school sparring (kumite) and sparring-related training is only about a third of the curriculum. Forms (kata) and basics (kihon) should each comprise a third of training. Kata and basics are cool, if you’re into that, but if you really want to learn striking, I would go to a school that takes the 33% sparring training and expands it to roughly 100%. No need for those other two, IMO, for fighting.
Oh yeah, if you want to do traditional shotokan, try to make sure the school is Japan Karate Association affiliated. Doesn’t assure that it’s a good school, but in my experience increases the likelihood.
If you increase the sparring training to 100% then you’re no longer studying shotokan. You’re studying sparring training.
Which in and of itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but let’s not call it shotokan, okay?
K. Mark Hoover
I wasn’t.
OK guys, before you think that Shotokan has limited strikes available, check out the first couple of volumes of Best Karate by M. Nakayama.
It irks me when Shotokan and TKD instructors leave out the techniques found in the kata, it tells me that they don’t “get” the very arts they teach. While Shotokan may be a “schoolboy” martial art, it is not special ed art either.
“Americans don’t have the courage to come here,” Mullah Mohammed Omar, leader of the Taliban who right about now is getting jiggy with his first of 70 virgins.
“Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.†Last words of Todd Beamer heard over his mobile line right before rushing a hijacker.
getting it strait
So Shotokan is complete as for what they train to accomplish. Which seems to be a system of basic strikes and a solid method to deliver these strikes. The web site 24fightingchickens.com summed up Shotokan as a dueling art, and the author of the site explained that Shotokan is excels at this. Would that be the agreement here? Guys thanks for all the replies.
I trained shotokan for several years, and yes, I was exposed to all sorts of techniques, both in the kata and in the basics. However, we didn’t train in those techniques for fighting. Shotokan has elbow strikes, knee strikes, spear hands, hammerfists, ridge hands, knife-hands, testical grabs, and all kinds of other crap, but we didn’t train to use those in sparring or fighting. Our instructor just sort of explained what the techniques in the forms were and left it at that.
And in Japan ISKF/JKA tournaments you won’t see any of those techniques either, so don’t go telling me about how I wasn’t drinking from the source. We had all kinds of Japanese exchange students (it was a college club) and their shotokan was identical to ours, in content if perhaps not in intensity (some of those guys were pretty hardcare). Also, our school had frequent contact with the regional head instructor, Mikami out of New Orleans, and various shihans from the Japan branches. No doubt you could find MORE traditional schools, but as far as the US goes, it was pretty traditional.
Anyway, I apologize for sounding terse in that last post; I didn’t mean to come off that way.
Just wanted to make the point that even though many techniques may be “taught” in a school, frequently only a handful are usually heavily emphasized.
Maybe I’m generalizing too much, but our school was all about the reverse punch.
Redmond is wrong about shotokan being good only as a dueling art. His site is good for basic defini
True. Only a handful of techniques are emphasized because shotokan’s basic premise is that you should be extremely proficient in a few moves rather than have an overview of several hundred. To wit:
Stances: Yoi, front stance, back stance, horse stance
Strikes: backfist, reverse punch, lunge punch, palm heel
Blocks: shuto, middle block, high block, low block
Kicks: front snap kick, side kick, back kick, roundhouse
These are the Basic 16 as they’re sometimes called. But they are by no means the only techniques learned within the system.
And I couldn’t agree more about the book “Dynamic Karate” by Nakayama. It is an excellent treatise that explores all aspects of the shotokan system, even down to old style ‘fists’ used by the Okinawan Masters.
K. Mark Hoover
Budokan, you’re in Mississippi? Are you from the state? I’m a native Mississippian, but I left in 1993.
The club where I trained was at University of Southern Mississippi (Hattiesburg) with T. Waggoner as instructor. It was a great experience.
question
Now, If I can ask another important question. Are you guys still practicing Shotokan and if not why? Guess I am just trying to rationalize my own move away from Kenpo.
I quit because of accumulated injuries and because of moving away from the area.
Also, this was about the time the UFC started, and karate began to lose credibility as a fighting art in my eyes. After doing some brief and painful training under a sadistic MMA teacher, during which time I saw him demolish a number of TKD and karate black belts, I came to realize that the gap between shotokan and actual fighting was pretty large.
I still appreciate shotokan as a martial art. It’s aesthetic, meditative, and, depending on the class, physically challenging. It also probably has some self-defense applications. But if you’re really interested in self-defense you’d best supplement it with BJJ or some other grappling style.
P.S.: Don’t take my experience with an ******* as representative of MMA style training. There are lots of excellent instructors nowadays.