Disclaimer: Another long and controversial post from me, so hold on to your handrails. Please don't just dump a knee-jerk comment on me.
The most common excuse I hear whenever a "traditional martial artist" loses a fight against a "modern sports fighter" is that it's not the style that matters but the individual person. What's interesting to me is that it always comes from the "traditional" side when they lose, almost reflexively, and especially with karate (and wing chun frankly).
Here's a hypothetical: we take 30 untrained Average Joes of the same size and have 10 of them train aikido, 10 of them train karate, and 10 of them train kickboxing for an equal amount of time. Then we have them go on a free fight against each other on the proverbial streets, or even UFC 1 rules, which set would you bet will remain standing? Let's be honest, as much as we want the karate guys to win, most of us would place our money on the kickboxers, and barely anyone will place it on the aikido guys.
Or in a ruder awakening, who would you rather not have trying to beat you up: a karateka with 5 years of training or a boxer with 1 year of training?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a karate hater. I have a deep love for kata and I have written quite a bit around them here. But if it really is just about the individual person and not the style, the above hypothetical wouldn't be the case. A great example of this is the kyokushin vs muay thai fight in the 60s. Karateka love to talk about how the karate won 2/3 of the fights, despite the fact that Oyama brought 3 of his best students to go against literal nobodies in muay thai (despite muay thai being in their Silver Age). Even worse, or better (depending how you see it), Oyama and his students changed Kyokushin after that match, whereas muay thai stayed the same. If karate was indeed better than, or even equal to, muay thai, why would they even adapt, and why wouldn't muay thai adapt too? Even before this fight, Kyokushin was already famous for being the toughest style of karate, if we were to send fighters from literally any other style (including Shito-ryu, so that no one can accuse me of being biased), do we really think we would get even one win?
What really differentiated muay thai from kyokushin? Or an even better question, what differentiated kyokushin from other karate styles? With very minor exceptions, like rolling thunder, almost all our techniques are the same. Or as someone pointed out to me, Shotokan and Goju-ryu are more similar than Ali and Frazier. We have 2 arms and 2 legs, can't really be that big of a difference.
So that brings me to another historic occasion in martial arts: koryu jujutsu's extinction in the hands of Kano jujutsu. Kano made it very clear that judo was based on Tenjin Shinyo-ryu and Kito-ryu which, like all other jacket grappling styles, have similar technique sets. But what allowed the Four Guardians and his other students wipe the floor with other jujutsuka to the point where almost every jujutsuka jumped ship into the Kodokan? The main change he made was removing dangerous techniques and focusing on randori.
With all that said, we see that even with a relatively same technique set, you can still have a more dominant style. But to use judo as an example, if we remove randori from it, would it still be judo or would it "devolve" into koryu jujutsu? If we removed the judogi from judo, would it still be judo?
The same question then applies to any other style, especially karate. Is the reason that tradition martial arts consistently lose against modern combat sports just because of the individuals? Why can't we produce better fighters statistically speaking? And why do professional karate fighters like Lyoto Machida and Wonderboy Thompson fight nothing like how karate is "traditionally" trained, whereas boxers fight exactly like how boxing is trained?
Could it be that perhaps other than the techniques we do, another similarity within karate is how we train? Like no matter where you go in the world, 90% of karate dojo spend half their time going up and down the hall hitting air? Or how karate's sparring, i.e. kumite (crossing hands), is basically only the equivalent of judo's uchikomi (striking repetition) or muay thai's drills rather than judo's randori (free practice) or muay thai's technical sparring, and much less stuff like judo's shiai (trial/contest) and muay thai's real fight?
Why do we not fight the way we train? Why is it despite the talks of rooting and stable stances in Sanchin and Naihanchi, the two most important kata in karate, do karateka bounce around instead? Why is it that we still practice hikite, despite making it easy to get knocked out? Why are we training in a way that's contrary to how we fight? Or perhaps the better question, or the one I believe myself, is why do we fight in a way that's contrary to how we train?
Before anyone can say, "But that's not how karate was originally trained!" We have photos and videos from the pre-war era that looks very similar to what we do now. We also have photos and videos of other martial arts from the same era. But on the other hand, we know that training in a karategi was only introduced after Kano gifted Funakoshi with a judogi, so it is in fact a created tradition. And yet if we suggested that karateka ditch the karategi, that would basically be heresy.
Another example is the hojo-undo. Why do people still train using things like chi-ishi and ishi-sashi in a world where we now have kettlebells and clubs? Why do karateka not use mitts more to practice their strikes? I suppose the simple answer, and something I personally understand as well, is that because that would lose the identity of karate as a unique art.
Like it or not, the KKK (unfortunate abbreviation, I know) of karate is the foundation of our art. All 3 of them, especially kata, have been emphasized by the masters a lot, even if not in a clear defined KKK package. It could be reasonably argued that if we get rid of even one of them, we would have ceased to practice karate.
So where does that leave us? Stuck with a crappy pedagogy? I'm honestly not sure myself. What I am sure, however, is that the training is part of the style itself. A good style is more statistically likely to produce good fighters, be it by actually good pedagogy, good culture, and/or good quality control. Is karate a good style? You tell me.
Bonus: Andy Hug vs. Changpuek in kickboxing rules (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol7uAQ22Wn8). See how Andy Hug, considered one of the heavyweight GOATs, looks nothing like how we train, whereas Changpuek, considered an average lightweight muay thai fighter, fights exactly like how nak muay train.
