Putting Substance Back Into Karate: It Must Mean Something.

 

Posted by ADAM CARTER on JUL 15, 2025

Putting Substance Back Into Karate: It Must Mean Something.

(Approx 1 minute 45 second read)

What on earth has karate become?

Yesterday, I was sent a video of a well-known karateka – a successful competitor with deep roots in karate. Someone with rank, experience, and a famous legacy behind them. And yet what I heard left me shaking my head.

They were visiting a dojo of another style, exchanging a few ideas. Nothing unusual about that. But in the middle of it all came a comment I still can’t quite believe. They said they could handle attacks that come straight on – but not so much from an angle.

Think about that for a moment. Someone with years of training, carrying a respected dan grade, openly saying they’re not prepared if an attack doesn’t come straight down the line.

How does that make sense? How on earth did we get here?

Modern karate has become hollow when it comes to real application. So much of what’s practiced today is dogma wrapped in ceremony – step-kumite being a perfect example. It teaches you to deal with tidy, straight-line attacks at a safe distance and predictable timing.

But the world doesn’t work like that. Real aggression doesn’t step forward neatly on cue.

Too many cling to old drills without asking why they’re doing them – or what they’re for beyond the drill. There’s a kind of blind faith in methods that were never meant to be frozen in time. Repetition for its own sake. Trophies and certificates, but not much real ability to handle chaos.

This is the heart of it: if you can’t deal with something as simple as an attack coming at an angle, what are you actually training for? If karate can’t prepare you for something so basic, then it’s just choreography – not a martial art.

You have to question. You have to dig deeper. If something doesn’t hold up under pressure, you adapt it, or you discard it. That’s the responsibility – to yourself and to anyone you teach.

Surely you can’t keep practicing something that just doesn’t add up, that doesn’t work outside of itself.

Karate was about adapting to the situation, using techniques that could transform in the moment – not being frozen because something unexpected happened.

This isn’t the karate that was created to defend against real-life attacks. It’s now become just a demonstration art. And if you can’t even see that your training is hollow – like not realizing you can’t handle an attack from an angle – then the problem is bigger than you think.

So if you care about karate – if you train, if you teach, if you stand in a dojo – start putting substance back inside it. For goodness’ sake.

Written by Adam Carter – Shuri Dojo