Karate Effectiveness
This poll was started a while back and I think we are at the point where I have gotten as many responses as I am going to get regularly. I was trying to find trends in martial artists and street fighting. There is a pretty famous quote about how 90% of all fights will end up on the ground. If you have done your homework, you know this was a misquoting of an LAPD study that found that 60% of altercations between police officers and suspects end up on the ground (Remember that number for later). I know a lot of my karate buddies don’t do any kind of grappling, so I was curious if we should even be concerned about grappling. Here is what I found:
Correlations
One of the things I tried to find was correlations, patterns that would suggest a relationship between one thing and the other. Here is a quick breakdown of the things that correlated:
- How Often Your School Teaches Grappling and If You Grappled in a Fight: 22% (Those who study grappling are more likely to grapple).
- # of Years in Martial Arts and If You Grappled in a Fight: -14% (Those who study longer are slightly less likely to grapple).
- If You do Karate and If You Grappled in a Fight: -3% (Those who do karate are marginally less likely to grapple).
Percentages
When I was looking at the numbers I found a few facts about fights (according to our poll of 40+ martial artists):
- 74% of people considered their school less focused on grappling.
- 62% of people who got into a fight said they grappled during the fight.
This is in no way conclusive of anything, but it should make you think. Most people say they ended up grappling during their fight. Shockingly, 62% of martial artists said they end up grappling – almost exactly the same number as the police study. At the same time, most people said their schools don’t focus on grappling. What this means to me, is that the odds suggest you will end up grappling should you ever get in a fist fight. Are you ready? 74% of the people who responded are hopefully asking themselves that right now.
Next Poll
I am going to keep polling everyone on various things in the martial arts community. Please know, I don’t make money off of these polls or sell your info in any way. I do research to help offer interesting thoughts to the world about martial arts training. The next poll can be found here. Please take a few minutes and fill it out and pass it on to your martial arts friends, the results help all of us make our training more effective.
If you were wondering about my first poll that I rarely talk about, more to come on that soon.
Good Job Ted. I train under the guys that use that 90% quote (I have 23 yrs of Shorin Ryu training and about 2 yrs of GJJ). I think a lot of karate practitioners are in denial that they have no idea what to do if the fight goes to the ground. I started Jiu-Jitsu, because I realized I was one of those people. Now I incorporate quite a bit of grappling in my karate classes. Is this an admission that karate is inferior? Nope. Just an acknowledgement that the two arts have very different focus. Even in karate styles that incorporate grappling, the ratio of time training on the feet vs. training on the ground is drastic. Even in the karate classes I teach the ratio to probably 90% standing, 10% groundwork (some nights it is a lot more but on average ~10%) . And because we only spend 10% of the time on groundwork, I tell my karate students that the grappling I teach in karate is mostly designed to be used against an unskilled grappler. If they want to learn to defeat an experienced grappler they need to delve deeper into the the grappling arts (which is why most of my karate students also take my Jiu-Jitsu class).
I do want to clarify, the poll was on grappling – not ground fighting. I may have been misleading on that point. None the less, I think my point still stands.
My understanding is that most Okinawans would have become familiar in grappling as kids when they would wrestle each other regularly for fun. In the age of technology, we forget that if you have nothing to do but play with each other – these kind of boyish ideas are a daily thing, not just something you may have done during your childhood once or twice. Karate, because of this, has a lot of techniques that explain good stand-up grappling, but not too many that disqus a ground fight – because most Okinawan instructors would have relied on their experiences in the wrestling realm (not sumo…).
I am the first one to argue that karate’s emphasis on NOT going to the ground is the smartest thing you can ever do, with one exception – If I can’t prevent going to the ground, I want to dominate the ground fight too – so good on you for what you are doing in GJJ (Gracie JuJitsu for those who don’t know).