Karate is not for girls?

August 30th, 2006 at 12:45 · Filed Under Karate

I was having dinner with my friend and his family in PJ last evening. Both of them are doctorate. We talked about crime rates nowadays and about self-defense. His wife was interested to let their daughter to learn self-defense and she asked about what was good for her daughter. I told them karate, of course.

But then his wife said, “Karate is for men, isn’t it?”

They are not the only two persons saying that. This has been a general idea of the public for quite a long time. I don’t know when people start thinking that way.

I asked them, “What do you think is good for girls/women?” Their answer was “Tae Kwon Do?!”

Fine, everybody has an idea that TKD is good for girls. And there are many female training TKD compared to karate. Why do you think TKD is for girls? Do you think girls look nice when they lift their legs to kick high? What if they are wearing skirts?

I think people got the idea that TKD is better for girls because karate training is much more aggressive and require more power training to develop muscles. This generalization is totally incorrect.

IMHO, karate is more practical than TKD but I do not say TKD is not good (Please! Don’t start flame war but if you like, please leave your constructive comments for discussion). TKD is more a sport and showmanship than self-defense. It is very entertaining to see some TKD practitioners breaking boards with stunning flying kicks. Are you required to do a high flying kick to take an opponent down? Is the opponent 8 feet tall? Will the opponent wait for you to run 20 feet to execute a long and high flying kick? TKD also uses hands as weapons but their training does not seem to emphasize in using hand techniques. Why?

I have some TKD friends who are black belts and instructors who occasionally come to train and discuss with me some karate techniques. It is fun to exchange ideas between TKD and karate with them.

Karate-do is also practiced as a sport by most people today. There is a tendency for karate-do to lose its traditional essence for self-defense. Many real karate-kas have realized this and they are moving back to traditional karate-do training. Traditionally, karate-do is not a sport. The techniques for self-defense are highly effective and employ effectual human kinetics and motion economy to achieve its purpose.

I am going to write an article, Scientific Karate, explaining human kinetics and motion economy in karate-do. I sparked on the idea while I was doing research about karate-do. I find both human kinetics and motion economy very interesting. I hope I can find more time to write the article.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Karate is not for girls?”

Beh on August 30th, 2006 14:48 1

Good article. In fact, there are much more girls nowadays learn Tae Kwon Do than Karate-do. This is from what i observe in MMU. The ratio of TKD female to karate female is approximately 5 (or more!).
There are many people think that TKD is definitely more powerful than karate-do due to the strong leg emphasis. Yes, i agree that TKD does emphasize more on kicking, but not everyone (especially girls) is able to kick powerfully and effectively.
Also, kicking requires lots of stamina. I realise that though there are more girls involve in martial art nowadays, many of them are still lack of stamina. Imagine when you were being attacked, if you were to use kicking only to defense yourself, could you knock your opponent out with only few kicks? (I believe there are girls can do so, but few only) End up you would probably surrender yourself due to exhaustion.
However, it’s a sad case that today, karate-do as well is turning into a sport rather than self-defence. And people misunderstand this is how it should be. So I just hope that the modern karate-kas can realise this misconcept and together we work hard to maintain the beauty of traditional karate-do training.
Adrian Hoe on August 30th, 2006 20:22 2

Yes, kicking uses a lot of stamina and is not effective in motion economy.

What people generally thinks about TKD’s kicks is more powerful is wrong. Karate’s kicks are more practical, powerful and often lethal. In real situation, Karate-do uses kick to finish off the fight with a kill.