Sparring – A medical implication

October 8th, 2007 at 0:10 · Filed Under Injuries, Karate, Medical, Sports 

Last year, I wrote an article about injuries in karate. You can find the article here.

Many modern martial arts practice free sparring between two persons. In karate, free sparring or jiyu kumite, like many modern contact martial arts, such as Tae Kwon Do, Muay Thai and many more, are practiced widely as one of the training regime to strengthen physically and mentally and also often training for tournament. Free sparring events have been fabulous attraction. We can see sparring events are divided into three major age groups, children, teenagers and adults. In some sports martial arts such as TKD, protective gears are used to protect torso, shins and knees. But none can provide absolute protection from injuries.

Very often, we can see these tournament ‘fighters’ have got bruises on their limbs and sometimes on their bodies and heads. These bruises are actually internal hemorrhage where blood vessels have ruptured and cause bleeding. Together with the hemorrhage, there could be thrombosis or formation of blood clot along the wall of a blood vessel. Thrombosis can cause many medical complication, such as infarction and may also cause cancer over time when the thrombus is not cleared up by our body immune system. These medical complication will usually cause some other illness later in life which is difficult to trace back to the cause or injury suffered from a tournament many years ago.

In children, sparring is a very dangerous activities and extremely hazardous to their health. Children’s bones, joints and tendons are very soft and still in formation. An injury may cause serious health problem later in their lives.

IMHO, free sparring should not be practiced in martial arts as it causes destruction more than strengthening good health. Sparring is an evolved form of male chauvanism and the product of capitalism of commercializing tournament. Commercialization has become a key for a martial art to continue to survive in this capitalism world. Without a tournament, there will be no handsome income and publicity for the martial arts organization. Tournament has also become an instrument for marketing oneself and one’s training school if he has won many titles which highly sought after by ignorant and naive people.

Martial arts should be practiced in a non-violent way which encourages only growth and strengthening of oneself and partners. Sparring encourages violence and initiative to attack rather than defense which is contrary to the concept of olden martial arts teaching.

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Comments

6 Responses to “Sparring – A medical implication”

  • ridzuan the older on October 10th, 2007 11:14 1

    Adrian Sensei,
    Thus what is your stand on jiyu kumite? Best regards.

  • Adrian Hoe on October 10th, 2007 11:47 2

    Hi my old friend,

    Just call me Adrian will do.

    Well, I did not say free sparring is not good. My post is based on a discussion with a sports medicine researcher. We talked about the possibilities of injuries which can possibly and seriously affect our health later on. So far, there is no substantial conclusion about the danger of thrombosis causing cancer and coronary infarction and brain aneurism. But the possibilities are there and may have a few cases already happened but medical professionals are unable to link those to the actual cause. Our human body is an extremely complicated bio-machine and the scientists still know very little about it.

    But the medical implication on children are very potential as their bones, joints, ligaments, tendons and etc. are still very delicate in their growing age. Injuries post great health risk to children even with protective gears.

    Free sparring encourages violence and initiative to attack which is contradict to the principal of martial arts – defense.

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