u/abedhaj

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There’s a Kyokushin fighting competition coming up in less than a month, and my teachers asked if I wanted to participate.

I’m currently a green belt and I’m 26. I started karate about 4 years ago and have always treated it as a hobby alongside work and my other responsibilities. I competed once before, when I was a blue belt, mainly just to challenge myself, and I’m really glad I did it.

This time, though, I’m much more hesitant.

I’ll potentially be fighting higher belts, and while I regularly spar with my sensei, he’s very strong and definitely doesn’t go easy on us, I know that sparring with him is still controlled. A competition is different, and I’m honestly a bit worried about serious injuries. I have work and other responsibilities, so getting injured badly enough to affect those things is a bigger concern for me than simply losing a fight.

I asked my sensei if, since he spars with me regularly, he thinks I’m good enough/ready enough to participate. I was expecting some kind of advice or encouragement, but his response was basically: “That’s not my issue. You decide if you want to fight or not. And so what if you get kicked in the head?” 😂

He basically hates seeing us being hesitant, but to be honest I was genuinely asking for advice.

To be fair, that’s just his personality and he’s not very talkative, so I’m not taking it personally. But it didn’t exactly make the decision easier.

Part of me also worries that I’m using my age, work, and responsibilities as excuses not to do it. I keep telling myself, seriously, what’s the worst that can happen? I’ve already competed once, I know I’ll probably learn a lot from doing it, and I don’t want to look back and wish I had just gone for it.

At the same time, I don’t want to be reckless just for the sake of challenging myself.

For those of you who compete in Kyokushin, how would you approach this? Is being a green belt with 4 years of training enough reason to give it a shot, even if the other competitors may be higher belts? And how much should I realistically worry about injuries compared with regular hard sparring?

I’d especially appreciate perspectives from people who started competing as adults and have work/life responsibilities outside of karate.

I've been doing Kyokushin for a while now, focusing more on kumite, and something has been bothering me lately. I wanted to get some opinions from people with more experience.

Our sensei spars with almost everyone in the dojo nearly every class. He, of course, fights according to the level of his opponents. While I understand that sparring is an important part of learning, it often ends in my case with getting hurt to some degree, and then we just go home.

The thing that bothers me isn't even the injuries themselves, it's the lack of feedback. After sparring, there's rarely any discussion about what I did wrong, what I did well, what habits I should fix, or what I should focus on improving. To the point that I really don't know if I'm good or not. And when I avoid fighting him sometimes, he teases me, thinking that I was scared or something, but in a light hearted way nothing serious. While I usually am just injured a bit or just don't want to spar.

I'm starting to wonder if this is normal coaching, or if a good instructor should be spending more time teaching instead of just fighting. I get that he's not the talkative type, every sensei has his personality, but at the same time this is starting to get to me, I like sparring with him, but can't help but feel that recently I'm just going to get injured and leave.

I'm starting to ask him more after sparring how did I do and all, but to be honest his answers are very vague and confusing. It's always the " you're improving but you should work harder " kind of thing.

Has anyone trained under a coach like this? Is constant sparring with little to no feedback an effective way to improve, or is it a red flag? I'm genuinely asking because I don't have enough experience to know what good coaching is supposed to look like.