On Karate Punch

It's been a long discussion on whether martial arts (read Karate) is becoming soft and softer year after year. Case in point, just watch 60's, 70's and 80's clips on championships in you tube etc. Karate had the greats such as Englishmen Terry O'neill and Geoff Thompson, Japanese 'samurais' such as Yahara and Takaeshi Oishi. This generation never heard of hand mitts, shin guards, chest protectors, gum shields as today's generation of rafael Aghayev and Luigi Busa do.

Even without these 'safety measures', the earlier generation still managed to minimise injury (or were they tougher?) on the tatami.

I may not agree totally with Iain Abernathy's views but I totally agree on some use of power and swiftness in punching and kicking. As he puts it in world combat association website...

"A punch is fundamentally designed to damage other human beings so that they can no longer function. A punch should therefore be judged by the success criteria of its ability to incapacitate. We should train our punches with that goal in mind such that our training increases the ability of our punches to incapacitate. A punch should be deemed “good” if it can damage people."

Iain claims that today's punches and techniques in general are taught in such a way to look nice beautiful...

Don't know what you think.