This is a sequel post to my 2015 post "Fencing vs Sparring." As early as 2014 I was concerned that Kumite Point Fighting - the practice that almost totally destroyed martial arts in the USA in the 1980's - was directly connected to Fencing, and that Fencing's fighting practices were one of the single most destructive forces in the martial arts. I suspected some direct connection between fencing and the origins of Kumite Point Fighting and the sport of Fencing. Now The Karate Nerd has clearly documented the connection:
So to briefly summarize: before Karate was popular in Japan, Savate was already popular in Japan. The Savate that was popular at the time wasn't organized into professional matches like Boxing or MMA today, they instead competed in something more like tournaments, which used Kumite Point Fighting stop-and-go rules, which they directly inherited from Fencing. Savate of that era considered itself to essentially be unarmed fencing. All of Shotokan's kicks with the exception of the side kick and front kick seem to be taken directly from Savate.
As you know if you read very much about martial arts on my blog, one of my biggest pet peeves is the Kumite Point Fighting round kick, which lacks the practical power and ease of use of most other martial arts round kicks. I have noticed this in Savate before, and was puzzled that it could develop in Japan and France independently, because it is so horrifically flawed:
To be clear what is wrong with this kick is that body stops moving before the leg extends, meaning that the over all speed of the impact the kick creates is much slower than if whole body was still moving with the kick at the point of impact. Whipping your shoulders, waist and hips into the kick as it connects is a magnitude of difference in power than relying on the leg muscle alone to generate the power.
As The Karate Nerd points out above, round kicks were unheard of in Okinawan Karate originally. So how did some Karate styles like Kyokushin and other knock-down Karate styles get such good round kicks that they remind us of Muay Thai rather than Kumite Point Fighitng? The Kyokushin founder's Wikipedia page mentions his Korean ethnicity, but also his participation in an early Full Contact Karate style called Bogutsuki known for two things: 1) the use of body armor, sometimes even doing karate fighting in Kendo armor, and 2) a very strong Korean influence, entertaining seminars from Korean martial arts masters. If Tae Kwon Do is the most popular Korean Martial Art and uses a lot of the bad round kicks from Kumite Point Fighting, why would we assume good round kicks could come from Korean Martial Arts? Because Tae Kwon Do was strongly influenced by Shotokan and is not considered representative of Korean Martial Arts. The most clearly Korean kicking martial art is called "Takkyeon" and in this video this Takkyeon master executes Sanda/Muay Thai style round kicks a number of times, but so forcefully his technique requires him to spin afterwords at two specific at both 1:27 and 2:28 in this video:
And we see in Bogutsuki today that their lead leg round kicks are clearly more like Sanda/Muay Thai lead leg round kicks than like the wimpy Savate lead leg kicks, even though their fighting stance and competition rules resemble Kumite Point Fighting:
This basic full power round kick I suspect has been around since before recorded history, and it is a common sparring technique in most Northern Kung Fu styles, which is the real reason it is so prominent in San Shou:
Even in Tai Chi we see Chen Ziqiang execute a low round kick (sometimes called a "whirlwind kick" in the Chen forms) to stop an incoming opponent at 7:46:
So the Kumite Point Fighting round kicks - technically and properly called "Foette Kicks" from Savate - have almost nothing to do with authentic Asian Martial Arts, and is indeed part of the cancer that fencing is to the martial arts, a direct byproduct of Kumite Point Fighting, that Karate took from Savate in Japan.
