Customer Reviews

Complete book of karate

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Bruce Tegner does not shy away from presenting his opinions on topics even if those might disagree with the majority of karate instructors or with ancient martial arts traditions in general.

There are two books in this one volume, the first on karate for self defense, and the second on sports karate. The first book is designed to relate those elements of karate that can be learned by anybody to be used on the street without requiring years of training and athletic conditioning.

This is where Tegner would differ with many karate instructors. He makes it very clear that anybody can learn the basic techniques, and many of the more advanced techniques are not useful for real self defense in the modern world anyway. Therefore, the person interested primarily in self defense has no need to pay big bucks to a karate school and does not need to be concerned with such things as kata (forms), board breaking, or trying to earn a black belt. These things, according to Tegner, are mostly for those who have the athletic ability and the desire to compete in tournaments.

Tegner goes on to say that a person needs no other reason to practice forms than that they find them enjoyable and that they are good exercise. Of course, many people practice tai chi forms purely for exercise, but this is less common with karate.

Given that his book is written primarily with an American audience in mind, the author does not over-burden the reader with numerous Japanese terms. Nor does he talk about any spiritual or mystical side to karate. Kia is explained in purely physiological terms which will be more easily understood by westerners. Also, the section on pressure points leaves out any mention of Chinese medicine and acupuncture.

The second book in this volume presents Tegner's belt requirements along with all the karate forms to go with them. (Elsewhere on the internet and in another book review I have seen it stated that his style is Shukokai.)

I have a little bit of an issue with Tegner's classifying forms as part of sports karate. Since Tegner seeks to remove the mystical aspect of karate, he had to classify kata as either fitting into self defense or sport aspects. However, Karate was not originally practiced as a sport. The sport aspect came along later, but the kata were always there. For the old masters (such as Funakochi) karate was not a sport.

For better or worse, Tegner has removed any spiritual aspect from his teaching of karate. This makes sense when you realize that many westerners do not want to have to accept eastern religious principles in order to learn a method of self defense.

Regardless of whether you agree with this approach, Tegner makes some good points. For example, he warns his readers that if they have hands conditioned for board breaking then they may have a hard time convincing police that they were not the aggressor in any fight they get into. In addition, he makes other practical warnings about moves that should be used only in life-and-death struggles. If you seriously injure somebody in a fight when you could have walked away or used less lethal force, the law will not look upon your action as an act of self defense. Not bad advice.

He also talks about moves that are often used in the movies and on tv that do not work as well in real life. He also dispels some myths such as the idea that you can drive a person's nose bone into their brain.

The book is full of lots of pictures demonstrating the techniques and forms and includes useful suggestions for practice.

The book is a bit dated. Some criticisms that the book makes of sport karate are less true today. For example tournament sparring has changed since then to include full contact with padding. That doesn't actually change the point he was making, however, which is that tournament sparring is not good practice for self defense. For example, you cannot kick below the belt in tournament sparring. Instead, high kicks are more encouraged, which most people can't use effectively in a real self defense situation.

Overall, I think the book is a good introduction that discusses some modern considerations that are missing in many other karate books.

Anyway, it won't hurt anybody to read a different point of view from a man who spent a life-time studying and writing books about the martial arts.