There are a thousand styles of karate, from those with rich history and lineage to those invented by a guy teaching at the mall who shoots adverts in a stars and stripes gi.  But for our purposes we have always divided them more generally into two camps based on their method of competition: knockdown karate and point karate. The former has produced dozens of K-1 champions, and the latter tends to be the property of the McDojo. With the advent of MMA—and the desire to fight elusively and avoid prolonged engagements—point karate has found some new vigor, but our subject today is the anomaly: a man who fought a point karate style at the highest levels of kickboxing, Hideaki Yamazaki.

Yamazaki’s career is remarkable because he was a Shotokan karate who, crucially, fought like a Shotokan karateka in the kickboxing ring. In a relatively short kickboxing career, Yamazaki became Krush champion with multiple defences, won a K-1 grand prix, and won the K-1 super lightweight belt. He was far from flawless, but he convincingly avenged losses to Masaaki Noiri and Rukiya Anpo, and knocked out Yuta Kubo. For his era of J-kick, that is a very strong set of names. Another way to look at it is that those fighters were good enough to know why a fighter shouldn’t stand and move like Yamazaki in the kickboxing ring, and they could not consistently make him pay for it.

In and Out

Karate point fighting came out of the mythmaking of the old Okinawan martial art. The idea that you could kill a man with one blow, ikken hissatsu. You get in first, you land, you score. In competition the other guy normally hits you a moment after you hit him, but you get the point and he doesn’t. Sometimes writers and pundits use the term “blitz” to describe getting across the floor quickly.

The long stance enables a fighter to make a good fencer-like lunge with either a jab or a right straight, but the distance is obviously too great to get all the way to the opponent with just that lunge. The distance a fighter can lunge is governed by the position of his back foot, so the point fighter wants to get that back foot as close to the opponent as possible, while keeping it behind his centre of gravity so that he can effectively drive off it into the lunge. This is where the idea of “sneaking up the back foot” comes from.

Take a look at this clip of Yamazaki initiating a fight by bouncing in rhythm, and then pouncing on his man. He bounces forward, back, and forward again. On the bounce forward just before he initiates his attack, you can see his back foot comes in closer to his front foot, ready to drive him forwards.

The heart of this entry is the bounce. The simple pattern that is repeated in every point fighting contest but has the ability to make the closing of distance look like witchcraft. To distill the magic of every great point fighter down to one expression that you can carry with your forever, think: “forward, back, forward, FORWARD.”

Here Yamazaki opens the fight by quickly establishing a bounce and almost immediately entering.

All he requires is a break in the opponent pushing forward. If they stand and stare at him for just a second, he can establish the bouncing rhythm and sneak himself into the lunge. Here are two extremes from the same fight. In the first, Yamazaki bounces back and forth trying to get a read on his man, who seems to want to intercept him with the teep, before finally engaging. In the second, he picks up the bounce for just an instant before lunging into a good jab.

With Yamazaki, we’re starting at the end. Yamazaki’s finest hour was a rematch with Rukiya Anpo for the K-1 title. The first time they met, the two fought a slobber knocker that was so competitive that they found themselves heading to the cursed K-1 extension round. Seconds into that extension round, Anpo scored a headkick that put Yamazaki down for the count. When the rematch arrived, Yamazaki came to the ring with a lead leg bandaged and supported to Sakuraba levels.

This time Yamazaki held his distance cautiously. When Anpo lashed out at the lead leg, Yamazaki bounced back. When Anpo stood still, Yamazaki went into the bounce, blitzed in, and cracked him.

The forward and back bounce is so easy to fall into if the opponent stops pursuing you for even a moment. Even with a reserved bounce, a huge amount of movement fills the opponent’s vision, and lulls him into a rhythm.

One way to perform the bounce even more safely is to only take both feet in when you plan that final commitment. On your initial bounces forward and back, you perform them as you would a jab—bouncing the lead foot in and out, without moving the rear foot.  

The longer stance enhances linear movement towards and away from the opponent, but comes at a cost. The lead leg is out in no man’s land, ready to be kicked into mincemeat. To check kicks effectively is not just a matter of lifting the leg in time, the fighter has to be stable enough to absorb the kick without adverse effects. If you stand in a long stance and try to pick your lead leg up to check, you might not take the kick on the intended target, but you will be spun around or knocked over by it.  

To make the long stance work against low kicks, a fighter must switch priorities. He cannot block, he can only evade—by bouncing back or withdrawing his lead leg—or counter. The intercepting counter against the low kick is a medium risk, high reward strategy but Yamazaki has operated it beautifully. The trick of it is to hang the lead leg out in a way that is immediately appetizing to an experienced kickboxer, but still far enough that they will take the short initial step out of their stance before throwing it. That step is the trigger.

The intercepting counter has an interesting effect. Opponents stop throwing the low kick.

The surprise of Yamazaki’s career is how seldom the low kick decided his matches. One instance when it did was his second match with Kaew Fairtex, wherein a single good kick to the inside of the lead leg knocked Yamazaki’s knee out of whack, and it all went downhill from there. But in the sweet spot before the end of his career, 2019 until his knockout victory over Rukiya Anpo for the K-1 title, Yamazaki suffered an ACL injury that saw him heavily taping up his lead leg and it still was not a disproportionate problem.  

With a square stance, the switch kick is king. Because the hips are square to begin with, the feet can be switched without any rotation of the body and set to kick. From a longer stance, step-up kicks work better.  A staple of Yamazaki’s game was the step up triangle kick with the ball of the foot to the midsection.

By establishing the jab as a point fighting weapon of its own, Yamazaki could then hide a step up behind a jab. This was a staple of the American kickboxing legend, Bill “Superfoot” Wallace. When he was jabbing to score, the lead foot stabbed in on the jab.  When he was jabbing to kick, his rear foot came up underneath him as the jab filled his opponent’s vision.