Kyokushin
極真The hardest of the major karate styles: fought at full contact without protectors, but with no punches to the head. Founded by Masutatsu Oyama in 1964.
Quick Facts
JapanCharacter & Origin
Training
Who It Suits
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
Catalogs & Databases for Kyokushin
About Kyokushin
Kyokushin was founded by Masutatsu Oyama in 1964 as an answer to what he saw as the softening of karate. Oyama, a Korean-Japanese master, imposed the one rule that changes everything: fighting is full contact, without gloves and without protectors. The name means "the society of ultimate truth", referring precisely to the idea that the truth about a technique shows only in a landed blow. The rules have one fundamental exception — hand strikes to the head are forbidden. Without it, bare-knuckle fighting would not be sustainable. Kicks to the head are allowed, and they often decide the bout. Everything else goes: direct strikes to the body, kicks to the thigh and torso, knees depending on the organisation. The result is a distinctive style of fighting. Competitors stand close, exchanges are long, and durability decides as much as technique. Conditioning of the body and legs therefore has a fixed place in training, as does breaking hard materials (tameshiwari), which is part of the grading. Alongside sparring, kata and basic technique are trained just as in traditional karate — kyokushin is not only fighting. After Oyama's death in 1994 the movement split into a number of organisations (IKO, IFK, Shinkyokushinkai and others) with their own rules and syllabi that differ in detail. The load is high and the beginning tends to be hard; clubs usually handle this by introducing full-contact sparring gradually.
Styles & Branches
Full-contact karate founded in 1980 by Kazuyoshi Ishii. Its main legacy is not technique but the K-1 tournament, which in 1993 set the striking styles against each other.
Dutch hybrid Kyokushin branch combining full-contact strikes with Judo throws.
The school of the winner of the very first Kyokushin world tournament in 1975, built on precise knockdown technique rather than sheer endurance.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.