Contents
The published conditioning ladder
| Belt | Push-ups | Jumping squats | Handstand | Chin-ups | Jump (target) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| White | 20 | 20 | 20 s | 3 | Own height |
| Orange | 30 | 30 | 30 s | 5 | +10 cm |
| Blue | 40 | 40 | 40 s | 8 | +15 cm |
| Yellow | 50 | 50 | 50 s | 10 | +20 cm |
| Green | 60 | 60 | 60 s | 12 | +30 cm |
| Brown | 100 | 100 | 90 s | 15 | +30 cm (tobi ushiro) |
This is the spine of the « physical » theme: a grading standard. In training, volumes are dosed by age: the youngest work the same movement family at small volume, in circuits and games.
Flexibility, graded too
The IKO syllabus grades flexibility like everything else: head to the floor legs open, then the shoulders (blue), then the chest (green). Two training rules: mobility warms up active and controlled (never forced ballistic work for children; the literature publishes no youth ballistic dosage), and deep stretching lives in the cool-down, not before power work.
Tanren: an adult tradition, honestly framed
For adults, traditional tanren (the makiwara for seiken/shuto, light and progressive mutual conditioning) remains a dojo's choice: progressive, never painful to the bone, never a substitute for technique.
What the injury literature says, and does not
- Full contact hits the lower limb harder: in a retrospective survey of 215 amateur karateka, the lower limb accounts for 40% of injuries in full contact (Kyokushin) against 20% in semi-contact, at 1.9 injuries per 1,000 h against 1.3. In a survey of Kyokushin athletes and coaches, the injuries named most are sprains (33%), finger dislocations (28%) and chest contusions (14%).
- Concussion appears low in the available numbers (3% of self-reported injuries), but knockdown permits head kicks: the profile is NOT interchangeable with WKF karate, and surveys likely under-capture it.
- The head safeguard is in the rule: never a fist to the face, and at the EKO a head KO triggers a minimum 3-month medical suspension, recorded in the passport.
- Tameshiwari loads the hand: one more reason it stays with the senior grades.
- Evidence-base honesty: knockdown-specific surveillance is thin (retrospective or self-report surveys); the large prospective series are WKF, a different rules family. Never cite a « karate » statistic as a knockdown fact without checking the population.
Frequently asked questions
When should makiwara work start?
How do you physically prepare a young competitor?
Sources
IKO Kyokushinkaikan: Technical Syllabus (April 2011): the conditioning and flexibility ladder per grade. Ōyama, historical canon (makiwara, tanren). Strykalenko, Shalar, Hussar: The problem of injuries in kyokushin karate, Health, Sport, Rehabilitation 2(4), 2016 (self-reported distribution). Greier, Riechelmann, Ziemska: Sportverletz Sportschaden 28(1), 2014 (full contact against semi-contact, 215 karateka). Piejko, Mosler, Grzebisz: Sport Injuries in Karate Kyokushin Athletes, Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research 15(1), 2019 (questionnaire, 61 athletes; no rate per exposure). Lystad et al. / Arriaza et al.: WKF surveillance (comparators, a different rules family). EKO: Art. 1.5 (post-KO medical suspension). Paak kyokushin corpus, files 03 and 05. Content verified September 2026; injury sources re-checked October 2026.