Krav is a good system for its purpose: getting people use to contact (it translates literally as that) and making them aggresive when they need to be. Most importantly its for making civilians compliant and listen to their superiors under preasure. For this it works great.
The system itself is just a handful of drills and if you have a coach with other combat sport or martial art training, itll fill that cup and look like weird aggresive karate. If its a MT influenced coach, thats what it looks like.
Itâs easy to look at karate and laugh because of point fighters and fat black belts with a skullet, but the Okinawans were tough.
Iâve heard more than once that Shotokan and the more popular styles in the west are heavily watered down because the locals didnât want to teach outsiders the real shit.
Just anecdotal but I started in sport karate. On more than a few occasions, affiliates and other schools would come over and train from Japan. They all got their asses whoopedâŚwell, as much as you can in point fighting. IME, this mysticism around âfrom Japanâ is kinda bs.
I think the gold medalist in Karate at the Olympics tells us all we need to know about point fighting. Iâd rather fight him than some Okinawan thatâs been carrying clay pots and wearing iron sandals for 40 years.
Well, Shotokan is Okinawan karate that was âwatered downâ or streamlined, if you prefer, because it was brought to Japan and taught in Japanese public schools. It had to be appropriate for students to learn and standardized into a set curriculum.
Mechanically, Karate is probably the closest martial art to Krav Maga.
âNot the history obviously, but if you look at the actual techniques, theyâre rigid & direct and there is much emphasis on exact positioning.
Much as with karate (and all Japanese arts really) they also do very formal presentations of techniques --itâs the tori & uke approach.
Just like karate, the rigidity in KM seems to infuse the way they approach everything. This is why adding BJJ to Krav Maga doesnât really work. They want to add a handful of techniques then drill them by rote in their formal combat drills (âkataâ). Problem is, the training methodologies are fundamentally at odds.
If you canât land a jab & a front kick, you canât poke someone in the eyes or kick them in the nuts. You need a delivery system that works. Thatâs usually the problem; HOW do you land those strikes on a person fighting back?
Itâs possible, but unless you have spared kickboxing, unlikely.
You donât have to train Krav Maga to use nut shots and other dirty strikes. Last street fight I was in I won with one straight right to the guyâs head that micro fractured my entire right hand followed by a Thai plum to knee to the solar plexus.
Guy tried to punch me in the nuts after it went to the ground and we were getting back up and I just splayed my legs out and used the inseam of my shorts to block the strikes. It was over not long after once the knee shot really started to take effect.
Long story short, youâre better off learning standard, tried and true strikes/techniques to beat someoneâs ass than thinking youâll have any sort of edge because youâre gonna go for neck, eye and groin attacks after a couple seminars with psuedo mcdojo senseis. Train daily and train real methods of martial arts/self defense and youâll fuck up 90% of people before they ever have a chance to hurt you.
Then again, I should preface this by saying Iâm 6â4" 210lbs, so maybe this might not work for everybody. I still suggest you train daily and learn how to go savage mode when shit goes down and you got nowhere to go.
The core problem is the âshortcutâ mentality, be it KM or Vunakâs RAT system or 100 other stripped down self-defense programs --a number of which I have personally taken as a student.
People want complexity stripped away. I get it, But when you strip away complexity, youâre really stripping away reality itself. A fight is chaos with tons of variables. So itâs comforting for someone to say, âjust do x, y, zâ. There will always be a market for that.
Having spent my early life doing authentic okinowan karate (under mario higoanna, the old tough guy punching concrete on youtube), i can say hes a tough old guy, no question.
However looking back its laughable how disconnected from actual combat it is and some of the training methods are the equivilent of taking 1800âs medical approaches.
The sport vs traditional karate is a joke, not one traditional guy translated to mmaâŚor any combat sportâŚor real life situationâŚincluding the grandmasters son Eric, who I respect for getting into the cage but all he could utilise was wrestling and a karate spirit. At least sports gives you timing and footworkâŚtraditional karate will actually regress you.
And before anyone brings up Terry Oniell or Geoff Thompson, the amount of extra work they had to do on top of traditional karate, do they even do karate?
