PART ONE
Both Krav Maga and BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU have become exceptionally popular martial arts and self-defense systems over the last couple decades. This alone says a lot about these fighting styles considering that going into the 1990s both of them were virtually unknown, even to the majority of martial arts practitioners in North America. While it may be a stretch to say they have now become “house hold words”, they are certainly recognizable terms to a large segment of even the general population and this is a testament to their long standing reputations for street effectiveness among self-defense enthusiasts and laypeople alike.
Therefore, despite these two systems being late arrivals into the very over crowded North American martial arts marketplace, they did manage to quickly establish large, loyal and still growing numbers of adherents. This is all the more remarkable when we factor In how so many martial arts “consumers” are influenced by movie inspired trends and short lived fads that come and go, while these two systems appear to be here to stay because they are providing real substance in the area of realistic personal protection. Since at least the 1980s, much of the martial arts industry had become very kids orientated and was doing little more for people than providing a low to medium impact workout and glorified baby-sitting services. Thus, KRAV MAGA and BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU provided a real and badly needed alternative for real people, especially adults, looking for real world self-defense.
Of course, no matter how good something is, it is of little benefit if no one knows about it. Good marketing has to play a role in the modern world and it certainly helped in the rise of these two upstart systems. The mainstream media has largely embraced KRAV MAGA because they see it as a community service since it has been adopted and endorsed by many law enforcement agencies in North America. This makes it kind of the new “weapon” for the “good guys” and a new and interesting twist on old fashioned self-defense as the public lost interest and more importantly, confidence in the “traditional” karate, Tae Kwon Do , Kung-fu , Judo and jujutsu schools.
Furthermore, KM had the Israeli Military mystique to help it stand out. This Israeli military novelty was combined with the efforts of Darrin Levine who with his law enforcement connections in Southern California (where he worked as a violent crimes against peace officers prosecutor) and his ties with the Israeli organizations and KM founder Imi Lichtenfield, was able to accelerate the popularity and growth of KM in the USA. BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU has enjoyed some of this media attention as well but it has not become the Hollywood darling that KM did by constantly being portrayed as the new “bad ass” system on many TV shows and movies.
BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU, on the other hand, gained much of its notoriety along with the rise of the early MMA or “no holds barred” fighting and this has been a double edged sword forBRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU. Much of the early main stream media attention tended to be very negative towards NHB/MMA and often BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU got tarred with the same brush because of its association with the new version of the old “Vale Tudo” style fighting. Let’s not forget that this kind of Vale Tudo fighting was even banned in Brazil for a time so it should have come as no surprise that it would run into problems with the politicians and other guardians of all that is good and proper for everyone else, whether they like it or not.
In Fact, if you go back far enough with BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU as I do, into the days before the UFC, then you may remember that the first real marketing in roads that BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU made was with the old “Gracie Jiu-jitsu in Action” video tapes produced by Rorion Gracie. These were narrated compilations of bare knuckle challenge matches and Vale Tudo fights that had been videotaped in Brazil.
For certain kinds of people this kind of material is always going to be “shocking” and I suppose it should be because real fighting and self-defense is usually shocking. Martial arts in North America had become largely sanitized and further and further away from its origins as actual real world fighting methods. How can you know what you need to defend yourself in a real fight if you don’t even know what a real fight looks like? Yea, sure we would all like real fights to look like they do on television but they don’t and some people understand this and look for reality while others are seduced by other aspects of the well marketed styles.
Hence,I don’t think it is too much of an oversimplification to say that when it came to how the majority of laypeople found out about these fighting systems I could generalize and say that most people were exposed to KM through movies and TV and perhaps a little through training courses for peace officers while BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU was popularized through real fighting events and videos.
Nevertheless, BJJ and KM often appear to be quite different approaches to the same problems and that tends to cause a lot of confusion for the layperson. Thus, a natural question that people interested in learning a self defense system, especially for the first time, often ask me or other self-defense professionals is: “which is the better fighting system or method of self-defence”? And “What are the major differences between Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu-jitsu?
I believe that I am more qualified than most to answer these questions about KRAV MAGA and BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU, because I was involved with both these systems long before they became mainstream and trendy. I trained in, researched and even had to fight on the street with these arts. I delved very deeply into these and closely related systems because I was looking for answers to the problems of real world violence not because I wanted to follow a trend.
Be that as it may, an argument could still be made that I am completely biased since I am primarily a BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU instructor. However, as I have said and written many times, I am firstly and fore mostly a professional self-defense instructor who uses BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU as my primary method , “frame work” or “blue print”. I am not a BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU instructor who has never cross-trained or more importantly, had to actually defend himself or others in the real world under high stress conditions; and may or may not know or care anything about real world self-defense and fighting (as the vast majority seem to be these days). In other words, I have never practiced or taught BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU in any other way or as anything other than- a SYSTEM OF UNARMED COMBAT.
In fact, anyone who knows me or has read any of my writings on the topic knows I am highly critical of the current state of sport-centric BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU. In other words, my first loyalty has always been, and will remain, to the truth and a more scientific approach to real world violence and not to a particular “style” or instructor. Ergo, when it comes to mine and other people’s personal safety, I don’t play politics and I certainly am not out to make friends, get belts or “recognition” from an “industry” that I view has having largely betrayed the needs of the general public in order to advance some flaky or selfish agenda.
Trust me, after over 30 years in the Martial arts, all of it spent cross-training and researching “the shit” if I truly believe that a certain Self-defense system, style or instructor is better than what I am doing than I am going to do it regardless of what all the flakes, phonies and weirdos (aka: self defense experts) had to say about it. In fact, it was exactly this attitude and logical process that led me to bring BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU to my home country of Canada because all the phonies and Martial Arts losers were too busy talking about how tough they were and criticizing me for bringing BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU to Canada for the first time. Somehow that was a bad thing or we did not meet their phony standards or something.
I became an outspoken advocate for Brazilian Jiu-jitsu and an MMA approach to training because it worked so well. However, the quality of both the people and what they teach varies much more widely than I realized back in the early 1990s. I have seen both ends of the spectrum, and I’m talking about just Brazilian Jiu-jitsu here. From the consummate professionals like Rorion, Reylson and Carely Gracie who have lifetimes worth of technical and real world fighting knowledge and made a true healthy “way of live” out of jiu-jitsu and therefore are role models on many levels. To the very opposite; the fat, lazy, and unskilled Marcus Soares.
I should know, I brought Marcus Soares from Brazil to Canada in 1997, and he was the very worst “Jiu-jitsu” instructor and physical specimen I have ever encountered in BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU circles, during my very long career. At that time I didn’t even think over weight Brazilians even existed, certainly not ones doing Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. Of course, that was the problem, he wasn’t doing what any skill full practitioner would call Brazilian Jiu-jitsu or much of anything else for that matter. Worse yet he literally did not know how to fight or defend himself and was scared to do anything but the crudest sport techniques, all while talking about how tough he was…sound familiar.
Guys like this, who don’t work out and don’t want to and who are too scared to fight for real or even train for it are nearly as phony as the obese charlatans of the pre-MMA “dark ages”. This all too common and laughable stero type is something all professionals should be ashamed of because of how it reflects on our industry. We should be trying to protect the public from the highly negative influence of these types not try to portray losers and law breakers as heroes, all because we want a “belt” from them. Thankfully they are very, very rare in Brazilian Jiu-jitsu circles but they still exist. Therefore, just because something is called “Brazilian Jiu-jitsu” does not mean it is necessarily something I endorse or is based on the techniques and philosophies that gave Brazilian Jiu-jitsu its well deserved reputation.
That being said, let’s get to the heart of the matter. The main difference between Krav Maga and BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU is also the main difference between BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU and almost every other system or style out there. This most important difference is also the thing that is the hardest for beginners to understand. There is no easy way around this and either you “get it” or you don’t.
BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU is not just a collection of techniques, as I would argue that Krav Maga can be described as. BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU is instead physical techniques governed by, organized around and distilled through a set of unifying and governing principles. This really isn’t as esoteric as it sounds but it is vitally important. There is an overall combat strategy that governs BJJ and is based on a pretty simple idea of “distance management’ and “positional control”, which you could lump together with the other self defense positional concepts as “RELATIVE POSITION” . It is this overall general strategy and not really the individual techniques that BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU has used to prove itself in real documented fights for generations.
In my opinion, BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU has the very best overall “frame work” or “blue print” that really is complete on a conceptual, technical and tactical level and I have done a lot of different martial arts and self defense training; not to mention, actually having to use these methods in the only place it matters-the real world. That is why I embraced BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU so whole heartily when I became exposed to it at a time when no one was really interested in it and generally jealous and hostile to the inevitable changes BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU was going to bring to the ego and fantasy driven world of pre-UFC martial arts.
I decided Canada needed this system for one reason-it worked…for real and anything valuable and practical that was already working for me would fit into this “framework” if not already present. Once you have this “blue print” you can add or subtract individual techniques or tactics to suit individual or tactical needs. This “frame work” appears to be the only self-defense system that actually works with the fundamental nature of high risk hand to hand combat and not against it(as most other and particularly “stand –up” striking systems seem to do.) That being said, remember that sport jiu-jitsu does not train this frame work, only the limited parts that fit into the sport rules. There are lots of BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU people and “Black Belts” who have no idea of what I’m talking about either so don’t feel bad we can go into more details later
On the other hand, Krav Maga certainly did not start out with anything close to a complete conceptual and tactical approach although they must have thought they did, as so many “deadly” systems did while missing key tactical considerations such as the extremely high likely hood of unarmed encounters becoming ground fights. I go far enough back to remember that original KM had little or no ground work and was based on generally untenable concepts like “simultaneous attack and defense”. This kind of “block and strike at the same time” training has been abandoned by many branches of KM and rightly so, because it has never materialized in realistic fight settings like MMA matches.
Hence KM was very much more a work in progress when it was introduced into North America, It simply did not have the proven solutions for the range of real life situations that BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU always had. Therefore,KM has had to labor really hard to try and catch up and their solution was to adopt larger and larger aspects of BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU and MMA into their curriculum. It is an old saying that the sincerest form of flattery is imitation.
Ergo, I would have to argue that the answer to the question of which is the “better” self-defense system, Krav Maga or Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, by pointing out that Krav Maga has already answered that question for you by unabashedly adopting so much of the BJJ methodology, whether they are admitting to the students where it comes from or not. What is ironic though, is while KM was enthusiastically adopting many of these street orientated techniques From BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU, many BJJ schools were neglecting or even out right abandoning these same techniques and replacing them with more and more irrelevant sport techniques.