In the previous segments of this series of posts, on the differences between Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, I argued that it was actually the underlying principles that were the biggest differences between these two self-defense systems. Furthermore, I demonstrated that true combat principles are not just a matter of arbitrary choice but should be the result of objective scientific study into the very nature of human bio-mechanical performance and unarmed combat.
Some people may be a little confused by this kind of conceptual discussion and would prefer to be dealing in more simplistic terms like too many “self-defense experts” and layman alike want to do. They could say, quite correctly, that the major difference between Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu-jitsu is that Brazilian Jiu-jitsu puts a very heavy emphasis on ground fighting and defense while Krav Maga does not. On a certain level this is true, but it also misses the deeper point.
The point, is to ask why Brazilian Jiu-jitsu would do this and Krav Maga would not, (at least not before they started to adopt so much of the Brazilian Jiu-jitsu methodology). The more insightful answer is that an emphasis on ground fighting was not an arbitrary decision made by one person in order to be different from other “styles”. In other words, no one woke up one day and said: “hey, let’s just make up a bunch of ground fighting moves and create a new martial art because I like ground fighting.”
Instead, an emphasis on ground grappling evolved in Brazilian Jiu-jitsu because of the application of the scientific combat principles originally discovered and developed by Jigoro Kano. These principles were then applied in an observable, testable and repeatable way to large numbers of real fights over an extended period of time, by the Brazilian Jiu-jitsu exponents. The result was that it was empirically proven that more real life fights were won with ground grappling then by anything else.
However, “ground grappling” its self is not a “principle”, it is a “tactic” that has proven so successful because it works with the principles and fundamental nature of unarmed combat and not against it. Conversely, Krav Maga, and most other martial arts seem to develop what they might call “principles” first and then try to make unarmed combat fit into that. In other words, their “principles” are really just arbitrary theories or a “wish list” of how they would like to deal with self-defense and fighting. However, the principles and laws of nature are not a matter of choice, they are an objective testable reality.
For example, when Jigoro Kano was developing his new Jiu-jitsu he did not just randomly or subjectively decide to de-emphasise the striking aspect , he reached that conclusion by scientific inquiry and testing. Now many “pseudo-experts” might try to argue that Kano didn’t know anything about it because “Judo” does not have any striking and never did. These assertions are of course completely unfounded because Judo or more properly “Kano-Jiu-jitsu” had a complete method of karate like strikes he categorized together as “atemi-waza”.
This is no secret and any informed martial artist should know that. However, what is less well know and quite illuminating is that the original style of Jiu-jitsu that Kano studied and became a master of was Tenshin Yo Ryu. Tenshin Yo Ryu Jiu-jitsu was known, among other things, for its striking techniques or atami waza. Thus, even though Kano was originally an expert in striking methods he found them less important then other aspects that fit into the general principles that his new system had to be based on. In other words, he was not bound by what could have easily developed into a stylistic bias. He didn’t just mindlessly believe everything he was taught, he had to fight, research and experiment to find a scientifically based objective truth. This process was in turn continued through Brazilian Jiu-jitsu.
Kano discovered that the first principle of all human physical performance is having to overcome the effects of gravity. In other words, everything in self-defense has to begin with balance and stability whether we like it or not. He observed and tested the influence of that first principle of balance on striking methods and concluded that while still valuable for real fighting they should not be used as the primary method of training for self-defense.
This problem and lack of understanding of the underlying concept of “stability” has always been the biggest problem with the performance of striking based approaches to self-defense like Krav Maga. We discussed this to some degree in part number 3 of this series but we should explore some observable and testable support for my contentions and then end this post with a piece of critical statistical evidence.
Firstly, hitting a bag or target is nothing like hitting a moving human being, not even close. I have gone into great detail about the artificiality of striking based training in my blog post: “The Art of Maximum Deficiency”. In this post I want to specifically look at this first principle of “stability” as applied to striking based self-defense by encouraging you to do some experiments that now involve the physical act of striking.
For example, when you stand in front of a “Bob” doll or pad that is held stationary, with a little practice your strikes can feel very powerful and this is a major illusion that this kind of training produces (and what many are trying to sell you as their self-defense “product”). Now start to move the pad around and it becomes a lot harder to land solid blows even though you are now using more energy. The strikes are clearly becoming less efficient.
Next, move the pad around quickly and at odd angles so that you constantly have to move, shift your weight and judge the constantly changing distance you are at. The strikes are now wasting a lot more energy and you may be barely able to connect with the pad. What once seemed very simple and powerful now feels very awkward and difficult, (that’s because it is).
Now, to really understand what it will feel like to try and use these striking methods (especially kicks) in a real world fight, move the pad in the same way and try to hit it, but this time you don’t need a patch of ice as I suggested in a previous post, just have someone push and shove on you as you do it. Better yet, have the person holding the pad grab you by your jacket and try to jerk you around as hard as they can while you try to strike. Where did all that power go? The same place the weight lifter’s strength went, from back in our first “stability” experiment.
You really have to experience this to feel how disconcerting and revealing it is. To think that in most real self-defense encounters you are just going to be able to stand there and freely “wail” on an unmoving attacker without any reaction or unwanted and unpredictable forces acting on you is dangerously naive, (and so are the people foolish enough to advocate this approach).
Honestly, how much of the power and accuracy of those hand blows, that seemed so powerful under more artificial testing conditions, is lost under these more destabilizing and chaos simulating conditions? Moreover, I’m not even talking about kicks where you are literally hopping around on one leg. Now imagine those conditions against a much larger and aggressive attacker and I’m thinking something like 80-90% ineffectiveness.
I routinely do this kind of experiment in my classes and in seminars. With small people I don’t even need a pad and prefer not to use one because it is more realistic to let the person actually hit me. I give the person I’m demonstrating with permission to kick me in the legs or strike my body as hard as they can and all I will do is hold onto their jacket with one hand. On the command of “go” we both can begin, what I do is nothing sophisticated or “technical”, I just pull, jerk and shake them as hard as I can and just like any completely untrained but larger street attacker can do.
Not only am I never hit with any force I am not generally hit at all because the person becomes so unstable that they are most often simply tossed to the ground. Those that are not have to entirely stop trying to strike in order to catch themselves and concentrate completely on staying on their feet. Yes, it takes a big weight difference to be able to demonstrate it that easily but that is the essence of good self-defense, it has to be designed to work against those big weight differences and if it cannot then it is observably untenable. This is a very simplistic but nonetheless observable, testable and repeatable lesson on our first principle of stability and therefore solid evidence as to why you must not rely on standing striking as your primary means of self-defence as is advocated by systems like Krav Maga.
After crushing one of the biggest false paradigms in the self-defense world in about 10 seconds, and you can too, the question from confused laypeople becomes: “Can strikes not work in a real fight? Of course they can, we see it all the time in surveillance footage of real assaults but we have to put it in context. Striking attacks can and do work, especially for very large, athletic or predatory people taking advantage of smaller, drunker, older, intimidated or whatever kind of “soft targets” that cowards what to victimize. However, for the rest of us, it is simply much, much harder than many so called self-defense instructors would have you believe. It is not a question of “right” or “wrong”, “working” or “not working” but really a question of percentages and the right tool for the right job.
Moreover, striking is very attribute based. In other words, when it comes to hitting people the craftsman is usually much more important than the tool. You are going to be at an extreme disadvantage trying to out strike someone who is larger and more aggressive even if they are trying to “play your game” and not attacking you wildly and chaotically as is the norm in actual street fights. Why do you think Boxing and kick-boxing have weight classes? There is less than 10lbs difference between Boxing weight classes, meaning that the best hand strikers in the world don’t want to tangle with people even 10 pounds heavier than them.
I once had a champion kick-boxer bragging to me about his accomplishments, when I looked at his championship belt I saw that it was for a 5 lbs. weight class! I had never seen anything silly like that and I’d done a lot of kick-boxing, it turned out to be common practice in many Thai boxing organizations. Yes, you got it; there was a different “World” champion or whatever every five pounds! That’s a whole lot of champions, but that is a different topic.
Obviously then, from a defensive self-protection perspective that is based on our first principle of balance, the best time to use strikes is when you are stable and the opponent is stationary. This simply does not happen enough or for long enough in the middle of most kinds of assaults to be a reliable or high percentage tactic.
Furthermore, even if these “sniper” conditions do exist there is still no guarantee that your strikes are going to start looking like that pad training again. Your best most well delivered punch from your optimal position of stability and perfect distance may still not have any appreciable effects on an attacker. Unlike the movies and TV, people in the real world do not usually just collapse unconscious like they were struck by lightning because you swing your hand at them. This is particularly true with much heavier people with thicker necks and or bone structure and should be obvious, but I am talking about regular people here.
No matter what some pseudo-expert tells you, statistically the vast majority of punches in the street will not produce anything more serious than cuts and contusions, (check out my post: “Fist Fighting: A Cultural Perspective”). You could train for years and simply never have the natural attributes or mass necessary to produce the kind of force needed to fell people. This is the greatest illusion of striking based systems and their greatest draw back. As I mentioned, I wrote about this at length in my other post, the illusion is based on the fact that you can seldom if ever actually hit people full force in training and therefore never have any idea what would actually happen.
Instead, the instructor has to stand there and tell you what is going to happen while you hit the pad (or worse yet punch the air). I have heard it all, “this kick will break his jaw”, “this punch will knock him out”, “this strike to his throat will kill the opponent”, really? How many people has the instructor killed with that strike? The more “deadly” the technique the less you can actually train it and the ultimate ego illusion that we talked about is complete. You are told by an excepted authority figure and therefore will believe that you are deadly for doing no more than strike the air. Now that you have been anointed by the master, go out and open a “self-defense school”
We have been over this ground before so I want to add a final and very important piece of real statistical evidence that does not come from any self-defense or martial arts source. I think it is very important to our “evidence-based self-defense” approach, to get our stats from objective sources rather than the completely biased and often completely spurious self-defense and martial arts sources.
According to a medical web site referring to a study on Boxing and brain trauma there is an overall knock-out rate of only about six percent in Boxing. Yes, that is correct a 06. % knock-out rate that seems to be at odds with the claims of so many “pseudo-experts” alleging they have knock out rates of 80-90 % on the street.These kinds of ridicules made up figures are the norm in the “pseudo-profession” and are just unabashed fabrications (i.e bold faced lies).
Think about that, even under near perfect conditions of very good lighting, a flat ideal surface, hands wrapped for protection and effectiveness, an optimizing warm up and lots and lots of practice there is still only a 6% knock-out rate! Don’t kid yourself, Boxing gloves increase the knock-out rate, they are just thick enough to protect the puncher’s hands not the opponent’s head. Gloves developed because they increased the amount of punches the fighter could throw which made boxing more exciting.
Boxing gloves spread the force of a punch over a greater surface area that causes more, not less brain shaking. Although far less cuts, therefore causing long term brain damage was seen as far more “civilized” than the barbarity of head lacerations so the illusion that boxing gloves were “safer” was born.
It is also interesting that head gear is worn in amateur boxing bouts for the same reason, it prevents facial lacerations i.e cuts and therefor makes boxing appear more civilized and gives the illusion of safety while in reality head gear actually increases the chance of knock out-and greater brain trauma-because the added weight causes more head and brain shaking.
Once again welcome to the real world of perception vs reality. Of course there are individual boxers with much higher knock out rates that is why we have heard of them, but for every rare and exceptional athlete that defies the odds there is literally thousands and thousands of boxers throwing punches and defining those statistics. Furthermore, that rare athlete is still performing those feats in a weight class.
Ergo, we have some very solid objective evidence that if the chance of knocking people out is so low under the very conditions designed to maximize knock-outs, then this cannot be a very reliable, high percentage approach to self-defense for normal people. Long before this kind of evidence was available to Kano and other Jiu-jitsu people they were arriving at the same conclusions by applying the principles of unarmed combat and comparing the efficiency of different methodologies. It is this objective evolution based on scientific principles of observable, testable and repeatable results that is really the greatest difference between not only Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu-jitsu but Brazilian Jiu-jitsu and nearly every other self-defense system out there.