[quote]LondonBoxer123 wrote:
This is a subject I find quite interesting. I have no experience of Krav, beyond what I have read on the internet, and the odd condescending put down about boxing from the occassional krav practitioner that I have come across.
What annoys me about it is the way that many tout it as the kind of fighting system that renders you a lethal killing machine.
I have boxed all my life, and one of the ways in which my krav acquaintances have tried to beliitle its usefulness is to suggest that krav teaches you to fight for survival, throat punching etc, whereas boxing is sport fighting, and thus a totally different mentality and almost inapplicable in a ‘real’ situation. Now, I can appreciate that there is a small amount of legitimate value in such comments. But I think the validity of such criticism is extremely limited.
By way of further background, I live in a particularly bad area of London, and am unfortunately no stranger to the kind of ‘real situation’ a lot of krav practitioners on the internet talk about in hushed tones (although I avoid trouble as far as possible). Without wanting to go into any particular detail, despite not having trained throat strikes, eye gouges etc, I have not found myself unable to do them on the rare occassion that such a level of violnce has been called for.
I think what is often ignored, when the superiority of krav is being claimed, is that sport fighting has enormous value, and attracts a particular kind of person. In my limited experience of krav practitioners in the flesh, i am not aware of any of them having been in one of these ‘situations’. In my experience, and I appreciate it is probably not reflective of the good sides of it, the people who go towards it generally want to be tough guys with some kind of lethal power at their finger tips.
While the techniques it teaches are no doubt valuable and potentially lethal, I would still back any of the boys from my boxing gym against any krav practitioner I have met. People who sport fight, in my experience, have the mentality and the tools that it takes to win a fight against most people in a street fight, even those who have trained selk defence. I appreciate that krav teaches you to produce aggression and to control adrenaline etc, but there is, in my experience, a different mentality amongst those who fight and train to fight for years because they enjoy it, and those who want to keep the boogeyman away should it ever find them.
Turned into a bit of a ramble, and I didnt set out to bash krav. Just something that bothers me about some of the people that swear by it. [/quote]
You make a lot of good points, including one that isn’t touched on all the time - Krav can teach people to fight for their lives in situations where it’s not legally justifiable.
A punch is a punch, you kayo somebody and they hit their head and die yea, you’re up for manslaughter, no doubt.
But some of the stuff Krav teaches - such as totally disabling a downed attacker - has a place on the battlefield but not in the street where people like cops and lawyers and judges are going to get involved.
That one class I went to and watched, I’ll give that instructor credit, because he told his people that when showing them a choke hold - “You can use this, but you’re goin in front of a fuckin judge if you do.”
Now, I thought maybe he should have put a little more emphasis on WHEN you could justifiably use it, but who knows.
Now, sport can fuck you too. I’m a small guy, and whenever anyone got me to the ground, the first thing I did was go for their throat. That’s right - I grab that fuckin box in there and I pull. I watched a guy puke and go into the shakes one time when I latched onto that thing.
When I started doing BJJ, I had to get AWAY from that, because that’s not legal in the sport, and now I find that I have trained myself to NOT follow that instinct. So sport, and it’s rules, can hurt.
But, the one thing I can say is that the best streetfighters I’ve ever known were guys who were either fantastic wrestlers in high school or golden gloves boxers. Not because their moves are so deadly, or because they’re stronger or smarter, but because of the pure amount of hours they’ve put into the craft.
You throw a punch at someone who has no experience fighting, they’re probably gonna shit themselves or do some of that flailing bullshit; you throw a punch at a twice a week karate cat, and they’re gonna try to do that wax on bullshit. And when they get pegged they’re gonna freeze because they’ve never REALLY seen hands let go at them.
You throw a punch at a boxer though, and it’s just fucking Tuesday for him. He’s gonna react like he always has over his hundreds of hours of training, and you’re getting hit five times before you’re done swinging.
You come at a wrestler and he’s gonna shoot right in on you because that’s what he did every day after school for four hours for ten years, and you’ll be on your back and getting pummeled.
It’s like for the guys who played football… if you’re screwing around on a field or in a pickup game and you go to tackle somebody, you don’t think about it - you’re just looking at their belt line, lining up that angle, and making the tackle. You did it every day in practice, and now that’s just IN you.
Now, if I was trying to learn football at age 27 like most guys try to learn martial arts at age 27, and going twice a week for an hour, I could do that for four years and I’m not going to be anywhere near as good as the dude who just played a couple years in high school, because it was four hours a day for him, every day, all fucking year.
And of course, there’s the fact that the news articles speak for themselves - the list of boxers who are pretty brutal streetfighters is a long one, from Micky Ward to Floyd Mayweather Sr. to BHop to Arturo to Tyson… the shit does work, but more because of the length and depth of training than anything else.