Heh I was watching tv today and I ran across this show called "Fight Quest" where these two guys are going all over the planet and going to the birth place of a bunch of different martial arts styles and training and fighting there. Well luckily I caught it from the beginning and they were like "Today we are going to Isreal to learn about Krav Maga..." And I was like that sounds familiar and then i was like oh yeah thatsone of the fighting styles from arsenal. So I was like cool I will watch it.

It was pretty neat, its what the Isreali's teaches to its soldiers and the funny part is that it mainly teaches you how to take down people quickly by using methods that are normally banned in other martial arts styles like attacks to the eyes, throat, balls, kidney's, back of the head lol. They teach you had to use an assault rifle for melee combat, and they made the two guys do training against several guys at once with the emphasis on just staying on your feet while your being overrun and trying to continue to try and take out your target.

I felt sorry for both guys after it was over because they got beat up so much. Anyways it is always cool when shadowrun collides with the real world and it made me more aware of like how I should roleplay fighting styles and how my characters learned them and stuff. Wish I had arsenal so I could see what the book says about Krav Maga and compare it to what i saw. I also want to see all these other styles.

That was a sweet episode. I love how merciless they were. That guy's legs were destroyed after the training, and they just kept kicking him there.

In any case, I think it is always fun to do some research into what you're going to have your character's style be. I did this a lot back in my D&D days for my monks. With the internet being what it is these days, you can research just about any martial arts style to see what the basic tenets are, though Fight Quest is hard to beat for a crash course of what it looks like in action.

This is also true for various backgrounds and livelihoods the character may have/had.

There aren't many attacks that are "banned" from actual martial art styles. There might be attacks that aren't often taught to sport fighters (because the attacks are banned from competitions), and some of those attacks may have fallen to the wayside (becoming less popular) in many schools as a result, but I promise you traditional martial artists can be just as likely to kill or cripple you with dirty fighting techniques like eye gouges, bites, throat shots, etc. Heck, I can tell you what page in The Tao of Jeet Kun Do to go to to find Bruce Lee telling you exactly how and where to kick a guy when he's down.

Krav Maga is just a simple, brutally effective-by-design, fighting system (not even really a martial art, there's no "art" to it) that's stolen all the most basic moves from other martial arts, and tried to make them easy to digest and teach.

The whole point behind it is to make it as learnable as possible, in as short a time as possible, to as large a group (the entire IDF) as possible. So there's not much fancy stuff to it, and what schools you'll find for Krav Maga practice as much conditioning, situational awareness, and mindset (inasmuch as you can teach mindset) as they do anything else. Most of their actual attacks are very, very, simple stuff.

There's another, very similar show out there, called "Human Weapon" that is essentially the same thing (I think Fight Quest is on Discovery, Human Weapon is on the History Channel). Two guys travel the world going to the birthplaces of martial arts, and studying and fighting there. They've covered Krav, too (also visiting with the military to do so, etc). Neat stuff. It's kind of a middle-school level of study (if that makes sense), like most History channel stuff, but it's pretty fun to watch.

The other "technique" the art is usefull for is learning how to combat multiple opponets. I'm being taught this "martial art", and I agree with Critias it's a very 'simple' form of mishmashed styles, but simple is quite often the most effective. I like it to me it has value.

Good for you. I can't find a Krav Maga school around here that's not woman's self defense only. Le sigh. Guess I'll have to finish rehabbing my leg and tackle Muay Thai downtown...man that's going to suck.

Personally, I thing "Human Weapon" is much better than "Fight Quest". Fight Quest is all about the training of the two guys, while Human Weapon deals more with the history and culture of the art. It also includes motion caps of select techniques, so you can get a better view and possibly see if it fits into your own style.

But back on topic, Krav Maga isn't so much a martial art as it is a self-defense art. Part of that is learning to attack as well as defend. If you can't find it, you may want to look into some of its precursor arts.

Fight Quest was a result of some backlash in the martial arts community (mostly the MMA/UFC fans) to the hosts and format of Human Weapon. Discovery focused on the fighters and their stories to make more of a reality show, while the History Channel (Disney) focused on the history of the art and country, several local masters, the art and techniques, with special focus on certain interesting moves accompanied by learning aids. I prefer the latter. And am rambling.

Look for Haganah too. See http://www.fight2survive.com/

Man, I love that show. I caught the Krav Maga episode the other day and I have to admit, that was downright brutal. I have training in Tae Kwon Do, Hapkido, and Aikido and I must say that I would have to rethink going up against some of those fighters. Damn...

A number of the motion caps from Human Weapon that Cain mentioned are on YouTube.

I think both shows are pretty cool, but I like Human Weapon better. A lot of MMA/UFC guys tend to have an aversion to traditional styles because they assume that traditional etiquette is superfilous and somehow mutually exclusive with martial effectiveness. The whole point of traditional etiquette was to teach attention to detail and a type of martial awareness that transcended martial practice. In many ways it would be the equivalent of Perception skill training in SR.

Ironically many MMA/UFC guys hold up their competitive sport (albeit more "realistic") as the end-all-be-all model of martial effectiveness. Styles like krav maga and CQB training are probably closer to real confrontation (and don't look much like a UFC fight), but all good training tends to converge on the same principles.

In reality the effectiveness of any style has everything to do with how you train and who you train with.

And what you are willing to do to a human being.

-Siege

In deed.

hmm, i seriously feel like looking into savate for whatever reason.

as for etiquette, its a nice test of patience. something i get a feel that some of those people dont have at all...

but thats just the impression im left with...

the western world have become very rude and crude over the last decades...

I was actually quite impressed with savate when they featured it on the show. I had only ever seen the competition form (which to be honest looks quite silly) but I was surprised by how the techniques were applied by the CQB instructors they showed.

Well mma is the end all be all of 1v1 martial arts =P It only works for that though. When you are fighting multiple people like in warfare or riot/gang/mod circumstance grappling and going to the ground = death.

Just because MMA or Brazilian jujitsu emphasizes ground fighting doesn't mean a grappler will automatically go to ground - just because Tae Kwon Do teaches elaborate flying kicks doesn't mean that's the only trick a Tae Kwon Do student knows.

I'm not a big fan of grappling, but one of my buddies is and he doesn't need to go to ground to hurt someone badly, quickly before moving on to the next schmuck.

-Siege

When I was taking hapkido in college, they emphasized when in a real fight to go for eye gouging, hitting the throat, going for the kneecaps, etc. We just can't do that in sparring because it's not good to disable your fellow students in that way, nor is it for competition. In the xingyi classes, it was a similar thing too, in fact one of the forms (called the chicken form) there was an emphasis to nail the opponents gonads with a cupping strike followed by the other hand striking downward. A combination rip/tear and strike, definitely a banned strike in any tournament. You really can't say it's banned, just that the fighting styles with emphasis on tournaments are more prone to get their people to not get disqualified. The problem might occur if you're body gets to accustomed to only fighting tournament style in a street fight, I don't know. I've never been in a real fight and I hope I never have to.

Personally, I'm glad for my time in hapkido because it had lots of emphasis on grappling and ground fighting along with the kicks and strikes. Plus, learning to fall and tumbling have been invaluable to me (especially the falling since I fell on a slick bathroom tile once a few years ago and I managed to avoid cracking my head since I automatically tucked my head).

The tricky part, natch, is trying to stat these things.

It's essentially impossible to do effectively. Plus people will get bent out of shape.

I know that karate guys (I are one) tend to greatly overestimate the effectiveness of a good punch. I know in the early MMA single punches were shown to not work as advertised, even by pretty skilled people. I'm sure that Tae Kwon Do guys will go on how great their patented "knock Chinese cavalryman off horse" attacks are, but there may not be widespread agreement on this.

Then there is the whole effective at what range bit. A whole lot of the techniques of Tae Kwon Do don't work if the opponent is close enough to knee or elbow you, but you have to get there.

The SR3 point sink approach certainly isn't something that we need to do again.

I do like the new SR4 mechanics, though. A vast improvement over the initial suggestion, where martial arts had advantages and disadvantages like a mentor spirit.

No single technique ever works as advertised. It's always the combinations that matter. How you set it up, how you deliver, these are all just as important as the technique itself.

Having spent my early teenage years studying TDK, I can happily inform you that the single most effective fighting technique I learned was stabbing people with the pointy-end of a sharpened sai. Of course, setting that up is just as important. None of that fancy twirling crap, just use it as an extension of your empty-haded attacks
Unfortunately, bringing sais to a MMA match tends to be frowned upon, except possibly amongst some rather hardcore radical ki practitioners, and even then it is frowned upon by the police.

Unfortunatly, spending more time learning to kill people with sais than on practicing for tournaments led to my loss of every tournament I ever participated in on the first round because I was afraid of doing something illegal.

Many would argue they are all subsumed into the technique itself or are other aspects of the technique or separate techniques.
But I've too often reverted to the, "Ah! That guy's trying to hurt us. Right hand, pummel! Left, break! Feet, get us the fuck out of here!" in mid-fight to preach too much about technique.

Krav Maga's special manuvers are:
-license sub-par franchises all across UCAS
-D34DLY C0MM4ND0 AD CAMPAIGN!!!!!
-wrist lock beats hand grenade!


EDIT: I watch Fight Quest strictly due to a sense of ironic humor.

Is that an adept power sense?

Okay, I just couldn't resist. It's comedy theater anyway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Mva-3n7TY

I'm just going to go ahead and lift a post I made in another forum one time and post it here with a few modifications.

The only problem with krav is that a lot of its most celebrated aspects are actually theories based on the idea of hitting people in places and ways that you can't really properly practice with a resisting partner, which means that despite their emphasis on the idea of "cheap" tactics, they can't really teach you how to gouge someone's eyes out any better than say, a good wrestler/bjj practictioner can because nobody can really practice poking someone's eyes out short of going out and finding someone to maim. I mean, theory's great and all, but like with most things in life you're really only about as good as you practice. Not to shit all over krav or anything, but they follow two prime directives that are kinda contradictory from a training perspective when you consider their supposed emphasis on crippling tactics: The first rule is that there are no rules in a fight... but their second rule is that you must not injure yourself or your partner while training. So, yeah, krav is "better" than styles like Capoeira or Tai Chi, since the former is actually more of a performance art and the latter is more concerned with relaxation and moderate exercise than toughening yourself up via rigorous fitness and hard sparring with a resisting opponent, but that doesn't change the fact that the key moves Krav emphasizes are hardly unique. The biggests trick to fighting, after all, are as follows:

1. Toughening up and getting used to being hit. You can't afford to go down like a li'l bitch to an attack that actually wasn't physically disabling.

2. Getting used to the idea of potentially fuckin' someone up, or as my uncle in law (an arnis instructor) calls it: "Gettin' religion."

heh, its not without reason that in every war, each side have described the other as less then human. ones you stop thinking about your opponent as human, its for whatever reason easier to do stuff that could kill that person.

and i guess one could always practice on real doll products...

The evil little voice in my head says "send in the clones!"

or in the case of the israelis, "send in the arabs"...