If I had a dollar for every time ….

For the last couple of years people have had great delight in trolling Krav Maga supporters. They are good candidates for it as some of their practitioners are heavy on the dogma.

Generally its MMA exponents that seem to be enjoying themselves at the Krav Maga supporter’s expense. The challenge issued by MMA is to join them in the ring to test some of Krav Maga’s supposed effectiveness. The response is ‘we cannot use our elimination techniques because the rules of the ring won’t let us, and anyway it is only for use in real life and death situations’. MMA then say it’s unproven and you are likely creating fantasies by only training within your school. Krav Maga respond by quoting their lineage back to Israeli Commandos and that MMA is just a sport so what would it really know about self-defence.

Keeping Krav Maga exponents out of the ring is a good thing for their marketing as they probably aren’t going to thrive in that environment even if you allow what some people regard as 'dirty fighting'. Their counter claim that MMA is a sport could be considered to be a petulant rebuttal but Krav Maga does have a point, namely that a martial art should be trying to account for everything in a situation, including weapons. They are focusing on a holistic vision of the arts, which is a good thing, but it’s their claims of it being a supreme battle proven system that makes everyone else roll their eyes. If only the rebuttals wouldn’t start with – I know this guy in the defence forces from Israel who ….

It doesn’t help them that people's vision of the arts in general is somewhat skewed. Students tend to see it as mainly unarmed defence, but a lot of martial arts incorporated the use of weapons as a significant part of their art.

Ignoring weapons for the moment, there is no doubt that Krav Maga practitioners can be good at unarmed combat. However, is their system going to create that ability in every student – I doubt it. The ones who get the practical experience they need to adapt their skills to suit the requirements of battle will do well. Krav Maga started as a collection of boxing, Judo and wrestling plus a few self-defense moves and it evolved over time. You would expect it to keep evolving and incorporating other ideas. Purity of system is an idea at odds with battle.

Anyway, it's not the system that matters in the end. Good fighters generally master a couple of things and tend to apply them with a high percentage of success. Plebs generally learn a new technique or a variation thereof for every situation, and have a low percentage of success on all of them.

Fighting multiple attackers is much the same. You need a couple of concepts that you can apply with a high percentage of success.