Self-defence based mixed martial arts
We did our homework to give you the best of all worlds: A true self-defence based mixed martial art, adopting all the best techniques and strategies from the world’s best martial arts including karate, kickboxing, krav maga, judo, jiu-jitsu, MMA and even a little aikido.
In the past 25 years, there has been a movement of Mixed Martial Arts. So rather than following the narrow doctrine of a traditional style martial artists learn several arts and adopt a philosophy of using “whatever works” or “what works best”. Shinkyu Combat is an art born of this philosophy. We are also not limited to the rules of sporting competitions, nor training in our club focused on trying to win accolades in competitions. Our focus is delivering real-world, self-defence skills.
We love the principle of keeping your opponents at a distance that we learnt from Karate. This helps you see attacks coming and helps you be more aware of secondary threats. Karate uses great footwork and lots of fast and direct techniques to maintain distance until it is safer to close in. But we understand that the traditional training in karate is not for everyone and depending on what style you do you could spend a lot of time on techniques and exercises that can be abstract or simply don’t work in reality.
We really like the strong emphasis on counter-attacking in Krav Maga. This strong self-defence mindset is something we pass on in Shinkyu Combat too. Fighting dirty is another thing that Krav Maga and Shinkyu combat share. What we didn’t like in Krav Maga was that some Krav Maga schools don’t spar at all and others only do it rarely. It is only common sense to spar – how can you learn how to fight if you rarely or never spar? There is a big difference between drilling something and using it in the middle of combat. We use a combination of full face head gear and a system for controlling techniques, so we can spar using an almost full range of self-defence tactics while still maintaining a safe training environment- exceptionally few clubs out there do this kind of training. The lack of core technique training in Krav Maga also means that practitioners often struggle to develop effective technique because of a lack of good form.
We adopted hooks and uppercuts from boxing and thigh kicking, elbows and knees from Muay Thai kickboxing. While we love a strong kick and straight punch to keep opponents at a distance, once you’re in close the angles and power from these techniques is unrivalled. We also use some head movement and evasion from boxing, as well as the fitness. There are lots of issues with boxing and kickboxing when it comes to self-defence like wearing boxing gloves which, because of their size and the fact that you can’t form a proper fist while wearing them gets boxers and kickboxers into bad habits. But most importantly it is not self-defence, you won’t learn how to escape from even basic grappling situations like headlocks or learn even basic ground fighting nor will you learn any awareness or avoidance strategies.
With the prevalence of grappling and ground fighting in mixed martial art competitions like the UFC and when 42% of real fights end up on the ground any martial artist who ignores ground fighting is simply fooling themselves more than just a little bit. Brazilian Jiujutsu or BJJ is arguably the world’s best ground fighting art. While we have adopted several techniques from jiujitsu our goal in ground fighting is very different to the goal of Jiujitsu. They want to take an opponent down with them and keep them on the floor in order to control or submit them. Our goal, in general, is to get back tour feet where we have more options and are far less vulnerable from multiple attackers. We are also prepared to use dirty tactics to level the playing field against skilled or larger assailants trying to hold us down. Most BBJ clubs completely neglect self-defence and the prospect of an opponent fighting dirty in favour of preparing students for BBJ or MMA competitions.
All in all, we feel that Shinkyu Combat is very well rounded especially when it comes to learning how to protect yourself. However there is always more than one way to skin a cat, and we don’t want to put down the other arts we have mentioned, in fact just the opposite, we have adopted techniques and strategies from them because they are very good at their specialist area.
