Shinkyu Combat is designed to fill a unique gap in the martial arts world. Some styles are have a narrow traditional syllabus while others are limited by sporting rules, which in most cases leave their students grossly ill equipped for the realities of a wide variety of self defence situations. We took took all the most essential element from a some of the worlds most effective martial arts to make sure we cover all the most statistically probable self-defence situations. As a result we are best described as a self-defence based mixed martial art. We started with a strong karate and kickboxing base and adopted techniques and strategies from judo, jiujitsu, krav maga and MMA (Mixed Martial Arts).
Combat is the result of decades of experience and countless hours of study into the habitual acts of violence. So if your goal is to learn self-defence look no further.
Self-defence is just the start, training in Shinkyu Combat is an exciting and dynamic way to get a great all round workout. We have a great training atmosphere and you will have lots of fun and training with some great people. But one of the biggest benefits of training is that it is truly empowering — training in self-defence will build your confidence and self-esteem like no other activity can.
Combat is not limited to the rules of sporting competitions nor are we bound to stick to a narrow traditional syllabus. We are a truly self-defence based mixed martial art that is well rounded to make sure your receive the perfect balance of self-defence skills and fitness. In Shinkyu you will train core techniques for both attack and defence to give you reflexive moves that you can rely on, you will learn context driven self-defence as well as sparring skills to help you learn to be tactical and decisive
While a lot of clubs don’t like advertising their prices, we can’t rave enough about ours and at £5 or less per class, why wouldn’t we. Our simple direct debit fees structure is designed to help you get the most out of your training by encouraging you to train at least twice a week. This helps you quickly develop reflexive skills that you can rely on and also dramatically improves your fitness, so you get both value and results from your training.
We are absolutely committed to honing, developing and evolving our craft. Whether that takes the form of developing our martial arts and making sure we are passing on rigorously test skills and techniques or learning the latest teaching tools or working on our communication and service. All of our instructors have not only completed comprehensive instructor training but they also attend ongoing weekly training, this not only ensures they continue to grow as martial artists, it also means we deliver cutting edge teaching methods
Our customer service team and our instructors are there to help our students experience a rich and rewarding martial arts journey. There are many benefits to training in Combat: self-defence, fitness and confidence being high on the list. Your aspirations and goals are important to us, and our talented and experienced instructors are there to help you achieve them!
While the subject matter in our classes is serious, we make sure that have a safe, positive and empowering training atmosphere that builds confidence as you improve both your fitness levels and also your skill sets. Not to mention that learning self-defence in itself is one of the most empowering things you can do. We will make sure you get a warm welcome when come to our classes. Training is also very safe, we use a system for control and simulating dirty fighting techniques + the use of full face head gear to make sure your training is rigorous, reliable and super realistic, while still being safe
While our instructors plan out what they will teach in our classes most of the time there is room for a request or two. So if you want to learn how to deal with a particular self-defence situation, or work on a specific technique or area in sparring in most cases they will happily take some time out to teach it to you. In some cases, especially for bigger subjects, the instructor may not have time to run through your request but they will endeavour to cover it in the following few weeks. So whether you are concerned about a particular self-defence situation or if you are a karate student looking to achieve a milestone be sure to ask your instructor before class and they will do their best to help you.
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.
