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Greetings, all.I'm a couple months late to the party, but I thought I'd throw in my $0.02 for what it's worth. I did a little MMA back around the time the UFCs were in the single digits. My combatives experience -- which is what Krav Maga was designed to be -- is a bit more extensive. I trained in WWII combatives for some years, certified as an instructor for a while, and still teach combatives when the need arises. I can't speak to what gets taught in a commercial Krav studio; never been in one. I wouldn't be surprised if they've drifted away from their roots quite a bit, but I really don't know.Good combatives training is designed to use the student's existing gross motor movement capabilities and existing attributes to give him something effective to do in combat this afternoon. That is the defining element of combatives -- it's useful, as you are, right this minute. Combatives simply does not contemplate making the student stronger, faster, or better coordinated -- it has to work as he is, right now, or it's no good. It's meant to be taught in a matter of hours -- days, at the very most -- and deployed immediately. That is its strength. Of course there's a point of diminishing returns. When your technique is clean, and you're delivering the power of your whole body into the blows, there's not much else to do. You can't train more sophisticated material in combatives because, by definition, there isn't any.The very strength of combatives is a crippling weakness in classical martial arts training. In martial arts training, we don't take deficits in attributes for granted. We train to be stronger, faster, more enduring. We develop the specialized coordination it takes to execute useful skills under the pressure of someone trying to tear our head off. We do specialized conditioning that takes months or years to cultivate. And the technical expression of the art takes time to develop -- a minimum of several months, and often longer.In other words, combatives is an express elevator, and martial arts training makes you take the stairs. But the elevator only goes up to the third floor of the skyscraper, and the stairs go all the way to the roof.KTS has the advantage of having some good stuff that's instantly useful, but a whole lot of the really, really good stuff relies on body set and certain habits of hand, foot and body position -- none of which comes naturally, at least not to North Americans. It takes a while. I went into combatives because the storefront TKD I started with just didn't work all that well. I added KTS to my combatives training 14 years ago because combatives had taken me as far as it was going to, and I wanted much more. In KTS, I found it.
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