Originally Posted by
robt
Most practical. Yes, definitely. Source: used to do krav maga (and have done a few other martial arts). Most of the people I trained with, including the head instructor, were prison guards, plus a few police and military folk. All of whom found it to be extremely practical. Almost everyone already knew at least one other martial art, but it was a diverse lot including a 50-ish year old couple who had both decided to give it a go with no prior experience.
It's pretty accessible but it does put a lot of emphasis on psychological conditioning and pushing yourself up to and beyond your physical limits. This is largely based on the practical concern of dealing with adrenaline and stressful situations. A standard krav maga class ends with "pressure testing" which frankly, is never fun until its over. It is pretty demanding. You're more likely to get badly injured doing something like aikido, but you'll come away from krav maga with a lot of bruises, physically exhausted, and probably wondering if you really want to keep doing it. But it's also a lot of fun.
Also this, although be aware that there are actually 3 variants of krav maga: civilian, police and military. The police variant puts more emphasis on restraint and control methods. If you go to a typical krav maga school you will generally be taught the civilian version, but if you mention particular job requirements the instructor may be able to advise if they have special classes, or could show you slight variants on the techniques. Often the same technique can be applied in 3 different ways depending on the outcome you're looking for. The military version is sometimes pointed out so you know what not to do, as it can sometimes be a fine line between a restraint and breaking someone's neck. On the whole, that's not something you want to be going around doing.
What all of them have over the more traditional martial arts is up-front emphasis on things like situational awareness and keeping things simple: first try to diffuse the situation or leave, if that's not an option go in really really hard until you are absolutely certain the threat is gone. Again, there is a major difference in how these techniques are taught to police because they don't have the "run away" option, and they should always be trying to restrain rather than debilitate, depending on the threat involved. Your job may put you somewhere in the middle between these two.
One important point to realise about restraint techniques though, which isn't always emphasised enough in traditional MA, is that they very often don't work. Whatever you're training in, you need to be applying it in a relatively real scenario where things go wrong and you need to change plans at the last second. The sport arts like BJJ have a strong advantage here, but the artificial constraints of the sporting rule-system are a weakness at the same time. The biggest issue in any real situation is that you really can't predict what someone is going to do.
The intial emphasis in krav is on simple strikes and blocks that get progressively more complex as you develop more control, but it builds on innate reflexes rather than requiring a lot of skill before it is of any use. Training in anything at all is always better than nothing, but one key advantage of krav maga is that you will get something useful out of it with just a few weeks' training. That was one of the original objectives for the system. Whereas traditional martial arts were for professional martial artists, from a time when that was a thing, krav maga was designed to quickly enable ordinary jews able to defend themselves from nazis and other anti-semites in the escalating tensions leading up to WW2.
So while there will be some convergence after a few years, traditional martial arts tend to be a bit of an all-or-nothing affair. With a little bit of krav, if you have to defend yourself, you might not be able to do so cleanly, but it could make the difference between walking away with a minor injury, or a much more serious one. With more training, you might also be able to avoid injuring the other person too much.
This is largely a myth, but there are a lot of "krav maga" McDojos around. That's not krav maga. Find a real krav maga school. Check if they are affiliated with one of the real Israeli organisations such as IKMF or KMG. If they are, the instructors will train regularly with senior instructors who in turn spend a lot of time with the Israeli military & police forces. You may not agree with Israel's foreign policies, but there's little doubt that their police & military forces do in fact rely on their training more than average, so all the FUD about it being all mouth and no trousers is just BS. Nobody I know has ever made a claim about krav maga moves being "so deadly" etc. That's much more likely coming from traditional Chinese martial arts (which to be fair, often are difficult to practise properly because they are designed to do lots of damage very efficiently; but people only boast about that being a good thing if they have no gongfu).
Krav is a constantly evolving system, my school would get updates to the curriculum once a year. So for example we'd have been training in some technique or another, then the next year it would be slightly different, because they found the old way had a slightly higher risk of injury, or wasn't as effective, or something. This is all based directly on feedback from the Israeli forces. It's actually quite scientific in that regard. I think there is a recognition that the sports arts have the advantage of evolutionary pressure: techniques that don't work fall out of favour. However, they can also over-emphasise things that happen to be good for point-scoring, and de-emphasise defending things that would be illegal, or dealing with a second assailant for example (the latter is probably the biggest weakness of BJJ compared to krav).
The difference between Judo, Jiu Jitsu and BJJ is largely artificial as they are all, essentially, the same martial art with a slight difference in focus. Judo and BJJ are both sports based on traditonal jiu jitsu. My krav school was actually in a Gracie Barra BJJ gym and we would cross train with those guys all the time (any good krav school will do a lot of cross training with other martial artists). And most of the takedown techniques are the same, except that in krav you always get back up again really fast, and you would tend to opt for that as a last resort rather than the first one. If you need to subdue someone you probably don't want to take them to the ground in the way a BJJ fighter would anyway.
The other main difference between krav and most other systems is the emphasis on knife (and miscellaneous improvised weapon) defence early on. This is very much a take a small injury to avoid a bigger one sort of a thing. Traditional jiu jitsu, aikido etc., do contain knife techniques but the emphasis as usual tends to be on perfect execution, which of course never actually happens in reality. And it tends to be left out until you reach a basic level of proficiency in unarmed techniques. I've also done gun defence techniques but tbh I don't really remember them that well. They are extremely technical and, because this is the UK not Israel or USA, those techniques tend not to be practised as much as others with more obvious, practical uses. I think I've only practised handgun disarms maybe twice and a rifle disarm once. And even that was just because the instructor fancied mixing things up a bit.
Anyway, the overriding concern with any of these is this: find a good teacher.
Look at the students. Do they seem overly aggressive and not particularly well coordinated, or are they generally laid back, respectful, and focused on their skills? The students will reflect the teacher.
Also, if you happen to know anyone in the local constabulary, try to find out who does their martial arts training. The chances are it'll be a local krav maga or jiu jitsu instructor, and you can be fairly sure it will be one of the better ones.
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