This Blog Post carries on from last week’s. This wasn’t my intention however something a prospective student said to me after a class, this week continues to demonstrate how some people view self-defense and their right to defend themselves. After a class, I was asked (I am paraphrasing), “I want to learn how to defend myself, so I’ve been watching clips on Youtube to see which system might be best for me, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is either Krav Maga or Aikido, but I’m leaning towards Aikido because I don’t want to hurt anyone.” So firstly, a nod in the right direction, the individual sees the need to defend themselves, and to enact physical solutions, recognizing that some conflicts and confrontations need a physical solution, however they don’t want to hurt the person attacking them etc. This is a noble ideal, and one which I do have a certain amount of time for, though at the end of the day it’s practically unrealistic, and I want to explain to anyone who thinks that you can prevail and survive a violent assault without causing some degree of pain to your attacker, that this is really not possible. 

Firstly, I would like to make a strong defense of Aikido, and talk a bit about the history of the system e.g. how it’s practiced and trained now and how it was in pre-war Japan. When I demonstrate techniques in Krav Maga, I don’t do them full force, and if I throw somebody, I choose someone who I know can break-fall, and I give them the time, space and room, to fall safely. When you watch an Aikido demonstration, you are watching just that, a demo, where Uke (the person being thrown, is done so in a manner where they are not hurt. Substitute that individual for one who doesn’t know how to fall, and the soft mats/tatami, for concrete, and suddenly you are not watching an individual being thrown and getting up again, without injury, but a person who is being dropped head first into the concrete. Much of modern day Aikido might be practiced without the intent to harm, however its techniques and movements are very much able to be used for this purpose. I spent about 18 months studying Yoshinkan Aikido (as used by the Japanese Riot Police), and I have been thrown harder in training sessions than I was at National level Judo contests. A person watching an Aikido demo on the internet may be easily fooled in to thinking the idea behind the system is to let the person being thrown get up unhurt, but that was certainly not the intention of the system as it was developed in pre-war Japan – here it was not for demonstration but for the inflicting of pain and injury.

In my experience there are really only two ways you can end a fight (once it has started and avoidance is not an option): You can attempt to physically and mechanically take the person out of the fight e.g. break a limb, choke them out, knock them out etc. so they are physically unable to continue, or you can cause them such a degree of continued pain, that they no longer have the emotional stock to continue fighting. Both of these methods involve some level of pain i.e. hurting your attacker. Pain is what prevents them from continuing to assault you, without it they have no reason to stop their assault (unless there is some time constraint that they are working too). From my own experience when people are subjected to continuous, relentless pain, regardless of whether it is injurious or not, they will often back away from the fight. It doesn’t matter if they are still physically capable of fighting, they are unable to emotionally.

I understand this well. As a Kid I was bullied, and the worst part was not the physical pain, but what the violence represented; hatred of me as a person. The physical stuff I could take (even though at times it was pretty extreme – I remember being pushed down and stomped on by a group, till my back was just one mass of cuts and bruises, and I had extreme difficulty breathing), it was the emotional component that went with it; that people willingly and actively wanted to do these things to me. The parts of bullying which often get overlooked, are the name calling, the rumors and the gossip mongering, along with the social exclusion – because these don’t result in physical pain or injuries they tend to get overlooked and ignored however as any bullied kid will tell you, these components are the most painful. They represent emotional violence, and it is this which most people are not prepared to deal with; the sheer disbelief of what they are being subjected to. Most street fights end in under 5 seconds, not because one party is unable to continue but because they don’t want to.

If you get lucky, really lucky you may knock somebody out with a punch, and if you are both lucky and particularly skilled you may also break a joint, or choke or throw somebody so that they are mechanically unable to continue fighting. These instances are rare. In reality you must meet violence with extreme violence, and inflict the level of pain on your assailant so that they emotionally crumble. Nothing else will stop them. Don’t be fooled that other martial arts take a different approach, they just try and inflict different levels of pain in different ways - Japanese/Okinawan Karate may propose “one punch one kill”, whereas systems such as Wing Chun and Kali, look to overwhelm an aggressor with a multitude of strikes – all have the same goal though. Aikido as it’s practiced may look like nobody is getting hurt when they’re thrown, but in a real-life situation, those throws are designed to inflict heavy falls, and to physically and emotionally break somebody. When you look across the martial arts landscape Krav Maga isn’t that different in its goals and aims, to other fighting systems.