MartialArtistZone.com

LOL! you can take on 12 guys with knives but you cant take on 1 guy with a gun. HAHA

did you mean 12 kids or 12 old men at once?

Fantasy-Fu?? hahaha 12 guys at once?? Not unless it’s the movies- or you have an automatic weapon. I think one of the better styles for multiple opponents is Aikido. But we’re talking maybe 4-5 opponents it you’re worth your salt. I’m sure alot of bad-a$$es on here will say differently.
You mentioning the “formless form” or a style without “set rules” makes me think of Jeet Kune Do. As well, Aikido is very big in the states as well- those may be the two you are looking for. I dunno! Hope it helps, however

Makingitup-Fu and BS-Ryu

Seriously, sounds like your friend is either making this up or he’s getting this information from someone else who is. A couple flags to note.

–If the first one is really a Top 5 of all martial arts in the world, how come the name doesn’t sound familiar. It if was really as popular as Karate, TKD, etc, why didn’t it sound familiar when he said it?

–On the second one, there are a number of schools and systems that will teach you to do whatever you need to do to survive. This, however, will vary school by school as each school in a system may have a different focus they want to push (practical self-defense training vs. light-to-no contact sparring for example) so simply saying “I’m studying ______ style” is no guarantee of what is taught.

Furthermore there are very few martial arts that claim they will teach you how to take on 12 guys at once. And those that do are either 100% BS or practice dead and/or compliant techniques where the skills are never pressure tested to ensure that the student is lead to believe they have uber-deadly skills and are actually learning how to defend themselves when in reality they are not.

I have no idea what the first one would be…but the second makes me think of Krav Maga and how it was depicted on an episode of the Human Weapon.

If that’s what your friend is talking about, you may want to tell them to pay more attention to what they are watching. The person was surrounded by a dozen or so men, but they weren’t actually attacking him. It was a training exercise to help him see what it’s like to be crowded by a group of people — even though those people weren’t even attacking him.

Any art, no matter if it focuses on multiple attackers or not, tends to just tell you that once you’ve got even 2 or 3 people on you, you’re in trouble. Any more than that and I hope you’ve either got help or you’re a faster runner than them.

Karate and Jiu-Jitsu are Japanese. Taekwondo is Korean. Karate and Taekwondo focus on strikes, while Jiu-Jitsu also will give you throws, take-downs, submissions, etc… I understand some of this is also taught in some forms of karate, but karate is mostly a striking art.
Karate is more simple in form than tae-kwon-do. Tae-Kwon do is more focused on Kicks, while karate is more balanced with kicks and hand strikes being developed. There is more of a focus on power in Tae-Kwon-Do, but it does so at the expense of some simplicity that is found in karate.
The other one sounds like B.S. Tough-guy statements like the first rule is there are no rules reek of a mcDojo from 10 miles away. As for taking on 12 guys at once - fine if they’re all six year olds, but think about it: What if they know anything themselves? How realistic is that?

It honestly quite hard to tell what your freind is alluding to from your descriptions but the first could be a style called Sanshou, while the second is most likely not a martial art at all but a form of self-defense called Krav Maga.

It sounds very much as though your friend has been watching tv and picked up some basic information, and perhaps elaborated on it just a little
If you are interested in participating in the martial arts - forget about the discipline or style. That is much less important than the instructor/s who will teach you, the location of the school, the students in the school, and the costs of tuition. Look for the schools in your area, go by and check them out, talk with the instructor/s, chat with the students, and make your determination based on that. Selecting an art because a tv program suggest you can take of 12 guys at a time is not a very researched method of decision making lol.

Good luck

Ken C
9th Dan HapMoosaKi-Do
8th Dan TaeKwon-Do
7th Dan YongChul-Do

12 guys? bs…. but yeah i would say the guy above me gave you the right art name sanshou