GongKwon Yusul
공권유술A Korean hybrid system from 1996. It joins striking, throwing and ground fighting into one free sparring format rather than separate subjects.
Quick Facts
South KoreaCharacter & Origin
Training
Organisation & Competition
What the style is built from
Editorial rating on a 0–3 scale, based on how much room each area gets in ordinary training.
About GongKwon Yusul
GongKwon Yusul is a Korean hybrid martial system founded in 1996 by Kang Jun. The name is written 공권유술 and corresponds to the characters 空拳柔術, which join the empty hand to soft, yielding technique of the jujutsu kind. The syllabus was assembled from domestic and foreign sources alike: hapkido, Hakko-ryu jujutsu, judo, kumdo, taekwondo, taekkyon, teukgong moosool, kickboxing and kyeok too ki. What matters, however, is not what it was assembled from but how it is arranged. Where the Korean scene has traditionally kept striking and grappling as separate subjects with their own forms, GongKwon Yusul joins them into a single free sparring format with sporting rules and does not put forms in the foreground. That is precisely what caused it trouble at first. The Korean martial world received the hybrid approach with reserve, and acceptance came only in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when the popularity of mixed martial arts changed the idea of what training should look like. Today it operates as an amateur combat sport with a belt system from white to black and is present in roughly sixteen countries, among them the United States, Spain, Australia and Brazil. For a reader it is most interesting as evidence that the MMA wave did not run only inside competition cages but rewrote the syllabuses of national systems as well.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.