Kudo
空道A Japanese full-contact art from 1981. It allows head strikes thanks to a helmet with a plastic shield and adds the competitor's height to the weight class.
Quick Facts
JapanCharacter & Origin
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.
Catalogs & Databases for Kudo
About Kudo
Kudo, originally Daido Juku, is a Japanese full-contact martial art founded in 1981 in Sendai by Takashi Azuma, a former Kyokushin karate competitor. Azuma started from an objection that many of its own practitioners have to full-contact karate: it forbids hand strikes to the head, so it raises fighters who can take a blow to the body but have no learned defence of the face. Kudo therefore permits strikes to the head and adds to them throws, ground fighting, chokes and locks — in effect the whole range of mixed martial arts, but at a time three years before the UFC appeared. Its most striking element is the protective helmet with a transparent plastic shield, called the neo head guard, which allows full-power fighting to the head with a substantially lower risk of injury to the eyes and nose. The second peculiarity is the way competitors are classified. Kudo does not group them by weight alone but by the sum of height in centimetres and weight in kilograms; this index proceeds from the assumption that advantage in a fight is decided not by weight alone but also by reach. The name kudo, literally the way of the void, was adopted by the federation in 2001, when the original Daido Juku became an internationally run sport.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.