Ahg, no I couldn't do that, I need to keep J as Join lines. That's pretty useful to me. Kinda the inverse of gq.
The advantage of using J and K is that they're very vim movements, but if can't because of :join, another workaround would be to use <PageUp> and <PageDown> since they're redundantly bounded to <Ctrl-B> and <Ctrl-F>:
nnoremap <PageDown> 7j
nnoremap <PageUp> 7k
vnoremap <PageDown> 7j
vnoremap <PageUp> 7k