Krav Maga Blog - Feb 2012

Your goal in any violent encounter should be to shut your opponent down in the shortest possible time. This is accomplished by using two Krav Maga principles: 1) a continuous (Retzef), unbroken assault on your assailant and 2) by attacking soft targets. In today’s post I want to examine these two principles and how they fit together to form a single and unified strategy. The Hebrew word \"Retzef\", means continuous; literally, one thing after another. It’s a term I first became aware of (though I’d been aware of the concept earlier), when training with David Kahn and...

One of the core principles of Krav Maga, and the one that really sold me on the system was, “If the threat/attack is life threatening attack the attack, if it’s a non-life-threatening attack the attacker”. An example of this would be someone strangling/choking you versus someone grabbing your lapel or wrist. A wrist or lapel grab doesn’t pose any immediate threat to life whereas an attack that is restricting an airway does; therefore the choke/strangle has to be attacked and dealt with before anything else i.e. it is the number one priority. In the case of a lapel or wrist...

Last night as I was teaching the Knife Defenses that make up part of the curriculum/syllabus that we’re going over this week (and that I want to start putting into our Redman training at 8:00 pm tonight), I got to thinking about how many people don’t realize how Krav Maga works as a system. A lot of people think that it is simply a collection of the “best” self-defense techniques around rather than realizing that it is a system based on concepts and essential fighting principles. Krav Maga was (and continues to be) built from the bottom up; certainly it...

“The Monkey Dance” refers to the back and forth posturing that individuals engage in before they actually enter a physical conflict. In the Krav Maga system that we teach, this occurs in the “Pre-Conflict” phase of violence: one where the threat of danger/violence has been explicitly directed at a particular individual(s). I mention the “Monkey Dance” because on Saturday we started to take the skills and techniques we had been learning in the previous 6 weeks and start to show their relevance in actual street scenarios i.e. a push followed by a swinging punch/haymaker. You can learn every defense against...

One of the great things about running short courses (we have just completed) the 5^th week of our latest 6 week course, is the questions you get asked. In “regular” classes people assume that their questions will eventually get answered, in short courses this is not the case and people come straight out and ask them. One I just received concerned a gun disarm – and I will answer this more clearly and practically on Wednesday in our hostage/abduction training – when you see someone else being held at gunpoint if and when should you act?                 I want to rewind...

To survive an assault you need three things: physical fitness, simple techniques and an aggressive/focused mindset. If I had to choose to stress the importance of just one of these I would choose the “mindset” piece. It is a strange irony of our training that on the mats 90% of our focus is on the physical component with only 10% of our attention being drawn to the mental aspect; on the street/in reality you need to switch this and understand that it is your “mindset” which is the major determining factor concerning your survival and it is a much, much...

It was perhaps Plato, who coined the phrase, “Necessity is the Mother of Invention”, a phrase that really does explain how the “origins” of Krav Maga differs from that of many other martial arts. Krav Maga was designed with one very simple premise in mind: how to get a previously untrained person to be able to defend themselves from the most common type of attacks that they are likely to face, in the shortest possible time. It is great to know how to defend against a low roundhouse kick etc but how often will you have to deal with such...

The Importance of Movement I like to take a conceptual approach to training. As one of my instructors once said to me, “techniques can fail, concepts can’t”. We’ve all had techniques “fail” on us e.g. we picked the wrong one for the particular situation we were in, found that the one we were trying to use wasn’t particularly effective against someone of a particular weight and size etc – anyone who says that these two factors aren’t important in a fight should consider why there are weight categories in most combat sports (even the UFC went down this route as it...