Krav Maga Blog - Nov 2012

Often when I present our Knife system, people find it hard to stomach from both a moral and legal perspective that we are prepared to use the assailants knife against them, rather than simply disarming and disengaging. Firstly we always stress disengagement, whether this is accompanied by blocking and striking, or by simply running and attempting to put distance and barriers e.g. parked cars etc. between us and our attacker. However when disengagement isn’t an option, then the only other two that really exist are to disarm your aggressor and/or use the knife against them. It is easier, simpler and...

It always amazes me when people confuse, and miss, a learning opportunity because their eyes are set on achieving something different to that which the exercise they are engaged in, has been designed for. How people interpret the point of the activities they engage in has always fascinated me from a teaching perspective e.g. the person who misinterprets a drill designed to test and develop control of range as a lesson in aggressiveness and forward movement etc. These people often come away feeling they have achieved something (and possibly scored a point) because their partner continued to work with the...

I just wrote a blog piece on what it is to be tough and the way adaptability plays into this and I want to give a first-hand witness account as to what toughness actually is. I have a son, Noah, who is six years old. About 3 months ago I realized he was hard of hearing. He now wears hearing aids in both ears. His world has always been one where he understood sound and speech to be of a certain volume – without any training he learnt to lip read to make up for his hearing deficiency. In his...

It doesn’t take any intelligence to take a punch, nor does it take a lot of intelligence to throw one – most fights would never start if it did. Nor is it a mark of “toughness” to be able to take a beating; that is simply a matter of conditioning i.e. if you take enough shots in your life, you’ll be able to manage the physical pain – being bullied as a child taught me that one (you can hear and feel a rib crack in a very detached and disassociated manner). The endurance of physical pain is not in...

Everything is a choice. There are good decisions and bad decisions; there are seemingly good decisions that will set you up for bad ones. Much of reality based self-defense and combat is based around the decisions you make i.e. there are times when it’s sensible to disengage and times when it’s best to engage etc. Sometimes you have to “play the game”, other times you can ignore it and walk away. This is what CQC/Close Quarter Combat training is all about – presenting the possible options for avoiding violence and demonstrating the potential consequences for engaging in it. In true...

Many people are in a rush to both “test” a technique whilst at the same time and in the same process master it. Firstly, no technique is perfect and every technique has a supposed Achilles heel e.g. it is easy enough to argue that punching isn’t very effective against an opponent who is able to move out of the way every time someone tries to strike them – one of the things that makes a punch effective is the element of surprise and the accompanying speed with which it is delivered. If my partner knows I am going to put...

A central tenet of the Krav Maga Yashir system, is meeting an aggressor’s forceful/harmful intent with a greater degree of your own. This often flies in the face of many martial arts that teach a more Zen/Peaceful approach to self-defense; that the martial artist should be somehow held to a higher standard of conduct than their assailant. Krav Maga is an Israel system, and in the Hebrew Bible, there is the line, ”Im ba l\'hargekha, hashkem l\'hargo”, which translated means, “when someone comes to kill you rise up and kill him first.” Encapsulated in this line, is the basis of...

Punching someone is a decision, stabbing someone – if you are armed with a knife, or have picked up a stabbing/slashing weapon in the course of a fight – is a decision. It is not one that you can reach only being 50% sure of your choice; hitting someone with only 50% of your power, will and emotion behind it is a dangerous and possibly irrelevant thing to do. When you decide to do something in a fight it has to be with full conviction, belief and harmful intent i.e. you have to be willing to inflict the most serious...

Everybody has a story that brings them to the mats. It may be a story that is based on real events, or one that is founded on a set of fears and insecurities, alternatively it may be one that is based on an idea of self-image that the person wants to realize and achieve achieve e.g. who doesn’t want to see themselves as the person who is able to defeat a group of attackers who are armed to the teeth, and then be applauded by passers-by? Whatever the story a person has that brings them to a martial arts school...