Krav Maga Blog - Nov 2015

Have you ever been attacked by a teenager, or group of teenagers, aged 15 and below? How did you, or would you, respond? When I was at university in the north of England, this was a relatively common occurrence that students, including myself, faced. Dealing with five to eight, aggressive twelve and/or thirteen year olds, may at first seem a laughable proposition, but numbers do count, and can do a lot to negate size and strength; as many students found out to their peril. One individual I knew of, was dragged to the ground, and had to endure a sustained...

There’s a lot of well-intentioned self-defense instructors out there with seemingly great ideas, and innovative approaches to personal safety – one of these, that has recently got a lot of press and interest, is “High Heel Self-Defense” – teaching women how to fight when in heels. Firstly, if this gets more women to consider taking self-defense classes, because it makes the training seem more relevant to them, I may have my concerns about the content, but I have to recognize that such classes may have a benefit; especially if good predictive and preventative personal safety methods are taught alongside the...

On Saturday night, I was teaching/talking about Krav Maga at the Jewish Alliance in Rhode Island. This was an interactive session/discussion, and I was asked what you should do if you find yourself as a member of a group, targeted in a mass/spree shooting such as that which happened in Paris the previous night, when terrorists went on the rampage. I also saw over the course of the day many self-defense schools on Facebook and social media urging people to start training in order to protect themselves from being the victim of similar incidents etc. Whenever there is an incident,...

People often have blind spots concerning personal safety; they recognize a threat in one area, but are blind to the dangers of others. Sometimes the focus is on the obvious, and sometimes on the imagined or less likely. These blind spots may even occur where there is a wealth of information, and media attention – after all, bad things happen to other people, not to us. Imagine that, for whatever reason, you had to move you and your family to a part of town that had a reputation for a high number of break-ins and burglaries. My guess is that one...

“Ignore them and they’ll just go away”, in both one of the best and worst pieces of advice I was given as a bullied kid. It was the best, in that nobody had any better advice or ideas, and the worst because it was completely ineffective. In dealing with conflict, taking the moral high ground, not acknowledging the threat and walking away is rarely an effective route to take. It is basically a form of denial to yourself, and a provocative response to somebody else’s anger and emotion. Sure, it looks good on paper, but disengagement of this nature, involving...