Krav Maga Blog - Dec 2016

I was recently asked to write an article on physical conditioning for Krav Maga; and with people beginning to think about making New Year’s resolutions, which usually include some health/fitness goals, etc., this is perhaps the best time of year to be writing such an article. I believe that it is necessary to have two types of fitness, which are in fact inter-related: you need to have a certain level/type of fitness that allows you to take part in classes without succumbing to exhaustion, and another type/level that allows you to survive a real-life violent confrontation. The two are of...

I’ve written about Synchronizations of Movement before, however I want to put these pre-violence indicators into the context of victim selection and being targeted for surveillance (themselves pre-violence indicators that can help us predict violence). This week, CCTV footage of a woman being kicked down a flight of stairs in a Berlin subway started to do the rounds on social media (N.B. the man responsible for the attack has now been identified), and there are several personal safety and self-protection lessons that can be learnt from this. This article is not attempting to blame the victim in any way, but...

One of the lectures I remember most clearly from my university days, was by a professor who was explaining how the human brain operates, if you were to view it as a computer e.g. what algorithms, sorts etc. it uses to manage information. The reason I remember it so vividly, is because I came away from it going, “Is that it?” I was sorely disappointed that the actual underlying operations that the brain uses to manage the information it stores and recalls was basically very simple – almost simplistic. Obviously, the inner workings are more complex than this, but at...

I am a big believer in people making personal risk assessments for themselves, and where appropriate, for their families. I have written before about what risk is: the intersection between assets (things, persons you want to protect), threats (those things which could harm your assets), and vulnerabilities (those things which a threat could exploit, inadvertently or deliberately, to harm an asset). One of the reasons I believe it is important to make such assessments – and regularly update them – is that it forces you to consider the potential threats your assets face (you are also an asset), which in...