Krav Maga Blog - Apr 2017

When Chesley Sullenberger radioed a Mayday call, that he’d lost power in both the engines of US Airways Flight 1549, he made one mistake, he got his call-sign wrong; he said “Cactus 1539”, instead of “Cactus 1549” – remarkably, everything else he and his co-pilot said/did were on the money, and 4 minutes later, he landed the plane in the Hudson River, with the loss of no lives. It was a minor, inconsequential error, however it demonstrates that trying to recall names, codes, and similar under stress and duress, is not something we do naturally or easily. Depending on the...

It is all too easy to get technique-focused in our training, especially if we are working to, or following a syllabus that has a list of techniques we need to learn and be proficient at for a particular level or belt e.g. we need to know how to escape a rear strangle, a side-headlock, a guillotine, etc. The danger with this, is that we become really good at dealing with these individual attacks and problems, but lack the context in which they occur; nobody just puts a guillotine on you, there must be a “phase” in the fight that precedes...

n July 2016, I wrote about the Nice lorry attack, where a “lone wolf” terrorist drove a 19-tonne cargo truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day, killing 86 and injuring 434 more. Two days ago, a similar attack occurred in Stockholm, Sweden, killing 4 and injuring 15. A little over two weeks before this, a terrorist drove a car into a crowd on Westminster Bridge in London, killing 4 and injuring 49, before stabbing/killing a police officer. None of the perpetrators – at the time of writing this - had any direct links to a terrorist or political organization, but...

When I first started to do door work, those that I worked with used to impress upon me the importance of witnesses; of making sure that whatever you did, looked and appeared justified and reasonable to those around you i.e. if somebody decided to press charges against you and/or the establishment you were working for, that your actions would look reasonable and not be deemed excessive. However, if you ever talk to somebody who witnesses an incident you are involved in, you may be surprised at what they do and don’t remember, along with their version of events – which...