Krav Maga Blog - Nov 2017

The motivations and reasons for violence are often many-layered. At the lowest – and deepest -layer/level, violence is borne out of shame. Shame, as a form of trauma, is a reaction/response, that comes out of being forced to deal with an emotionally challenging and demanding situation, in which the person involved wasn’t able to exert any control over it; it was disempowering and humiliating, even if nobody witnessed the individual going through it – it’s enough that they knew, and they weren’t able to do anything about it etc. A child who is sexually abused is likely to suffer shame,...

Crime, including violent crime, relies upon opportunity. Sometimes a criminal creates, orchestrates, or takes advantage of an opportunity, and sometimes our actions and behaviors can facilitate an opportunity e.g. we leave a window open, that a burglar uses to break in to our house, etc. There is a theory concerning crime and opportunity called Routine Activity Theory (Cohen & Felson, 1979). Its basic premise is that, where a predatory crime occurs, an offender, and a likely target come together in a time and place without the presence of a capable guardian. The idea of a “capable guardian”, is specific to...

Cognitive Biases are rules of thumb that we use to make quick decisions. In many ways, they can help us e.g. we know to hand over the wallet to a mugger, as 99% of the time, this is the quickest way to get them to leave us. Like all rules of thumb, or heuristics, they are there to guide and direct us, rather than to offer absolute solutions – situations determine solutions, rather than rules and preconceived notions of what we should and shouldn’t do; 1% of mugging incidents, will require a different resolution than handing over the wallet, so...

The larger the striking surface, and the larger the target area, the less likely you are to miss with a strike. This is one of the reasons, I like using roundhouse kicks – shin to ankle as a striking surface, against, almost every area of the entire leg – hammer-fists, and forearm strikes offer a similar advantage. In real-life situations where you are operating under high stress and duress, target size becomes extremely important; if you start to suffer from tunnel-vision as part of your adrenal response, it is likely that objects in front of you will start to shrink...