Krav Maga 1

“The More You Sweat In Training, The Less You Bleed In Battle” – Armed Forces Motto

Recently, I have started going to one of my local gyms in Crowborough called assassins. Now, my idea of a well spent night has always been a good film or playstation before hitting the sack. I’ll admit, it had been 5 months since having a membership that I actually eventually went (Terrible I know) but since going I feel so much better in myself, it’s incredible.

All off topic, moving on.

While at the gym I saw a Krav Maga class advertised. For those of you that don’t know what Krav Maga is originally an Israeli fighting style developed in their military. It was always something I wanted to learn. Simply because it looked pretty brutal and awesome. But more importantly it looked like it worked. I turned up to this class and ooo yessss…

There were 6 of us. A few newbies as well as me but to be fair it is quite a new class. The instructor was quite an old fella but he was tatted up and looked hard as nails. We started the lesson off with Krav Maga breakfalls. Different to Judo I had done before. Instead of slapping the ground you collapse on your back leg and cover your head. (Don’t quote me on any of these Krav techniques. I’ll come to it later). Nothing too interesting to report about these but useful to know in the street situations. Which is what it was all about! This system is a quick to learn and violent discipline. Compared to the likes of kickboxing, tae-kwon-do, Judo, this isn’t a competition fighting style, it just gets the job done and done well.

We then moved onto defending against hooks and jabs. This was where things got interesting. A lot of the movements I saw looked a lot like Wing Chun (For those of you who don’t know, I was trained by Paul in Wing Chun from a very young age. I’ve grown up with it) It shared a lot of the same principles; Deflecting an aggressors energy, simultaneous attack and defence, sticking to your opponent (their arms, you move with their arms like your sticking to them) and being up close and personal rather than at a distance. When he started throwing some wing chun shapes into the equation I was thinking this has got to be more than a coincidence.

I got the opportunity to practise blocking the instructors jab and immediately he picked up on it and said “Hold up, that’s very Wing Chun what you’re doing there!” We started talking about it and turns out the class I was at was a “Cross Krav Maga” class. A lot of the time you find that these cross systems are watered down and aren’t as good as the original forms themselves. But this guy (Keith) has done, as far as I can tell, a really good job of picking out the best bits from lots of different systems and piled it all together into something that works.

I picked up most of the techniques really quickly. My Wing Chun training helped considerably. I’m hoping to go back not this weekend but the weekend after to continue training. I was really pleasantly surprised by it after turning up rather nervous and not knowing what to expect.

All are welcome to take part in the class so if any of you are local you should come and give it a go! The first lesson was free.