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At the end of 2010 I attended a Combat Instructors Course led by Eyal Yanilov, head instructor for Krav Maga Global. It was a live-in course, as we were barracked at the main police base in Budapest, Hungary. The first test was to get past the basic living conditions: the police base food, the hot/cold/hot showers and the sub-zero temperatures, especially in outdoor training.
The course was attended by a mix of European instructors, some military personnel, some law-enforcement, some civilians, of course, and several MMA types. The aim of the course was to train in depth in the fighting aspects of the Krav Maga system (which are not the core of the system).
Carrying an encounter past the initial physical engagement into an essentially empty-hand fight is not desired unless there is no choice. For civilian personnel, the aim is thus to escape as tactical circumstances allow. For law-enforcement and military personnel, the aim is to create safe separation and bring the primary or secondary weapon to bear, shooting if appropriate or using it as an impact weapon if not. Fighting is Plan B.
Rather than give you a detailed account of the course, I thought it more instructive to give a perspective of several aspects of the training to highlight lessons applicable to various systems.
Establishing hierarchy: On all training trips I have been on, and particularly those where you’re an unknown quantity, there is always this ritual where everyone sizes each other up. First it is by observing size and movement, then watching technique, then engagement in some exercise or drill. The real interest begins when two individuals who are about the same (or at least one, in their own eye, thinks so) test each other out.
For me the real value to be gained is not in proving yourself to be better than another — you will always eventually meet your match — but how you mentally react to the challenge process. How desperate are you to be the better? A high need to be the top dog to me probably indicates a weak self-image and thus a lack of mental strength. That needs work.
Mental strength and aggression drills: The Krav system has a variety of drills to either build or drive aggression, or test mental strength. On reflection it strikes me again that so-called modern systems could learn much from some of the more traditional systems, maybe not in their methods but at least the priority they give to developing mental strength. Without it, you are at best a show-pony.
The Krav aggression drills often place you in a situation where you have to battle yourself. Attacking a kick-shield while another is holding a belt around your middle and is pulling you backwards, while a third person is on the side screaming at you and/or striking you, brings you to a point of fatigue. How much are you going to listen to that voice in your head telling you to sit down and have a rest, rather than keep on going?
If you give in to that voice while there is still some energy left in you, are you going to be able to extract that last ounce of fight when you really need it?
Adaptation and improvisation: A lot of the training was conducted in the CQB facilities used to train the Hungarian police with many rooms that were set up to simulate domestic or commercial settings. A core competency of the Krav system is the ability to adapt and improvise — as opposed to, say, sparring — as the time, place and circumstances of any self-defence encounter are, of course, completely unknown.
The aim of training is to ensure you turn everything within you (mentally), on you and around you to your advantage, and it was instructive to see how that skill developed over the days of the course.
Dealing with edged weapons: as someone who has trained extensively in weapon systems it was reinforced to me that if you didn’t hit first and hard and then hightail it out of there, you were usually cut to pieces. And as we wore body-armour, the knife attacks were full-bore. Anything less than instant, explosive aggressiveness followed by a sprint didn’t cut it (pardon the pun). And forget the fancy disarms.
Ability to take a hit: What tends to sort the pretenders out is their reaction when smacked hard. Being quick to anger and retaliating may be better than dropping into the foetal position, but not by much. You’ve still lost control of the situation.
As my experiences attest, often the most important things one can learn on such a course have little to do with technique, and far more to do with mental development and conditioning.
Graham Kuerschner is a 45-year veteran of the martial arts and can be contacted through his website at www.sdtactics.com.au
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