Krav Maga

…The induction was nowhere near as bad as I thought. The warmup was pretty intense but also good fun and then the normal students were separated off to do crazy looking stuff with knives and sticks while Matt talked the noobs through the basic principles of KM. I can’t remember exactly what we covered but it was stuff like inside and outside attacks and defences, moving off the line of attack etc. In all good fun a great introduction to the discipline.

Following that I started attending class once a week, usually going to the Wednesday Hammersmith class before eventually switching to Moorgate on Tuesdays as it’s easier to get to and back from. I found that once a week wasn’t really enough to I then moved onto doing two a week, and I now usually go on Monday/Tuesday and Thursday.

In February I successfully took a grading for ‘P1′ which is the first ‘Practitioner Level’ in the IKMF grading system. On the whole I didn’t find this too hard although the pre-grading seminar was very tough and I was knackered afterwards. It was good to see Eyal up close and get some training in with him before the grading itself.

I started studying krav maga in June of 2007. I’d heard of it before from a couple of friends but didn’t know much about it. A guy I knew through work mentioned he’d been doing it and really enjoyed it and I started thinking about checking it out. What eventually swayed my decision was reading the paper one day and reading about like five separate murders over the course of one weekend in South East London where I live. I’ve lived in South East London most of my life and some would say it’s not the safest place in the world although I haven’t experienced a huge amount of crime myself. Having said that I’ve often felt I’ve been quite lucky and so I eventually decided to find out a bit more about krav maga.

The interweb was of course my research tool of choice and I had a read on wikipedia and liking what I heard looked for some classes in my area. I had a good old Google around and found that there were quite a few different groups operating. many of these seemed to be teaching as style called ‘Commando Krav Maga’ which confused me. Again, I had a research into this and realised there was some controversy surrounding whether this was KM at all or an elaborate money making scheme. A quick look at the overpriced DVDs on the CKM website told me all I really needed to know. From then I checked out the British Academy of Krav Maga who had a good website and the Institute of Krav Maga who also looked good. In the end, not knowing much about the two I went with the Institute as they had more than one instructor and I liked what I read on the site. I booked my induction and quickly had an email from Jon giving me the time and the date to turn up on…

I’ve decided to start a blog to recount my experiences training in Krav Maga for anyone who may be interested. I’ll probably also toss in amusing videos, anecdotes and stories that catch my eye in the popular press that may or may not be related to KM.

Enjoy!