Krav Maga??? Opinions.

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[john2226]

What is it exactly? It seems to be touted as the be all end all in "realistic self defense" whatever that means ;) Just looking into it. thanks

[Kevin Wilbanks]

You should be able to find out a lot about it on a Google search. It's the official method of the Isreali military. From what little I've seen, I have questions about the wisdom of training all-out battlefield-type combat techniques as civilian self-defense. I wonder whether the students don't end up feeling encouraged to take unwarranted risks and respond to threats with excessive force... For instance, I saw footage of ordinary office-worker type people learning gun takeaways, and practicing strikes to the head that looked to be nearly lethal and almost certainly injurious to the practitioners hand. Just idle wondering though, as I haven't experienced their teachings or anything.

[opherdonchin]

The goal of the development of Krav Maga (as I understand it) was to be able to impart the maximum of information to soldiers in the mimimum of time, relying (to a large extent) on their natural agressiveness and adrenalin to supply a lot of what you couldn't hope to teach them if you only had them for a 1 day, 1 week or 2 week course in hand to hand combat. As such, the techniques are designed to be simple to remember, easy to learn, and lethal. Everyone I knew in Israel had respect for it as a well-thought out system that accomplished the goals it set out for itself but had little interest in actually studying it.

[Bruce Baker]

Largely, it employs many of the old fighting ways of weapons, interaction, rather than response, employs many of the techniques found in jujitsu, some techniques defined as aikido, and some pretty dirty tricks.

I did some training in it back in '92 when it was reletively unknown. If you didn't watch the training video you would miss the breaks in the splicing and accept that the presenter did the entire presentation in one feld swoop, which he did not. Getting through the thirty something minute exercises was fairly grueling, and just about as grueling as doing fifteen rounds of sparring. Good workout for the young.

Many of the things I remember had to do with being able to lift your knees very high, and introducing some old sword and staff techniques that translated into hand to hand, which at that stage of my training, seemed to be a take off on jujitsu, and savat (French foot fighting, I think it is spelled savate?)

I know I stole what I liked and moved on.

Of course at that time, my teachers son in law was training to be a navy seal, so we took some things we practiced and found details of how they worked.

Krav Magaw is supposedly older than many chinese fighting systems, but that is up for grabs in the forum of one upmanship, which doesn't lesson the fact that its roots are as old as eastern fighting systems.

I remember it being agressive, where much of Aikido can be more passive in respect to its application, but as much fun as it was, it is another piece of my training and not a main focus of continued study.

By all means, check it out, it is another source of martial arts, and another source of historical reference in the progression of martial arts. Grab a piece of it, I think you will see as many differences as simularitys to other arts.