Krav Maga - What's the secret sauce?

- Extracted from Kravstation.com
- Posting by Mr. Boaz Aviram
- 3rd in line Chief of Krav Maga IDF


Do anyone ever ask themselves what is Krav Maga, how come it has a great reputation.

Is that because it is coming from a well known military and therefore it must be good?

Why is it then available to civilians? Does the military use a lot of Krav Maga in combat?

Really?

Do any military use Hand to Hand combat in combat? How much do they use it?

Why do they teach it? To increase confidence, or to increase survival skills?

Why many martial arts that have thousands of years of heritage, suddenly lost their demand when it comes to Self Defense and Hand to Hand Combat?

Is it just plain propaganda?

Why a human being that was born in Israel is better, is assumed to be better in Hand to Hand Combat than a citizen that grew up in Japan or China?

All three have military and police forces, and both do not use much of Hand to Hand Combat in the service, however, all three of them train in it.

Why Krav Maga is better than Karate when it comes for self defense? People are people?

Could it be than any Karate style is better than one particular Krav Maga style when it comes to Hand to Hand combat?

Any particular instructor or student better than the other?

If you break the training process to its component you get a full understanding of all these questions and you get the answers for them.

If the quest of Hand to Hand Fighting is to prevail in a confrontation which could happen once in a life time, could take few seconds, and depends on chance and reaction based on judgement that was timely executed then you need to look at the small components of the process and work to improve all of them.

If you tell a student to aim to the balls of his opponent without telling him how to move fast to reach the target before the target escapes, and how to land on the ball of his foot pointed outward to facilitate farther reach, and how to accelerate his leg to maximum speed, and all the other 20 details in a front kick, you let him fill all the gaps and connect all the dots.

Every kid will do it slightly different. If you do not understand and teach 100 percent of all the aspects of the technique you are teaching, you are creating a chance for multiplication of your students errors, that with training and repetition will multiple again.

You might get one "Champion" out of a whole school. It would be the one student that by chance connected the dots and filled the gaps in the most correct natural way.

But your instructor skills are reduced to administrative skills of running a schools. That student taught his own by observing, or by chance.

This is the difference between Krav Maga Instruction and Martial Arts Instruction, or at least it should be. I say that considering that there are all kinds of instructors under the umbrella of the name of Krav Maga. I wanted to touch down on all aspects of why suddenly Krav Maga took momentum where all the rest of the martial arts were doing the same thing they were doing for many years.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Self defense is a subset of Martial arts*
*Reality based self defense training cannot always be 100% real, because there may be no one left to train with! But do it real enough or else RBSD is just a bullshit term* - Me
*Train for what happens most and you will be able to handle most of what happens -- Marc "Animal" MacYoung*