TRADITION CAN GET YOU HURT

I certainly don’t intend for this blog to become me railing against martial arts. Putting down others is a sure sign that you have issues, I’ve always thought. I do feel that the subject of tradition is worth looking at for our own safety. Please keep in mind that I was a 4th degree black belt in a very traditional system. Notice that I say was…I still have the certificate but it’s my opinion that if you haven’t kept up on something or practiced it in years you no longer can claim the rank!

You have heard us say that Krav Maga is an open system. We don’t have a Grand Poobah to bow to, don’t have a tradition to keep up to further our cause. Israel was only worried about staying a country and knew that they had to stay cutting edge and never waste any training on tradition or fluff. It’s still this way today in the United States Krav Maga Association because we have citizens to keep safe, and they are who we answer to…not to tradition, a system or a “master”.

The following is from Bruce Siddle’s Sharpening the Warrior’s Edge which is an exhaustive study on training methods for military and law enforcement applications;

Instructors who teach survival skills (i.e. defensive tactics, close-quarter combat, tactical firearms, or survival strategies) are still faced with teaching students a physical skill. The author proposes the level of student proficiency is directly proportionate to the instructor’s training psychology and system design. Subsequently, instructors have a moral and legal obligation to constantly research methods to enhance training and, ultimately, to assure the survival of their students.

Unlike other motor skill training, survival skills will be performed in the stress of combat. As such, motor skill training inherits a fair degree of learning and performance limitations. Although the learning roadblocks are multiple, there are three constant variables which directly affect survival and combat training. First, is the development of a system of skills which are appropriate for the arena of performance. For example, skills need to be designed to control specific threat stimuli. Second, the instructional delivery system must ensure that the students can learn and develop confidence in the skill quickly. The final variable recognizes that the influence of motivational principles has a direct effect on the student’s training intensity and subsequent skill development.

After reading this, why would you teach something that hasn’t changed in hundreds of years? The thugs have changed their tactics in that time! If you are teaching people stress relief, exercise, coordination, etc. feel guilt free to teach what you want. However, if someone is coming to you to learn self defense they are literally putting their lives in your hands. Do you understand the seriousness of this? They are relying on you to teach them to stay alive during the worst moments of their entire lives. Knowing this;
-how can you teach a kick to the knife as a knife defense?
-how can you teach a forward roll into the person with a handgun who wants to kill you?
-how can you teach small women techniques that obviously only work for bigger, stronger students?
-how can you teach ground for self defense but never mention or train for a second attacker or a blade?
-how can you teach self defense to women by telling them that you will show them how to beat up the attacker and win the fight, to stay there and keep hitting the bad guy? They need to always be fighting to escape.
-how can you teach techniques that take hundreds of disciplined hours to perfect to the point they would actually work? I have heard many martial arts masters tell their students that it takes 1,000 reps to become proficient at a technique. This is ok if they are learning an art. If it is self defense training this is ridiculous! If it’s complicated, it’s not self defense!
-For self defense, how can you teach any kind of sparring that has rules, only certain places you can target, or stoppages when a point is scored? How can you not start all sparring sessions with telling the student to run or pick something up to hit the opponent with?
-Why would you teach anything in a horse stance? Unless, of course, you are teaching them to defend themselves for when they are on a horse.
-how can you teach katas for self defense? I have been told that this is practicing fighting off multi attackers. Why keep turning your back on the last person that you whacked (as most kata’s I’ve seen are in an x pattern)? Do you know how we practice fighting off multi attackers? We pad up and have multi attackers come at us…and we fight them off.
-how can you never put students under stress or talk about the effects of stress, the adrenaline dump or the fact that they will be fighting injured?
-how can you not include cardio training in your students lessons knowing that if they are ever in a self defense situation that goes past 30 seconds their techniques will severely degrade with exhaustion?
-how can you teach 65 pound kids that they can devastate an adult with a punch or kick when they obviously don’t have the strength or power?

I am not railing on martial arts at all. I just feel very passionate about pointing out the flaws in any training that claims to be “the ultimate in self defense”, that claims to make it’s practitioners safe against real world violence. It infuriates me to see instructors make these claims when it’s all about their ego or making money…not caring that they will get people hurt. Again, your students are putting their safety, their families safety and their very lives in your hands. I say to heck with tradition!! BE SAFE!

FULL OF OURSELVES

I just spent some time on the internet looking at the popular self defense “experts” that are out there. Wow, we in this field are really full of ourselves! The one thing that they all have in common is that anything that they are teaching is the best & the only way to do it and if you are doing anything else you are an idiot. They all fail my first test when looking for someone to learn anything from. I will not listen to anyone who thinks they are THE authority and right about everything. I believe we in the USKMA have the most up to date, battle tested and best self defense system anywhere, however, we look at what others are doing, attend seminars and are always looking to learn. We will tweak a technique or even change it altogether if we find something that works better. We are looking to keep people safe, not looking to build a cult of personality. So, here’s what’s out there:

-There’s the “expert” who evidently has tens of thousands of dollars to put into advertising. Anytime I do a search for Krav Maga his ad pops up in the sidebar telling me that if I learn his system I will “fear no man” and can “easily defeat three knife wielding thugs”. Wow, what an idiot. First off, we had better be fearing man. There are some beasts out there who will slaughter your whole family and then laugh about it. “Easily” defeat three dudes with knives? I’ve got only two techniques that will keep me from being killed in that scenario. The first involves sprinting faster than the three, the second involves a bit of distance and a twelve gauge.

-There’s the famous “expert” who has made millions of dollars in the industry with a new way of doing things every couple of years. Ten years ago he was putting down Krav Maga and teaching a pressure point system because “you don’t wanna get sued, you have to use non lethal techniques”. Now his program is “brutal, there are times that you are in a fight for your life and anything goes.” I saw a bit of one of his seminars recently and his main technique was to palm the bad guy in the forehead to “disrupt his brain” and knock him unconscious. He proceeded to knock his big, muscular assistant out about ten times in a row. The poor guy is probably brain damaged now from being concussed like that. Anyhow, nobody else at the seminar must have done it right because nobody else hit the ground.

-The most popular guy out there right now teaches quickening reaction times and one main technique to defeat most anything. His thoughts on seeing things earlier and reacting quicker makes a lot of sense. If only he wasn’t telling me that he invented the whole idea when I can read books on the subject from decades ago. His “awesome” one main technique that he invented has been around for awhile as well. My biggest problem is that he is the worst at the “I am teaching the only thing worth knowing, everyone else is stupid” train of thought.

-Then there’s the expert who six years ago was running judo dojos but now has his own system that is the best and only thing worth doing. He has one technique for any attack and has blogged on why Krav Maga is so terrible because it has numerous “complicated” techniques. This was news to me. His one technique that is used for everything is on a video where it is being used against a knife and then a handgun. How he thinks a technique that isn’t controlling the weapon (it was flopping all over the place) is a good technique is beyond me.

-I came across a video by another “expert” who has a secret, revolutionary way of kicking. It was the exact stomp kick that we teach in our beginner level one class. Well, we teach it with hands up so we don’t get punched and his hands were down around his belly button, so it wasn’t the exact same.

-Lastly there is the Krav Maga expert who claims to be Imi’s heir. He has changed a lot of techniques lately to show that he is “cutting edge” and the one in charge of Krav Maga’s evolution. If you do a technique the way he taught it for fifteen years instead of the way he has done it for the last two months you are absolutely, totally wrong, an idiot and completely out of the loop. This same guy claims that if you attend a Krav Maga gym that has any kind of cardio classes that you aren’t learning real Krav Maga. Most of his seminars are taught in basketball gyms but it doesn’t apply to him, if you are learning Krav Maga in a building that also has basketball you can’t be learning real Krav Maga would seem to be the same thought. Sigh….

The point to all of this is to think for yourself. Don’t ever let the word of an expert overrule your own common sense or experience. BE SAFE!

MUSCLE HEADS

Are muscle heads (power lifters & body builders) scary? Are they the last people in the World you’d want to have to defend yourselves against? Well, what can they do with all that muscle? I’m not putting those guys down, heck, as ‘Mater from Disney’s CARS said “I’d give my two left lug nuts to look like that”…..but here are some things to think about!

At our gyms we have trained several competitive body builders, power lifters and even an NFL lineman, several weighing 300 pounds or more. As a group, when they started with us, as far as self defense went, they were terrible! They had strength but not a one of them could get through a class. They couldn’t go hard for more than 30 seconds at a time. To a man their cardio was horrible. We had a whole group of body guards quit after a couple of weeks because they looked impressive standing but couldn’t take the work in a basic level 1 class!

The other thing we noticed is that none of these guys could turn their hips to save their lives and their punching was with arms only. Now, their arm only punches were mighty hard but it always impressed them when my long time students who weighed 150 pounds less could punch harder! I would tell them that they can punch hard now but when they learn to turn their hips and use their bodies they will knock people’s heads clean off.

We have had three of these big ol muscle heads stay with us and become long time students. They are very good at Krav now but all three have lost a lot of weight…one of them has lost over 80 pounds. It’s funny that the general public thinks that the bigger and more muscle a man has makes him tougher when all three of these guys discovered that they are better fighters and better at self defense when they lost some of that muscle. When I see muscle heads strutting around I want to ask them “what do you do if a gun is put in your face?” All the muscle in the world won’t save them but I have 95 pound female students who would take that gun from the Scum Bag and beat his butt with it!! I actually had a class that I was showing handgun defenses to just a few months ago that hammered home this point. We were using an airsoft gun and firing plastic pellets. I had seven or eight students (mostly skinny teens) do the technique and not get hit. The one big dude, a sculpted 6′ 2″ and 240 pounds, was the only one who got hit…twice. His reaction time was a bit slower and that muscular width worked against him.

Take Mariusz Pudzianowski, the World’s strongest man. He started training to be an MMA fighter and lost his first two fights. His opponents knew that if they could avoid a big shot that his cardio would be gone by the second round and that’s exactly how they beat him. He got tired and they got him! If he wants to continue in MMA he needs to lose a lot of that muscle!

If I am ever attacked by someone who has a lot of muscle (and I can’t run) I plan on doing the same. I won’t fight his fight, dance and drag it out. He’ll be huffing and puffing soon enough and then it’s my time. If you do find yourself in this situation remember not to look at how big or scary your attacker is, look at targets. All you should see are knees, throat, zyphoids and groin! No matter how big he is he can’t build up those places! BE SAFE!

MY FAVORITE SELF DEFENSE QUOTES

Here are my all time fave self defense quotes;

“Self defense is recovery from stupidity or bad luck.” SGT Miller

“Self defense is a short list of techniques that may get you out alive when you’re already screwed” SGT Miller

“When self defense becomes complicated, it is no longer self defense.” R. Hoover

“No intelligent man has ever lost a fight to someone who said ‘I’m gonna kick your ass’.” SGT Rory Miller

“When any person, idea, technique, school, piece of gear, team or tactic is put on a pedestal, we risk stopping progress.” Rob Pincus

“It is much easier and safer to scare someone into submission than to beat them into submission.” SGT RORY MILLER in Facing Violence.

“Danger, if met head on, can be nearly halved” W. Churchill

“If I learn 1,000 techniques with my luck I’ll go out on the street and be attacked by number 1,001.” J. Whitman

“Every asshole has an asshole buddy nearby.” M. Slane

“Have you read my biography? ‘Cuz I don’t have one. You don’t know me. I could be full of crap, think for yourself and question these techniques.” A. Jannetti

”after initial contact all plans go to hell” Patton

“The wicked flee when no man pursues but the righteous are bold as a lion.” Proverbs 28:1

“No matter how enmeshed a commander becomes in his plans, it is occasionally necessary to consider the enemy” Churchill

“We don’t call it knife defenses, we call it Knife survival.” SGT MJR Nir Maman

“Everybody’s got a plan until they get smacked in the face” M. Tyson

“Home intruders are terrorists without a political agenda.” SGT Sanford Strong

“Listening to the average martial artists talk about real world violence is like listening to ten year olds talk about sex.” SGT. Miller

BEYOND BLACK BELT

I’ve been looking at other organization’s curriculum for 2nd degree black belt and above. A lot of it looks like they thought they had to have something cool for the higher ranks to learn…even if it makes no sense for self defense.

KNIFE VS. KNIFE; Most knife defenses are wishful thinking. A knife is scary and there isn’t much that is going to work against one! About the only thing that will keep us alive is to block the attack as good as we can while smacking the attacker as hard as we can in the noggin and groin. The knife on knife that a lot of organizations teach we just can’t justify. It’s Krav if you have a gun against a knife…a knife against a knife is an even fight. Even fights are stupid, we want to cheat and win! We have basically one group of offensive knife techniques in the USKMA. It is simple and as effective as can be. To think that a knife on knife technique is worth practicing forgets the old saying that “the winner of a knife fight is the one who dies tomorrow”. Our one group of techniques will give us a chance against the way 99 percent of attackers will use a knife against us…slashing and flailing out of anger. For that one percent who know how to use a knife we are in trouble. If we had a lot of offensive knife on knife training we would still be in trouble. We would have to put a lot of hours into our knife to be able to even come close to being as competent as a person who has studied knife fighting. We will get cut no matter how much knife we have done as the expert has put a lot more hours of training into it. This is why I carry a gun. If not a gun I’d want a ballbat against knife, that would be worth learning. Reach and blunt trauma are way better than hoping I’m better at knife fighting than the attacker!

STICK VS. STICK; We believe this is way too complicated in most systems. I have so much faith in our unarmed stick defense I’d probably just throw my stick at the attacker and do that technique. I believe that would work against 99 percent of the people who swing sticks like almost every surveillance video I’ve seen. Again, the guy who knows stick fighting I’m not going to beat even if I have stick on stick techniques in my system, he’ll always have more practice time in. What I would rather have is a chair. Stab the four legs at the attacker and kick to the groin under the chair. Better for me than hoping I’m a better stick fighter than the attacker. Of course, I’d rather have that gun.

MILITARY/URBAN WARFARE TRAINING/VIP PROTECTION, ETC.; If someone needs this training for their job we’ll teach it. For the average person? I’d rather spend the time learning to kick to the groin, punch to the throat and knee to the body better.

We in the USKMA are a bit guilty of this as we have some jumping and spinning kicks in our curriculum for black belt. This was a recent addition after spending time with Grandmaster Yaron Lichtenstein who is one of only twelve that Imi trained to black belt and the only one still teaching Imi’s original curriculum. We thought that if Imi thought jump and spinning kicks were so important that we would honor his memory with keeping those techniques in our Krav. This is how I justify it anyway!

The one thing we have in our curriculum that a lot of other organizations don’t? Handgun. To test for black belt a student must attend the NRA handgun safety course. We also highly recommend a course such as Rob Pincus’ Combat Focus Shooting. Seems to me that ten hours of training in this will defeat the dude with hundreds of hours of training in knife or stick.

We in Krav are lazy…just give us the bare minimum that will actually work. BE SAFE!

THAT WON’T WORK!

I have blogged on this before but I just heard another “expert” talk about how bad Krav Maga’s handgun defenses are because we grab the barrel of the handgun. He went on about what a bad idea that is, how nobody is fast enough to do this, etc. Here is an article on our main defense for handguns:

http://www.personaldefensenetwork.com/articles/tactics-defensive-issues/krav-maga-handgun-disarms/

Sigh…..First off, anyone who has practiced these can see for themselves that a person is definitely fast enough to redirect the weapon before the assailant can fire it. We’ve done this with airsoft, pellet, bb, etc. guns many times. After people work on these techniques at our seminars the main question that we are asked is if we will get burned or cut while grabbing the weapon. I have three stock answers. One is fairly serious, the other two are smart aleck!

Answer 1: Yep, you may well get burned or cut by the handgun. Supposedly Myth Busters showed that a revolver has enough gas discharge to take off a finger. The thing is, you won’t know it until after the incident. With the adrenalin dump and the stress it will be much later when you notice that you are bleeding or burned. We’re not teaching magic tricks and never said you’d be unscathed.

…then again, it may not;

Answer 2: Well, we were trying Jedi mind tricks but kept getting people shot. You gotta move the barrel so that it isn’t pointed at you when the thing goes boom! The hand seems the logical thing to use to get the friggin thing offline!!

Answer 3: Yep, you’ll burn your hand or maybe get cut. The other option is to take a bullet…seems a no brainer. Is grabbing the barrel of a handgun that is being fired something I would want to do? Nope. That’s a crappy thing to do. The problem is that if a handgun is being pointed at me and fired I am in a world of crap. I have a list of only crappy answers. Standing there and getting shot is at the bottom of the crappy answer list, grabbing the handgun and getting it offline is at the top of the crappy answer list. The only good answer is…don’t be there with a gun pointed at you!!

…and that’s the way it is. BE SAFE and have a Merry Christmas!!

TO PUNCH OR NOT TO PUNCH…

It is common training with law enforcement officers to teach palm strikes and avoid punching. Officer’s are told not to punch because 1) they can easily break their hand and not be able to access their handgun or other weapons and 2) punching is against a lot of department’s policies. Well, for years I taught like everyone else and dissuaded law enforcement officers from punching. Then, out of the blue, I realized that I am an adult who can think for himself! If I believe something will keep officers safer, even if it’s against conventional wisdom, I better be teaching it.

Let’s look at that number two reason first, it’s against policy. I have heard of several departments that consider an officer punching to be a use of lethal force but for some illogical reason don’t consider someone punching at their officer’s to be using lethal force. I can certainly understand not punching in most instances but when an officer’s life is on the line he or she must know that they have permission to punch! When the USKMA teaches law enforcement seminars we mainly show lethal force scenarios. We show handgun, long gun, knife and blunt object disarms. If an officer in that situation is legally allowed to fire on the assailant it is certainly legal for him or her to punch. A palm strike has to hit the assailant in the nose or throat to have much of an effect but a punch cuts and does tissue damage wherever it hits. When we punch during weapon disarms our goal is to knock out the attacker. This video is from a blog a few weeks ago. Watch what a realistic knife attack looks like;

If an officer is faced with that attack the options are few. If he/she decides to access their handgun while being attacked they will take several stabs before they can fire. What the officer should do is block the weapon with their left forearm and attempt to knock out or otherwise disable the attacker with their right hand. In that situation why would you want to use a palm over a fist? It is much easier to knock someone out with a punch than a palm strike. When was the last time you watched the UFC and saw a palm strike lead to a knock out? I’ve seen plenty of punches do the trick, however.

Now, about those hand injuries. You can certainly get a boxer’s fracture from punching a skull but palming isn’t exactly guaranteed to be injury free. If you throw a palm to a skull or torso you can sprain or otherwise injure your wrist fairly easily. While palming you can also catch your thumb wrong and tear the thumb ligament. A boxer’s fracture isn’t going to keep an officer from accessing and firing his handgun. The officer will likely not even feel it until much later when the adrenaline dump has dissipated. We would have to fracture most of the bones in our hand to keep us from accessing and firing a weapon. Fractures from punching are almost always the metacarpal bones on the pinky side of the hand. The pinky doesn’t have much of a function when firing a handgun. I had a boxer’s fracture years ago that I got at the beginning of a third degree black belt test in the martial art I was in at the time. I went on to test for a few hours afterwards and, other than pain, it didn’t affect anything that I had to do with my hands.

I have had a few officers tell me that the reason they aren’t allowed to punch is that if they break their hand it means six to eight weeks off of work and someone having to be paid overtime to replace them. This I believe!

When an officer’s life is on the line he or she needs to know that they have permission to punch! We have to punch in training if we expect it to come out under stress. BE SAFE!

MEANWHILE, DOWN AT THE GYM…

Sigh…I just left the gym I work out in. While there I couldn’t keep my eyes off of the adult Karate class going on in the corner. They spent forty five minutes working on knife defenses. The “attacker” would get into a deep front stance and hold the knife by their belt, waiting for the “attackee” to get ready. They would then take a huge front step forward and thrust out the knife (with their loud “HiiiiYaaa”) and then just stand there with a straight arm. The defenses (several for the same attack) were a lot of grabbing wrists and moving the attacker’s arm in a big circle to take them to the ground and then using joint locks to have the attacker submit. I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!

I’m not putting down martial arts for adults. If the adult is doing the art for exercise, stress relief, because it’s cool or for the camaraderie I’ve got no problem with it. When you break out the knives you are teaching self defense. Whatever you show your students had better be the most battle tested, realistic techniques and tactics you can find. Your students are literally putting their lives in your hands…and what I just saw was pathetic!

Hey instructors, here’s an idea. Get on friggin Youtube and look for videos that actually show how people are attacked with a knife:

There are no techniques that will keep you unscathed against a knife. We don’t even call it knife defenses in Krav Maga, we call it knife survival! When we show “knife survival” in Krav Maga it isn’t technique as much as it is philosophy. Basically your best bet is to block and redirect the knife as good as you can while punching the attacker in the throat and kicking & kneeing his groin. Attack the attacker, it’s hard for him to keep stabbing when he’s balled up on the ground unconscious. Teach that and you may save a few lives. Keep teaching grabbing the wrist and twirling around and you’ll get people killed. BE SAFE!

ON KILLING

I have a stack of books that I am slowly getting through. Every now and then I read one and then think “I should have read that book years ago”. ON KILLING by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman was one of these. This was a fascinating read.

This book is written mainly for and about military but there are a lot of good lessons for us in the self defense field. Basically, it talked about how killing is so against everything that is inside of us that most of us will freeze or simply accept our own injury or death rather than strike out at others. I was amazed to learn that all of the World War II movies I’ve seen are full of crap when they are showing battle scenes. Eighty to Eighty five percent of soldiers on the battlefield would not shoot their weapons. They were not cowards, they would just find other things to do. They would get ammo to the fifteen to twenty percent of men who were firing, tend the wounded (often heroically), etc. rather than fire their own weapon, even when someone was trying to kill them. This was found to be about the same percentage (and story) in all wars throughout history up to that point. They found many rifles on Civil War battlefields that had several slugs and powder charges loaded into the same barrel. Men were acting like they fired and reloading so that it looked like they were firing to their officers.

This is why people like my wife had told me “I don’t think that I could ever shoot someone, even if they were trying to hurt me.” This always amazed me that anyone could possibly not want to hurt someone who was trying to hurt them but it makes more sense to me now.

By the war in Viet Nam the firing rate had been raised to ninety-seven percent. What did they do differently in training that raised the firing rate so dramatically? Well, in WWII the training for firing a weapon was to lie on a grassy field and shoot at a bulls-eye target. By Viet Nam they had soldiers firing at man shaped targets that popped up on a course that the soldier was traversing. When they got a hit the target would drop backwards giving instant positive feedback and reward. Soldiers who got their first kill in the battle were often heard to say “it was like the course, a torso popped up and I fired”.

With training people’s attitudes of “can’t hurt someone” can change. My wife, for example, has been to good training and now believes that she could and would fire at someone trying to hurt her. The fact that she has trained and has a child to protect now has me convinced that she would.

When we train for self defense we must stop hitting static pads & targets and working single techniques. Drills where we are being pushed and smacked while we are exhausted and stressed are training for what we will see in violent encounters. Doing handgun or knife defenses against a partner who is standing and holding a weapon on us as if they were a statue is worthless training. Having that partner with the weapon push us, kick us, yell and cuss while never holding the weapon in one place makes much more sense. When training this way we aren’t just working techniques but working the realistic scenario. When this happens in real life we are much more apt to respond as we have been there and done that.

As an aside, they also “desensitized” soldiers with films of violence, talking about how great killing was, etc . Practicing simulated killing and being desensitized by violence makes it much easier to kill. Lt. Grossman has another book entitled TEACHING OUR CHILDREN TO KILL. Violent video games and the violence in movies is exactly how they are teaching soldiers to kill…and we are doing it to our kids without any safeguards. Something to think about! BE SAFE!

THE UNKNOWN HISTORY OF KRAV MAGA

Sigh…have you heard the quote that “the victors write the history books”? I’m finding out that the ones who do all the talking in the Krav Maga world have written their own history of Krav Maga. I got to spend several days with Grandmaster Yaron Lichtenstein and pick his brain as I asked him many questions. Yaron was Imi’s second student ever after Imi left the military and began to develop Krav Maga. Yaron was around Imi almost daily for over thirty years. Yaron was one of only ten men whom Imi trained from beginner to black belt. Yaron was given a document from Imi stating that he was Imi’s successor. Imi gave Yaron his own personal black belt as a gift. You think Yaron might know what really went on with Krav Maga? After bringing Yaron to the U.S. for a seminar (the first time he has been in the states in thirty years) and talking with him I honestly believe that right now I know more about the true history of Krav Maga than anyone else in the United States. This isn’t a boast, just me knowing how fortunate I am. What do I have to gain by blogging this info? Nothing. It actually makes me look dumb as I have told my students and affiliates for years a history that was wrong. Why do it? The truth is the truth…and I hate being lied to!

What we were told: Imi taught Krav Maga in the Israeli military.
Truth: Imi never taught Krav Maga in the Israeli military. The term “Krav Maga” was not coined until 1971. Imi retired from the military in 1966. Imi taught hand to hand self defense techniques in the Israeli military.

What we were told: Krav Maga was made to be easy to learn and easy to remember.
Truth: The above is true for the military hand to hand self defense techniques. When Imi created Krav Maga he intended it to be a martial art. The students were to wear gi’s and belts. It relied a lot on high kicks, jump kicks,etc. It was meant to take time to perfect and move up the belt ranks.

What we are told: Krav Maga is an open system meant to change throughout time.
Truth: Yaron made the statement “When Michelangelo was done with David did he leave the chisel and hammer there for others to change as time went on? Krav Maga was Imi’s masterpiece.” It was meant to be a martial art that was complete.

What we are told: Krav Maga isn’t a martial art, it is all about techniques that are easy to learn and master quicly.
Truth: Krav Maga was absolutely meant to be a martial art. Imi wanted all the moves to have Hebrew names no matter where they were taught just like Karate and Judo techniques all have Japanese names.

The way Imi taught some of the techniques is the exact opposite of how we teach some of them today. For example, they keep their hands down to “invite the attacker in”. We teach to keep hands up so we don’t get hit. He taught punches with arms only (they actually punch brick walls daily like the old martial art masters). We yell if our students aren’t turning their body to punch! We have taken most of the high kicks and jump kicks out of the system, Imi had a lot of these techniques in his Krav Maga. We kick with the shin to the groin. Imi called such kicks foolish and lazy…the reason to kick is for the reach advantage so it is done with the ball of the foot.

There are those running around claiming to have developed Krav Maga in the military who held office jobs while they were in the military. There are those claiming to be trained by Imi whom Imi never met. There are many claiming they got their black belts from Imi when he only gave ten out ever. There are those who bought their black belts. There are those claiming to be Imi’s favorite or the heir whom the original group of ten black belts tried to get Imi to throw out of the system. To quote Yaron “Money ruined everything”.

I was told specific things about specific people in the Krav Maga world that would have you shaking your head that I will refrain from talking about at the moment. I am certainly not disparaging all in Krav Maga. There are many, such as SGT MJR Nir Maman, who are working in Israel with law enforcement and military who are sharp, dedicated and are teaching techniques that save lives. We in the USKMA are certainly making people safer and healthier and showing gym owners how to make money teaching Krav Maga without being dishonest or selling out. Unfortunately there are many in Krav Maga who put money above honesty and integrity.

I have heard Grandmaster Yaron Lichtenstein called a crazy old man and a liar. Knowing even a bit about Yaron should put these people to shame. Yaron looked at Imi as a father figure. His respect and reverence for Imi is apparent every time I talk with him. He retired to Brazil years ago and was done with Krav Maga completely until his son told him that if he didn’t keep Imi’s Krav Maga alive it would die because he is the only one who teaches it the way Imi wanted it taught. He does what he does only for Imi’s memory. He is one of the few not teaching for the money. I know that he has gone to other countries to teach seminars and upon seeing the conditions people were living in refused any payment. I have also heard people go on about his videos and how bad he looks as if he couldn’t possibly be the real deal. Part of this is hands are down, not turning into punches, etc. that he does on purpose as talked about above. Part of this is he is in his 60’s for crying out loud. The only videos I ever saw of Imi doing Krav were taken when he was in his last years. He looked slow and not too sharp. Should I think he isn’t the real deal because he was older and didn’t look good…he was the creator!! I may be quicker and sharper looking than Yaron but I wouldn’t mess with him. He was a war hero who was shot many times and taken prisoner for months in the Yom Kippur war (this can be proven, unlike many in Krav Maga who were proven to be liars when they talked about their military record). This man has taken lives with his bare hands in his military days…more than once. Again, I wouldn’t mess with him! BTW, Yaron is the only one who had been invited to teach Krav Maga for Wingate in Israel (others merely rent out Wingate facilities).

NOBODY other than Yaron is teaching Imi’s Krav Maga. All those running around in their camo’s and claiming to be THE authority on Krav Maga are teaching military self defense techniques. Krav Maga, the way Imi intended it to be, is a martial art that only Bukan (Yaron’s school name) is teaching. Period. This is why you will hear that what I am teaching is “American Krav Maga” from now on out of respect for both Imi and Yaron.