You will never hear us say that krav is better than any other system. They all have some merit. We only claim to be best at getting people from zero self defense skills-wise to being able to truly protect themselves faster than anything else. When I am shown other handgun or knife defenses, for example, I see some that are good and make sense but would need too many hours to become proficient with. The IDF only had soldiers in boot camp for six weeks…and they had to become proficient enough at everything to not get killed by the end! Most martial artists would admit that if you would spend three months in their art that you wouldn’t be very good, that you would need more time. Three months in Krav Maga will get you to the point where you can test into level two…and you are pretty darned good when you get that far and could truly take care of yourself in most bad situations.
If someone had 20 hours to train for a knife attack that they knew was coming they would train knife and maybe learn some more advanced techniques than we are going to bother with in Krav Maga. What a bummer if at the end of that twenty hours they were attacked by a handgun wielding maniac instead! Krav doesn’t get into anything complicated but teaches things that are easy to learn, easy to remember and, most of all, effective. We believe that we can’t put a ton of hours into any one thing because in the real world we can be attacked so many different ways. We want our students good at choke defenses, fighting, handgun disarms, knife defenses, stick defenses, long gun disarms, sucker punch defense, kick defenses, ground fighting, head lock defenses, full nelson defenses, hair grab defenses, etc., etc. There are different “arts” that focus on each of these things that together will get you very, very proficient at all of the above. You could go from one art to the next for several years to be an expert at defending yourself for all of these. At the end of those several years you will be one bad person!! Or, you can take Krav Maga and in six months maybe not be an expert but be able to defend all of the above.
How does Krav do it? We don’t teach techniques per se but philosophy. A knife system that I once learned had 30 techniques for a straight stab coming at your gut. To learn all of these took many, many hours. Krav teaches to block the knife, smack the attacker hard and often and control the knife when you can or push off and run and/or pick something up to smack the attacker with some more!! We train our mindset with drills so that we can turn on aggression and fight with rage. When it comes time to be afraid in a real life attack we’ve kinda been there, done that where the technique guy has learned techniques but always used them in a controlled, static environment. The stress of “I’m gonna die” does amazing things to the unprepared brain!!
As far as our techniques go, we use natural body reactions in our defenses. Because it is something that our body does automatically it doesn’t take much practice or memorization. For our choke defense we “pluck”…our hands go to the wrists of an attacker and we rip their hands off our throat. People tell me often that they have a better defense for a choke. I tell them they don’t have an easier one…it is natural to grab the wrists of the attacker because our hands go to where the pain is. We have started our defense before we even realize that we are being choked. As far as weapon defenses go, we try to have one that works for many different positions and attacks. Our handgun defense, the cupping technique, works for a handgun in front, to the side, while on our knees, mounted, attacker in our guard and attacker standing over us. When a handgun is pointed at us we don’t have to think about which defense is needed…they are the same defense. We want to have one answer for many questions.
Again, we don’t claim to be the best at anything besides getting people proficient quickly. We’ve been called simple and brutal among other things. That is usually said as a slam but we see it as a compliment. In a real world, violent attack simple and brutal is all that’s really going to work! Be safe!!
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United States Krav Maga's Blog 
Good stuff. I’ve been giving proficiency a lot of thought recently after seeing yet another of those “KM is bad at X, Y and Z” articles online. Usually X, Y and Z are selected from boxing, MT, TKD, BJJ and the other arts aimed, primarily, at one-on-one fighting sans weapons. Anyway, in that article someone made the point that a green belt in BJJ or a reasonable boxer would pound a KM black belt. Naturally, which boxer, which KM practitioner etc. is the biggest factor but let’s move into generalities and deal with statistics. On the average, an average KM black belt might well be equivalent in ground fighting techniques to a green belt BJJ or judoka, or as good at punch combos as a so-so boxer, etc. etc. Given the breadth of the KM syllabus, I don’t see how it could be any other way! We are generalists. We have to be. We don’t know what the attack is, how many people will be involved, what weapons might be present, whether it will be dark and outside or bright and inside. Boxing doesn’t teach how to deal with a slashing knife attach. TKD has little to say about an active shooter in a mall. And KM? We don’t specifically deal with two dudes wielding tire irons, either, but we do have the mental philosophy and basic techniques that can be adapted to the situation!
So after thinking more about that article I was rather glad to see that a KM black belt might get beat up in a cage fight with a serious BJJ practitioner of lesser rank. It’s probably as it should be. There are only so many hours in the day, and an equivalent number of hours spent on KM will yield only a small percentage of those hours in any one discipline. Thank goodness for that!
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