Krav Maga

After resorting to subterfuge in an attempt to get away from confronting muscles few weeks ago, I realized how weak I actually was. And that enlightened me on how ignorant I had been of many less endearing prospects in my life up till now, despite already knowing a handful I had been attributed with. It pissed me off big time and I still haven't been able to shake off the deep and lengthy hangover of that incident which brought out the coward in me. It was then that I decided to learn self defense. Easier said than done. My days in military school were not devoid of self defense training, and I knew very well that all the popular martial arts demanded a lot of time and dedication to be spend upon to get to the level where you can be confident of confronting most of the muscular obstacles you could possibly face. In fact six years to be precise. I don't have that kind of patience. Despite knowing that I did an online search for martial arts training in my area.

It was then that I learned that Martial arts had undergone a major shift in training since the last five years. Earlier martial arts were taught in specific styles like Judo, Kung fu, Juijutsu, Taekwondo, White Fujian Crane and many more, with each style having its own philosophy and jargon. Half the time in training was spent on something called 'Kanta', which pupils had to master if they wanted to progress to the next belt. 'Kanta' which literally translated means a dance, is a huge waste of time, and a sham on the part of trainers just to stress over the philosophy of that particular style. It is quite useless in real life self defense, and can take a lot of time to learn, even possibly consume more time than the actually training. Not to mention that each style had many perfectly valid but strictly forbidden moves which is a big disadvantage in real life scenarios... For example the infamous groin kick or testicle kick. And then there were stupid theory exams.

However lately, for the great and the good, people have had it with all the kantas nd shitty Japanese lexicon, like using 'Ich, ni, san shri.... yemei' instead of just using the words 'One, two, three... stop', just to sound cool. It the world of modern martial arts now. With pupil only being taught what is important, and movements and techniques borrowed from various styles together and fused together to train youngsters faster with 'kick ass' approach from trainers, it also includes training for all age groups. I was really convinced that I had to get started with it.

And then one of my friend told me of Krav Maga. An Israeli art of self defense, which perhaps in terms of its uses and efficiency is the world most efficient way to learn, practice, develop and implement in realistic scenarios in life. Krav Maga is Hebrew word for 'close combat'. Krav Maga is the official self defense technique for Israeli State police and defense forces, and lately its popularity is rising meteorically in the west. It includes a lot of dirty tricks and several moves which are illegal in other styles, but all of those moves are pertaining to real life scenarios. After reading more about it I just knew from within that there was no way I was gonna miss out on this.

IKMF Logo

And so I joined the Krav Maga coaching this weekend and had my first two training sessions. And here's the story...

Just as I had read, this definitely wasn't a kind of martial arts you could teach kids. The training involved a lot of exercises which have to sole purpose of draining your body of almost all your energy, pushing your stamina to your limits, until you can hardly stand on your feet. This isn't warm up. Its ten times more exertion than that. The exercise lead me to total physical exhaustion, although being a new comer, I was exhausted much earlier than the other members. After being exhausted you begin with the training. Unlike other techniques which make you spend a lot of days, and even months, in practicing and memorizing all the moves before facing actual combat, Krav Maga begins with combat right from day one, with different type of moves being taught while you are being continuously attacked from all sides.

Whats more? You train with your shoes on, since in real life scenarios, no one is going to take off their shoes before having a go at you. most of my training for the past two days revolved around fending off attacks from the offender for quite a while. But the one that got me was to defend yourself from attacks when in dip position (after a while your just cant stand the weight of your body being shifted from elbow to the other at a great speed). It was followed by conditioning exercises, which involves in letting you take the beating on different parts of your body to get the feel of being knocked. They called it 'conditioning your body to attacks'.


In brief, the last two days were very physical for me, and more so as I am not quite a gym follower. All the joint and muscles in my body are paining even as I write this post (aaow). But I feel a lot better from within now. The whole point of going through all the rough physical training is to make sure that you repeat the moves so many times in practice, that all those Krav Maga moves become second nature to you.

The environment there is quiet healthy, and those guys have all the necessary equipment for training. The fellow students of the IKMF(International Krav Maga Federation) are quite healthy looking guys, and quite experienced, considering they joined earlier than me, and probably all of them are elder to me. They are peple from various professions... soft engineers, traders, businessmen, etc.

Thankfully there are no good looking girls at IKMF, which is a big relief for me. Lately, due to my excessive sexual frustration, I have become a total pervert these days and the presence of attractive women would not only have made it harder for me to concentrate but would also have made me unnecessarily self-conscious.

The coach told me that it will take me a while(year or more) to be so proficient in Krav Maga so as to knock any goddamn opponent out for sure. But with two-three months of dedicated training, I can at least assure myself that I would never need to back down if I ever come across some broad chested muscular sonofabitch in my way. But once I feel confident enough to harness the art, I am most certainly going to experiment it.

I am going to provoke some random Bhaiyya (bihari), and then beat him up some day to test my skills. No offense meant for the bhojpuri community, and I have no sympathy for Raj Thackeray either. But the biharis must accept that some members of their community are indeed a nuisance to Mumbai, and deserve some good bit of punishment. They are a glutton for punishment. But the most important reason for my choice of biharis as my first guinea pig for trying out Krav Maga is that, one can safely assume that Bhaiyyas cant know any kind of self defense techniques or martial arts to counter me.