The Flaw with Krav Maga

I know there millions of people who bow down to the effectiveness of krav maga. When I first heard about it, I thought, okay, this looks like something that’s on the right track. The problem with KM is that there are too many different systems, all using the same basic name. The instructors can’t even keep things straight. “The system I teach is the original system taught by so-and-so to the Israeli military.” “No, the system I teach is the only system recognized by so-and-so or so-and-so organization.

I will say that I’ve actually seen a few of the KM systems that, I believe, conveyed the original intent of its creators. I figured any fighting system that included knee strikes, head butts and elbows couldn’t be all bad. I visited a few KM training centers and signed up for a few classes at each. Each time I was ready to go; ready to learn some cool stuff. I already had many years of training experience in several martial arts styles and fighting systems. But I always try to keep my cup half empty so I’ll always be in a position to add something new to my skill sets.

Every KM class I went to started off by having everyone tape up their hands and wrists with boxing handwraps. The first hour or so of each class revolved around boxing. That’s wonderful, since almost everyone knows that if you start throwing punches with unprotected hands in a real fight, you’re probably gonna break one knuckle or the other in one or both of your hands. After going through punching pad drills for a while, we took off the gloves and hand wraps and busted out the big pads for some knee and elbow striking practice. Good skills to have and practice. No problem there.

After doing some good drills and getting a good cardio workout, we moved on to some other minor things more designed for a warmdown than adding to your fighting skills. What we ended with is what probably disappointed me the most. The instructor said, “Okay. Whoever is going to spar, put on your protective gear and stick around.” Half the class left and half stayed. I was amazed that, after practicing full contact techniques on the various-sized pads, we were gonna practice our no-contact point karate skills. I’ve spent years trying to unlearn that stuff, not pull it out of the archives and revsit it.

As Matt Thorton says, your training must be filled with aliveness or it’s not of much use. He worded it a little stronger than that.

Yeah, you can get some cardio benefit and some new skills from your standard KM training, but unless you’re training in one of the military style KM, all you’re getting is another karate class with some boxing thrown in.

All you KM die hards can throw your posts at me telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about if you want. I’m ready for it. But those of you who are interested in learning a fighting system that will save your life on the street when real violence comes knocking, do your homework and find one of the “real” krav maga instructors.

Stay safe.

Watch Your Gold

The price of gold has reached all-time highs – so have muggings to steal that gold from unsuspecting people. This is something that has been going on in third-world countries for years. You’re walking down the street and a 13-year-old kid riding a bike zips by you and, with expert precision and skill, unclips your gold watch or rips off your necklace and disappears into the crowd, without even skipping a beat. Unfortunately, the way it happens in our country is some thug sees you’re wearing something made out of gold and conks you over the head or hits you in the face with his fist an just takes it. If you’re a normal woman or man and the thug is some coked up deviant, probably been in prison, I’m not gonna tell you that you can use this technique or that techique and leave him unconscious on the street as you continue on with your day. That’s Hollywood movie stuff.

What you CAN do is be cautious about where you go and what jewelry you wear for everyone to see. Like everything else, common sense rules supreme. You might want to leave the gold or diamonds at home for some outings. It’s not worth dying or being injured over. Check out my other posts for how to handle yourself in many common situations, and, as always, drop me a line if you have any questions about personal protection. I answer every question or comment I receive. Stay safe.

Self-Defense – The importance of attitude and calmness

Though you might think that effective techniques and above-average ability and skills are the key to sef-defense, it’s the non-physical attiributes that will keep you safe. Violent criminals look for victims who look and act like victims. If you look like someone who won’t go along with their program, they wll move on to someone who is. And there’s always plenty of victims to chose from. If you walk tall and confident, and carry yourself in a calm manner, you will not look like a potential victim. Sounds corny but it’s true. Making proper eye contact is also very important. In other words look at someone in your vicinity that’s looking at you, but just long enough to let them know that your see them, but not long enough to constitute a challenging stare. All that does is make you look cocky and looking for a fight. Speaking of looking for a fight. If that’s what you’re about, stop reading this right now and click on dumbasses.com, because I don’t have anything to say to you. I’m interested in people who want to avoid fights or confrontations, not those looking to prove themselves and add notches in their streetfighting agenda.

Nothing wrong with knowing how to protect yourself; just don’t take too seriously the claims from the instructors running all the adds in magazines and online that they’ll turn you into an unbeatable streetfighter if you buy their DVD series of videos. It’s not that easy. Most self-defense instructors will peddle one or the other version of headbutts, knee strikes and elbow strikes, some throwing in some groundfighting techniques that you can’t do without.

My approach is to look such that the bad guys want to avoid you, or you see them in time to avoid them. If that doesn’t work, I set the stage for legal self-defense (see my earlier posts on this subject) and then take it to them before they take it to me. My techniques include the same headbutts, knees and elbows, but I throw in biting, eye gouging and slams to the concrete that will make a grown man dead, it the situation calls for it.

Contact me with any questions, and stay safe.

Self-Defense – Power Perceived is Power Achieved

Yeah, okay, I stole that saying from a movie (The Substitute). But it’s perfect for self-defense/assault prevention. The ability to fight off an attacker with your fighting techniques (who REALLY thinks they can do that?) pales in comparison to the ability to avoid an attacker before anything happens. AND the ability to avoid an attacker pales in comparison to the ability to make an attacker want to avoid YOU.

Ponder that for a moment. There are actually some things you can do to achieve that goal. Your attitude is number one. If you walk tall and proud, always scanning and being aware of your surroundings and the people around you, a certain amount of attackers will perceive you as someone who won’t go along with his program and move on to someone he thinks will. If you make eye contact with those around you, especially men, to let them know that you know they’re there, that will dissuade many an attacker. Now, don’t stare with a fixed, challenging stare – that might evoke a confrontation all by itself – just a quick, “I see you,” look that let’s him know you are aware of him.

Everything you do to make an attacker think twice about messing with you is one more layer of protection between you and them. The more layers, the better. Anyone ever heard of The Boston Strangler? He wasa rapist/murderer in the Boston area in the 1960s. He was convicted of raping and murdering about seven women when he was finally caught and sent to prison.

When asked how he did it, he said he always picked a woman who looked like she wouldn’t resist, and then follow them home. He usually posed as a repairman, building super, gas company man or somthing like that to gain entry to their apartments, where he would go about his business. He said that if he saw any sign that the woman would resist or put up a fight, he’d move on to some else. And there was always someone else.

Violent criminals of today operate in much the same way. They pick someone who LOOKS like a victim and move in.

A survey of 50,000 women who had completed a full-contact self-defense program and had been out of it for at least a year showed that approximately 600 of them wound up in a physical confrontation that they were able the defuse and walk away from. Out of 50,000 women, only 96 of them actually wound up in a situation where they had to use their newfound fighting skills.

This tells me a whole lot. During their training they learned as much non-physical techniques as physical ones. It is obvious that the non-physical techniques (HOw to carry yourself, eye contact, assertiveness, common sense, and verbal deescalation skills) are more important to avoiding violent crime than the ability to fight effectively.

That was a hard pill for me to swallow, since I spent over 30 years studying several martial arts systems learning how to fight in almost any situation. But facts are facts. That is why I now spend my time traveling around giving assault prevention seminars rather than how to fight and take anyone out seminars.

Let me know what you think. Stay safe.

Self-Defense Made Simple – Target-Focused Attacks

Let’s face it. Most people are not trained fighters capable of unleashing an attack on a mugger or rapist, striking multiple targets with effective hits. However, those same most people want to know how to protect themselves should they ever find themselves in the sights of a violent criminal.

The body has a handful of vulnerable areas that don’t require great skill or strength to touch and at least temporarily disable the bad guy.

I’ll list my favorites. The eyes. You can devastate at attacker using either a spread-finger poke to both eyes of a thumb punch (make a fist with your thumb sticking up) to one eye. A punch or web hand (the area between your thumb and index finger) strike to the throat. Forget the knee to the groin. There are too many reasons why this won’t be effective. A stomp to an ankle or multiple stomps to the top of the feet. That’s four areas with about five strikes. Pick which target you like. You need to practice this physically on pads, as well as mentally, where you visualize seeing and striking your favorite target. And I mean focus on one target only for your first strike. If you’re focusing on one target only, you will eliminate hesitation and possibly confusion if you’re standing there trying to figure out, “If he does this, I’ll do that.” None of that matters. Once he’s in range, strike hard and strike fast. Only after you’ve unleashed your first strike do you look for a follow-up target of opportunity. For instance, once you pop him in the eye(s), he’ automatically bring one or both of his hands up to his face to protect his eyes. That’s when you start stomping relentlesslty on one or both of his feet. Trust me, you can drop someone with foot stomps. Or take out one of his ankles. Once you’ve done these two things, he is now seeing impaired and unable to walk, let alone run after you. Think about. Tell all your friends about it. You don’t have to be a trained fighter to be a mugger’s worst nightmare. Stay safe.

Self-Defense – How to clobber an attacker

I’m writing this for the non-martial artists, non-black belts, non MMA-trained fighters, and everyone else who thinks they’re the baddest dude around. Most of us are just regular people. We don’t live to fight or live at the fighting gym or karate studio. We don’t walk around on hair-trigger alert, ready to unload our latest super technique on some fool who decides to pick us as his next victim. And I don’t apologize for being a regular person. I’ve been around long enough to know that wisdom is far more important than physical prowess and fighting skills. Wisdom means biting, poking and gouging to protect yourself. I worked out with a Brazilian ju-jutsu practitioner who thought he had it all figured out. I said, okay, do what you do. He put me in some kind of armbar. I grabbed his arm and bit it (not that hard, but enough to make the point). He said, okay, let’s try it again. He did. This time I grabbed his throat and squeezed just a little. He got the point. So we tried one more time. This time he did something too fancy for me to even remember. This time I grabbed him by the neck, pulled his head close to my face, and placed my teeth aroud his ear and growled. He figured out that I could have bitten his ear off if it was for real. He came away with a new undrstanding of the difference between sport fighting and survival fighting. I wasn’t trying to show him up; I was trying to show him the difference.

Okay. Back to clobbering. You’re faced with an attacker who you know is ready to do something. All the flags are up. All the red lights are lit. You’d better do something or else. As I’ve covered before, you should have both your hands up to protect yourself from any surprise incoming strikes. Using hammerfist strikes, blast him in one of his collar bones. Any hard strike is capable of fracturing this bone. Immediately follow up with a hammerfist strike to his head/forehead/face. Throw in a few more for good measure. This should cause him to start covering up out of sheer confusion of what you’re doing to him (versus what he thought he was going to be doing to you). Once he covers up, you can either start bombing him with elbow strikes to the head (if his hands are in the way, you’ll just break them instead of his head), or unleash a torrent of knee strikes to his groin and thighs. This can drop the toughest street thug. And/or you can aim all of your attention and focus to his feet and stomp them until he drops like a bag of hammers. Once he drops, you need to leave and report to the police. Once he drops, you need to stop, lest you become the aggressor and end up in jail. The main thing is, get out of there and go home safe. Let me know what you think of my approach. Let the bad guys beware.

How to use pepper spray LEGALLY

If you’re already carrying pepper spray (PS), that’s great. If you carry it buried at the bottom of your purse, not so great. You need to have it clipped to your purse or waist for easy, quick access. Or, better yet, already have it in your hand; i.e., a keychain model. You need to be able access it, unlock it, and be ready to use it without looking. Practice makes perfect. This won’t be a discussion on which spray pattern is best; just make sure you have a spray rated at at least 2,000,000 SCU’s. And 5 percent or 10 percent doesn’t matter. The effects of a 10 percent spray are the same as 5 percent, they just last 15 or 20 minutes longer. You’ll already be gone, so it doesn’t matter.

If someone is trying to enter your space and get close to you, and you have a bad feeling and don’t want him to, raise one or both of your hands, palms towards him, and tell him to stop, don’t come any closer, go away, or whatever you think of to make the point that you don’t want him to get close to you. Once you’ve done this, you have set the groundwork for legal self-defense. If he takes one more step towards you after you’ve told him not to, it would be considered assault in most jurisdictions, and you are legally allowed to defend yourself. If he’s far enough away and he continues to come toward you, give him one more stern warning. If he doesn’t stop immediately, spray him in the face and escape away from the direction of the spray. If he’s too close for a second warning, and you’ve warned him once, spay him in the face and escape. If someone is coming at from an even longer distance, you can spray out an invisible wall of pepper spay between him and you and escape in the other direction. PS, especially if you have a cone mist (which I recommend but is harder to find). PS tends to float in the air for a while and he’ll probably walk right through it and be zapped if he’s still coming towards you. Any time you are forced to use PS in self-defense, make sure you immediately report it to the police. If you don’t and the guy you sprayed does, and you have no witnesses, he can make up any story he wants and you might have some splaining to do. Stay safe.

What is THE most important thing to do for self-defense??

Okay. You couldn’t avoid the bad guy. You couldn’t defuse the situation. Attack is imminent. What is THE most important thing you should do to ensure your safety?

The most important thing is not WHAT you do, it’s THAT you do – and that you do it sooner rather than later. You can know dozens of cool techniques, but the odds are that you haven’t had the training to get your mind up to speed so that you can actually DO any of these tecnhiques. Adrenaline an abject fear caused by the scary guy who’s in your face are likely to cause you to doubt that your techniques will actually work, or to freeze altogether and do nothing. I’ve known black belts who were physically but not mentally ready to face real violence, and they froze up just like most people would.

The best form of self-defense is, number one, learn how to be aware of your surroundings, know the tricks of violent criminals, and give considered thought IN ADVANCE of what could happen in terms of assault, and that you will fight for your safety. If you just go at an attacker screaming and clawing and biting with one hundred-plus percent committment, you wil have a much better chance of prevailing, or at leasst surviving, the encounter compared to trying some fancy technique that some self-defense instructor showed you but with less than “I will survive at any cost” attitude. It’s that simple. WHAT you do pales in comparison to THAT you do. Stay safe.

Women’s Self-Defense – Do women have an inner savage?

Women are genetically designed to be nurturers and tend to the home and have dinner ready when the man gets home from a hard day’s work — wait. Stop the presses. I was just expelling the remnants of the 1980s feminism and sensitivity that had seeped into my brain. Let’s start again.

You’d better believe that women have an inner savage. It’s not just a man’s trait, it’s a human trait. However, it’s safe to say that most of us have had our inner savage tamped down, exorcised out, threatened, scolded and brainwashed into thinking that it’s a bad thing.

So what is the inner savage? It’s a left over part of the human life force and gene pool from long ago when humans had to go against claws and teeth with rocks and spears. No elephant guns back then. You had to get up close and personal with something trying to eat you. That will cause a huge pucker response in anyone that I know.

In bygone days men actually counted on that surge or adrenaline to boost their mental and physical abilities to allow them to bring that sabretooth tiger home to the cave for dinner. In our time we’ve been civilized to the point that we don’t know what adrenaline is or does, and our inner savage is a long-lost friend.

That’s right. We were talking about women. The best way to reacquaint yourselves with these two things (adrenaline and inner savage) is to first find out what they are. You probably know some things about adrenaline, but it gives you turbocharged strength, numbness to pain, keen eyesight (but in tunnel vision only), makes your mind move so fast that time seems to slow down and everything seems to be happening in slow motion. No kidding. It also redirects your blood to your legs and arms for fighting. There’s probably more, but that’s a good synopsis.

So knowing about what adrenaline actually does is the best way to prepare youself to deal with it and USE its awesome power if you ever have to experience it.

Now let’s talk about that inner savage. Here’s what you can do with it if you can dig down and find it. You can do whatever it takes to defend and protect yourself. Think of yourself sitting where you are right now reading this post (you know who I mean. You’re that one person out there that actually reads my stuff). Do you think you would be able to pick up a hammer and smash someone’s head with it? Pretty gruesome, I know. But doing something like that might be what’s required to stop some maniac who is attacking you and wouldn’t hesitate to take you out with that same hammer.

You need to think about how far you would go, what you would do to prevent yourself from being victimized by a violent criminal. Ask any woman who has been brutally raped if there’s anything she WOULDN’T do to prevent it if she had it to do over again. So you should have a serious sit-down talk with yourself and decide in advance what you’re willing to do to protect yourself or your loved ones. Remember, if you’re hurt, they’re hurt. So protecting yourself, by whatever means, is protecting THEM. Don’t forget that. I suggested some pretty drastic stuff in my post entitled “How to stop a rape.” Some people might think me a maniac, but I know what violent criminals wreak on our society. I have no regard for them whatsoever. Lock ‘em up and throw away the key. Please contact me if you have any specific questions or would like further clarification on any of this. You can leave a comment here or e-mail me at dbhallford@yahoo.com. Thank you, and stay safe.

Self-Defense – Avoid, Control, Take out – ACT

I like to boil self-defense down to its simplest components. ACT covers what you need to know. Does it require you to have special training? No. Does it require you to have special skills? No.

Use your common sense and avoid potential trouble when you see it. And, according to police reports, most people, when asked, say that they noticed something, felt something was wrong, knew they shouldn’t do this or that or go there. Be alert, use common sense, and take steps to avoid possible danger. Turn around and go back where you came from. Cross the street. Turn around and run. Something that gets you out of there. That’s A in ACT.

If you can’t avoid a situation, then you have to determine how real and how bad is the threat that you detect. If it’s really dangerous, skip C and go to T. In the meantime, if you’re dealing with someone who is annoying you or coming on to you or actually pushing yuo around or threatening or touching you, but they don’t pose a REAL threat — i.e. in a bar, a club dealing with some drunk — you should learn some simple control holds to immobilize the guy and try to talk some sense into him. If you can’t, you can drop him on his but or escalate your level of force if necessary.

Moving on to T – take him out. You couldn’t avoid him. The level of threat is beyond thinking about control. You need to escape or take him out. This means that you attack him before he attacks you. Surprise him with your ferocity and savageness. Unfortunately, it takes that level of force to truly protect yourself from today’s street psychos. Check my previous posts for how to attack him and take him out with extreme prejudice. Please contact me with any questions. Stay safe.