The Art of Contact Combat

As you may have noticed, I did not blog yesterday. After my class of Krav Maga, I was too exhausted and my body was hurting like hell. I wanted to blog, but simply lacked energy. It might be the case for most of my Wednesdays now. The same happened with my acting classes back in 2010-2011. But hey, I have things to blog about afterwards.

So yes, anyway, about the training itself. I am learning a lot, sometimes the hard way: as I hesitated between two movements when I was answering to a knife attack, my instructors made me do push-ups. Or, as he calls it, press-ups. We cannot chit chat during warmups, or push-ups. Basically, mistakes we cannot make are punished with push-ups. Not that I to do many push-ups, in fact only when I stopped during exercise (I am a committed student), but it is something still foreign to me, something akin to a military mentality. Krav Maga is not so much about learning perfectly a movement or a technique but as integrating reflexes and instincts. To do what feels natural. Krav Maga truly is a martial art. There is a certain elegance in it.

What I am also gaining is energy, stamina and strength. My instructor said that when I started (and that was a month ago) I could barely do ten sit-ups, and badly. Now I do 25 easily. And that was my fifth lesson. I even had enough energy left to do a bit of extra training, when I exercised with fellow beginners the lessons we learned. basically, the knife attack. One takes a fake knife, threatens the other, using verbal abuse as well just to make it realistic (and because it's kind of fun), the other defend himself/herself and does the counter-attack. We were four there, two guys, two girls. One is a professional dancer working in London (no, not that kind of dancer, she does tango and things like that), the other a barmaid at a local pub (, the guy I don't know exactly. I have to say, threatening a woman with a knife, even a fake and harmless one, and saying something nasty, even as part of training, made me slightly uncomfortable. So she asked: "So you want to rape me or something?" and I answered: "Well yes, but go easy on me, it is my first time." My three fellows burst out laughing. So yes, for a few minutes, the extra training was pretty relaxed. I think that however silly the line was, it deserves to be a great unknown line. My first about a martial art.