Thursday 4 June 2015

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.

3 comments:

Craig said...

It certainly sounds like good exercise and I love the line you used!

jaz@octoberfarm said...

very interesting! that is good progress in a very short time.

Debra She Who Seeks said...

You're doing great! Next time you have to verbally threaten someone though, do it in French. It's more intimidating when they don't know what you're saying. Add that little extra element of terror!