Wednesday@Krav Maga Edinburgh

Last night we looked at different methods for defending against circular attacks. Statistically this is the most common attack that guys are going to face so it makes sense to start with this in the evening. We accepted that we are not always going to be able to successfully block and simultaneously strike an attacker. Common sense and an understanding of angles of attacks have to be taken into consideration. For example, we can be in a defensive posture trying to verbally de-escalate a threat directly in front of us. However, we are keeping in mind the attackers friends who are on his periphery egging him on. So straight away we understand there is a difficulty here. We cannot be sure where the attack will come from and given the numbers involved we are doing all we can to talk this down. All of a sudden our peripheral vision picks up something fast coming in from one side. It’s a punch thrown from one of his mates, we don’t know if there is a bottle or a glass in his hand, its simply moving too fast. Our vision has picked up the movement and sent a signal to the brain. The brain is working quickly to interpret the information and send the correct message for us to act accordingly. It’s all so fast and we simply manage to get the arm raised to protect our self. Job done. It’s how we then respond from this moment forward that counts. We can’t go, oh no I didn’t manage the simultaneous block and counter we have trained so often in class what do I do. We simply deal with the situation in front of us. There are so many variables involved. For example how many are attacking you, are you injured from the punch, is there weapons involved, do I have an exit, can I use something to hand as a defensive weapon. So we move away from a set techniques and focus heavily on scenarios which change in order to give us more experiences. The more experiences we have the better we will handle some new threat in front of us. In training this way we don’t get surprised. We looked at different ways of drilling surprise circular attacks. In actual fact they are not a surprise as we know the drill but we can role play and use certain games such as closing the eyes, off balancing the defender etc in order to make it harder to deal with.

Following on from this we finished off a drill from Monday’s class and looked at ways of dealing with a much larger opponent who we were trying to move to establish chest to back. Any questions from last night then please feel free to post.

Marcus