Blog - East Texas Krav Maga: Tyler Texas

How Not to Freeze

Posted by: nlundstrom In: Uncategorized 31 Oct 2018 0 comments Tags: anxiety, East Texas Krav Maga, ETKM, Fear, How not to Freeze, Krav Maga, Self Defense, Stress, Tyler Texas, Violence

“Every man is scared in his first action…the real hero is the man who fights even though he’s scared. Some get over their fright in a minute under fire; others take an hour; for some it takes days; but a real man will never let the fear of death overpower…” -General George Patton

There are people in our society we think of as heroes, as warriors. Police officers, members of the armed forces, firefighters and other first responders deservedly receive our respect because they move toward danger. How did they get to be so brave? What keeps them from freezing when faced with violence? How do they think clearly under extreme pressure?

If you’re reading this, you probably want to know so you can apply that knowledge to yourself. How do you face your first stress drill? How can you turn regular Krav Maga training into preparation that overcomes the intense stress of an attack?

Tactical Breathing

Think back to Dave Grossman’s color-coded system, as we noted in our Fear 101 article. Managing your heart rate helps retain your motor skills and cognitive abilities. Stress drills are meant to be stressful not to push students to the breaking point, but to teach them to cope.

Try what Grossman calls tactical breathing in a non-stressful situation first. Here’s how it works:

Breathe in through your nose while you count to 4.
Hold that breath and count to 4 again.
Breathe out through the mouth to another 4-count.

Notice how your heart rate slows and your mind focuses just on your breath. Practice next time someone almost runs into you in traffic and your heart is pounding. Bring that same concept when you come to class.

Before a stress drill you might not have time for several repetitions, but you can use the same pattern to control your breathing. As your heart starts to pound, breathe and think of your fear as sliding off of you like water through your fingers and limbs.

Reach inside to find your motivation for fighting, your ability to go to the dark side. If you haven’t already, read our article How to Prepare Your Mind for Physical Aggression. Now loosen your shoulders and determine to attack with ferocity.

Stress Inoculation

The military prepares soldiers through extensive training, much of which involves exposure to stressors that simulate real-life combat. The more they train, the better they are psychologically prepared to stay calm when the threat is real. It’s similar to the idea of exposing the body to small amounts of a germ or toxin so the body’s immune system learns how to respond.

Every time you come to a Krav Maga class, you expose yourself to the possibility of pain and injury. You know class will involve striking. You’ll be the aggressor and the person defending themselves, but you’ll train as a warrior, not a victim. Over time you’ll develop a mental toughness and the idea of combat won’t be as frightening as it was.

Stress Acclimatization

East Texas is around 500 feet above sea level. When people from our area go to high altitudes, their bodies react. Over time they adapt, they become acclimated.

Exposure to stress causes an extreme reaction when it’s infrequent. As Krav Maga students regularly expose themselves to being choked, bear hugged, dragged, assaulted with a knife or threatened with a gun, they become acclimated to that type of stress.

Will they still experience fear if someone actually tries to shoot them? Of course. But they will have practiced what to do in so many different scenarios they won’t freeze. Their training will take over and they will successfully defend themselves.

If you want to be successful against fear, hiding isn’t the answer. Make your fears worse. Get as close as you can to the real thing and confront it until you win. Turn what frightens you into what makes you confident in every situation. Come to class, we’ll show you how. See schedule and pricing here.

Preparing to Face Fear through Krav Maga

Posted by: nlundstrom In: Uncategorized 21 Oct 2018 0 comments Tags: Beat Anxiety, East Texas Krav Maga, Fear, Krav Maga, Self Defense, Tyler Texas

Fear happens. It can shut you down, or you can train for its eventuality so that your body knows how to respond even when your heart is pounding and the stakes are high. East Texas Krav Maga uses principle based training to help overcome fear. When you have trained for the worst your mind and body are prepared for anything.

Fancy Moves Aren’t Effective Under Stress

Sometimes people don’t start a self-defense program because they’ve seen movies where the hero does 16 backflips in a row followed by a spinning kick that takes out several opponents at once all with one hand tied behind his back. “I’m just not that coordinated,” people say. In Krav Maga, that’s the point.

The more dexterity, balance and coordination a move requires, the less likely you are to perform effectively under stress. Kicking high can expose vulnerabilities. Crazy complex moves named after animals look cool on camera, but if your life is at stake you’re not worried about starring in the sequel, you just want to stay alive.

Krav Maga training focuses on basic movements based on instinct. When choked, your hands go to your throat, and that’s where our defense starts, with your first natural reaction.

We also want to inflict the most damage possible in the shortest time frame. If someone attacks, we train to inhibit their ability to continue doing so. Straightforward elbows, kicks, knees, hammer fists and punches are harder to mess up when you’re stressed. Our students direct them at vulnerable areas with extreme aggression until they are safe.

Students Should Expect the Unknown

Actors practice choreographed fight scenes over and over. If you’re attacked you might not even see it coming, and you only have one chance to escape. We train for that. Students practice Krav Maga starting against a wall, with their eyes closed, being pushed in every direction and every other way we can introduce surprise.

For every individual, it’s possible they might face someone bigger, stronger or faster. We intentionally place students at a disadvantage. They learn to spot weaknesses and angles of attack that work in multiple scenarios. We train in ground fighting, but we also teach students to get up as soon as possible so they don’t rehearse staying in a position of weakness.

We can’t anticipate every situation, but we drill so students learn how to adapt.

Every Class Includes Stress Training

The goal at East Texas Krav Maga isn’t to teach the right way to kick or punch. It’s teaching students to defend themselves if they’re in real danger. That means being able to function under stress. If you’re not familiar with our system this may be difficult to read, but stick with us for a minute.

In a real struggle, nothing is going to go the way you practiced. A real attacker won’t stop because you ask them to or because you’re tired. When your system is full of adrenaline your body won’t work like normal.

We create stress on purpose. Sometimes we have multiple “attackers” yell and hit people with pads. Other times we have a bigger, stronger opponent sneak up and pick them off the ground and attempt to carry them away. Students have to fight, and we let that fight go on until long after they’re tired. If they make mistakes or freeze, we don’t let them quit.

That sounds harsh, but it creates individuals who are prepared. Over and over I hear how their Krav Maga training, especially the stress drill portion benefits them in other areas of life. They know if they can face a group of “attackers” and keep fighting even when exhausted it puts a tough meeting or angry relative in perspective.

Regular Training Maintains Preparedness

If self-defense training is tiring, doing the same activity while experiencing the fight or flight response is exhausting. Regular training keeps body and mind sharpened like a tool that is always at ready.

The main principle of Krav Maga is survival. We don’t focus on rules, but on cultivating a mindset that will do whatever necessary to prevail. Nothing is off limits, and we don’t stop until the attack is over and the student is safe.

If you’ve never trained with us or you haven’t been to class in a while, stop putting it off. Principle based training helps overcome fear. Start facing yours today.

Good Fear vs Bad Fear

Posted by: nlundstrom In: Uncategorized 17 Sep 2018 0 comments Tags: anxiety, Bad Fear, East Texas Krav Maga, Fear, Good Fear, Krav Maga, Self Defense, Tyler Texas

Fear sucks, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. It’s a powerful motivator that can keep us alive. It motivates us to wear our seatbelts and avoid certain parts of town late at night.

Fear management expert Tony Blauer says how you learn to cope with fear could be the most important thing you do, both in your personal and professional roles. He has the theory we actually already know what to do in many real-life situations, but we let fear hold us back. In life, and in self-defense training it’s possible to over think. When that happens, fear is bad.

Many times, though, fear is helpful. Let’s look at that a little closer.

3 Ways Fear is Good

Humankind doesn’t run from dinosaurs anymore, but fear is still helpful for these reasons:

Fear makes you pay attention to something that’s about to happen. You might be about to have a critical meeting with company stakeholders that results in your professional success or failure. Or you might be getting on a motorcycle for the first time. Either way, you need to pay attention.

Fear means opportunity. If a gunman walks into your church and you’ve been training with Freedom Defense Training and ETKM on how to deal with the situation, you have an opportunity to save lives. If you take a risk in spite of fear to reach your goals, you have the opportunity for success.

You get stronger when you overcome fear. Think of when you were a child and you crept toward that dark closet and turned on the light. The first time it was terrifying, but every time you faced that fear it loosened its hold. Fear happens. You can’t control whether or not scary things jump at you, but you can train your body and mind how to react.

How to Know When Someone Wants to Harm You

Let’s talk for a minute about another way fear is good. Sometimes your heart starts to pound and the hair rises on the back of your neck and it seems irrational. We’ve trained ourselves to ignore the feeling, now we need to start paying more attention.

The same signals are often present whether you’re talking about a rapist or murderer or someone who wants to take advantage of you for other reasons. Whether the threat is physical or psychological, something inside us often whispers they’re up to no good.

Gavin De Becker wrote extensively on intuition in his book The Gift of Fear, another must-read. Most of the time people who mean you harm don’t look like thugs and announce their intent. De Becker explains some of the ways they tip themselves off.

Forced teaming is when a person tries to create trust by indicating you’re in a thing together. They use the word “we” to make you think they identify with you and are on your side. A co-worker who doesn’t want to get busted might say, “Now look at what we’ve done,” when you had nothing to do with it. A stranger approaching a lone woman tips her off when he says, “Why don’t we get these groceries into the trunk.”

Most people realize they aren’t part of the “we.” An objection skitters across their mind and they squash it, thinking they’re overreacting, that the response would be rude. They leave the door open and bad things often step through.

Charm is another danger sign, because when people turn it on, they’re being artificial in an attempt to manipulate. De Becker says, “We must learn and teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness…people seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning…unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive.”

There are people who are kind because there is goodness in their heart, but when people turn on the charm, ask what they want. It could be your job, your car keys, your virtue or your life. Train yourself to look for the difference between kindness and charm. One is a character trait, the other is a verb.

Charm covers for when someone ignores your no. When you ask someone to leave, tell them you’re not interested or say they shouldn’t call again and they do, that’s a red flag. No matter how charming their insistence seems, letting them in isn’t a good idea.

De Becker says this might be the most significant signal. “’No’ is a word that must never be negotiated, because the person who chooses not to hear it is trying to control you,” he says. Even when strangers or acquaintances have good intentions, they are ignoring your preferences and seeking to control and impose their will.

Watch for people who give too many details. Aunt Millie might just like to talk, but when a stranger approaches you with way more information than you asked for, he or she is nervous or trying to distract you. When people have an ulterior motive or are telling a lie, what they’re saying sounds suspicious to them, so they keep trying to make it better.

Typecasting is when someone gives a slight insult to get you to engage. “You’re probably not willing to talk to someone who looks like me,” says the stranger in the parking lot. You want to prove them wrong, so you give them more time than you otherwise would.

Loan sharking happens when a stranger or associate tries to place you in their debt. When a man buys a woman a drink, there’s an expectation she will reciprocate with her attention. A criminal might point out your headlight isn’t working and expect you to respond with trust out of a feeling of obligation.

Unsolicited promises are a sign the speaker is trying to convince you. “Just one more thing and I’ll let you go, I promise,” you might hear from the telemarketer, the con man or the rapist. When given a promise you didn’t ask for, let that trigger an alert in your brain. You were hesitant about giving trust before, what comes next is very important.

Start paying attention to those small signals that send fissions of fear up your spine. Train your mind not to freeze, but to take action under stress. Fear is a good thing if it motivates you to get out of a difficult situation or protect yourself from those who mean you harm. Facing fear is an opportunity for growth.

At East Texas Krav Maga, we help students face their fears every day. Get in touch to find out more.

Fear 101

Posted by: nlundstrom In: Uncategorized 05 Sep 2018 0 comments Tags: ETKM, Fear, fear vs anxiety, Gift of Fear, Krav Maga, Lt Col Dave Grossman, Self Defense, Tyler Texas

The Problem with Fear

At East Texas Krav Maga we teach students to defend themselves. We often find what brought those students to our door is fear. They know deep down inside we live in a violent society where bad people do bad things. As we work with them toward their goals, we often uncover other fears that have to do with their relationships, their jobs, their past.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are better able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’”

That’s what we do in class and that’s the goal of this series. We want to look fear in the face, to rip off the mask and to find how to keep it from crippling us no matter when it rears its ugly head. Let’s clarify what, exactly we mean when we say fear.

Fear vs. Anxiety

When we say fear, we’re talking about is the body’s reaction when you’re actually in danger. Here’s the difference between anxiety and fear:

Anxiety – This feeling creates unpleasant sensations of nervousness, apprehension or foreboding. It’s like worry. You don’t know if the bad thing is going to happen, but you are uneasy because it might.
Fear – You experience the body’s fight or flight response to a perceived imminent threat. You’re actually in danger.

Both anxiety and fear have helped the human race survive. They’re both powerful, motivating emotions. They can also create problems.

Your Body on Fear

When you perceive danger, a chain reaction happens in your body, catapulting you into fight or flight mode. In the brain, your thalamus receives the danger signal and passes the red alert on to your hypothalamus. At that point your adrenal glands dump adrenaline into your body and blood rushes to your muscles so you’re ready to either fight or run away.

The whole thing happens almost instantaneously. Once it starts, you can’t stop your body’s reaction. Here’s what you experience:

Pupils dilate as your body prepares itself to be watchful for an escape. You may experience tunnel vision.
Your heart rate and breathing accelerate.
Your body feels shaky and you may tremble. Blood flow to muscles may make you feel tense.
Your skin becomes flushed or pale.
You begin to sweat so perspiration can cool you during exertion.
Salivation and digestion shuts down. Your mouth feels dry and your stomach feels like a stone.
You may lose control of your bladder or bowels.

After the threat is over, the body starts trying to get back to normal. If you fought or ran away you may feel exhausted from burning all that adrenaline. If the threat was psychological, you might feel restless and jumpy because it’s still in your system.

The fight or flight response is supposed to help you either defend yourself or get away. It’s very primal. The focus isn’t to use logic, so you can’t rely on your reasoning skills to help you when you’re in danger.

When Fear Can Kill

American Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman is a psychology professor at West Point and former Army Ranger. His book On Combat is a must-read. Grossman uses a color-coded graph to explain what happens to your heart rate when you experience fear and how that impacts the rest of your body.

Heart Rate – beats per min.	Body Condition	What You Feel
60-85	White	Most people’s normal heart rate at rest.
90-110	Yellow	Fine motor skills Reduce
115-145	Red	Complex motor skills Reduce
145-175	Gray	Tunnel Vision Auditory Exclusion Loss of Cognitive Function
175 or higher	Black	Fight and Flight Freezing Irrational Thoughts Submissive Behaviour Loss of bowel/bladder function

Note this reaction has to do with perceived danger. When you run a 5k, your heart rate stays up for as long as it takes you to reach the finish line and you’re still able to compile your grocery list and remember where you put your car keys. The fight or flight response isn’t triggered.

However, when someone puts a knife to your throat, how you respond could save or end your life. If you can’t rely on your reasoning or your fine motor skills, what can you do?

In the rest of this series we’ll talk about the difference between good fear and bad fear, how to use your fears to prepare for the worst and why principle based training is the best way to prepare your body to respond in ways that can save your life. Between now and then, why not try a free class at Krav Maga? Here’s a link.

Fight Back against Human Trafficking in East Texas

Posted by: nlundstrom In: Uncategorized 10 Aug 2018 0 comments

Recently national headlines contained news about children and teens missing in Iowa. It’s always a concern when young people go missing, and in this situation the concern was they were victims of human trafficking. There’s been a lot of chatter about whether the numbers are correct and whether or not the news and social media accounts are accurate.

At ETKM we wanted to know the truth about what’s happening in our area. We talked with Kelly Culpepper, Development Director for the nonprofit organization For the Silent. Here are excerpts from that interview.

Can you share some statistics on sexual exploitation in our area?

The University of Texas says more than 79,000 people have been victims of sex trafficking in our state. Providing those victims with care costs $6.6 billion a year.

Sex trafficking is something that’s hard to put numbers to, because it’s not out in the open. Since 2012, For the Silent (FTS) has identified and assisted 162 victims of sexual exploitation in East Texas.

What does sex trafficking look like in East Texas?

I think a lot of people have seen the movie “Taken,” and think it’s where girls are dragged out from under the bed and physically being taken. That can happen, but what we see at our organization, that’s not typically the case. Girls and boys can both be victims, but our organization works with girls.

Really it’s more like a pimp culture where pimps prey on minor girls who are vulnerable to be trafficked. They persuade them through a relationship and try to get them to a place where they feel like they don’t have another option.

How do they lure girls?

Pimps identify a girl’s wants or needs and use those to get close. Contact can happen in person or online. He might offer her nice things like getting her hair done, getting her nails done, purses, jewelry or other comforts. If she’s hungry he’ll offer her something to eat. If she needs a place to stay he might provide it.

They tell the girl she’s beautiful. They say I love you. This girl feels like she has a boyfriend but in reality the goal is to pimp her out, to exploit her.

Once he has created the relationship with this girl, he turns the table on her and says, “We need this money and I’ve done all this for you.” He says she has to repay him.

There are a lot of different ways it could happen. Some pimps use fraud or coercion or force. Some threaten to hurt their family members or go after a sister. Usually when a girl is exploited, she’s doing what she does out of fear.

What makes a girl more likely to be a victim?

Any minor can be at risk, but some or more vulnerable. Runaways, kids in and out of the foster care system, boys or girls who are alone a lot or don’t have a constant place of comfort or home are at risk.

How do you work with East Texas youth to prevent sex trafficking?

I Have a Voice is our prevention program. We go in to child advocacy centers, middle schools, high schools etc. We offer summer programs at apartment complexes. Every week there’s a topic.

We teach girls to be aware of what’s going on in their community and to look out for exploiters. We give them tools so they can see when people are trying to lure them in and so they can watch out for their peers.

The goal is at the end of the course for each girl to know she can stand up. She can say no. She can look out for others and speak out when they see one person trying to exploit another.

We also teach them the myths of pimp culture. The movie Pretty Woman glamorized prostitution. We want girls to see what’s really going on and put a face on what a pimp actually looks like. We help them understand the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships. We don’t tell them what to do, we just help them realize it for themselves.

FTS also provides professional training for healthcare and social workers, foster parents and community members who want to help.

Fight Back against Human Trafficking With ETKM

For the Silent combats human trafficking by spreading awareness and being vigilant. East Texas Krav Maga is working to do the same. We also want to train youth to defend themselves so if they’re in a situation where someone tries to force them to do something they don’t want to, they can get away and go home safe.

Right now with any new family membership, teenagers between 13 and 19 years old train for free. Sign up on our website or get in touch to find out more.

If you’re a current ETKM student you can help by sharing this article so more people know what’s happening in our area. Let’s work together to make our community safe for our children and teens.

Why Women’s Self-Defense Is Not Enough

Posted by: nlundstrom In: Uncategorized 17 Jul 2018 0 comments Tags: Domestic Abuse, East Texas Krav Maga, ETKM, Krav Maga, Self Defense, Statisitics, Tyler Texas, Women's Self Defense

Straight Talk on Women’s Self-Defense and Domestic Violence

How big a concern is violent crime for women in Texas? Late last year Texas DPS released a Texas crime analysis with chilling statistics.

In 2016, there was one murder every six hours and a rape every 40 minutes. Every 16 minutes someone committed a robbery, and every 7 minutes a Texan was the victim of violent assault. Add those numbers together and you have one violent crime every four minutes. Just in Texas.

Those statistics provide a compelling case for Texas women to learn to defend themselves, and they should. At East Texas Krav Maga we teach individuals to respond aggressively and decisively when there’s a threat, even if that threat includes a knife or gun.

We don’t just offer routines and rituals because we know sometimes that type of women’s self-defense is not enough. The threat involves the mind as much as the body.

In this article, we want to focus on the danger of violent assault to women. Our self-defense for women and men doesn’t just focus on curriculum, but on developing a mindset that turns individuals from potential victims into confident weapons.

Violent Assault and Women – Statistics

Government agencies just released in 2017 what happened in 2016. An FBI report showed there were an estimated 1.2 million violent crimes that year in the United States. Of those, 95,730 of them were rapes. In the U.S., one in five women will be the victim of sexual assault. Overall property crime has gone down, but rape, murder and aggravated assault has increased.

Texas Women and Violence

The national numbers are staggering, but when you think about the whole United States, those women seem far away. Here are some of the numbers from the Texas Council on Family Violence:

• In Texas during 2016, a man killed his wife or girlfriend every 2.5 days.
• One in every 10 murders in Texas overall happened when a man killed his female partner.
• 68 percent of the time, the killer used a gun.
• Murdered women ranged from age 15 to 92. The majority of those killed were between 20 and 39 years old.
• 146 women died in Texas, plus an additional 24 children and adults.

East Texas Women and Violence

Of the 146 women who died in Texas, eight of them were from the East Texas area. KETK published a list of their names to honor their memories. Most died of gunshot wounds. One died two days after her assault from severe head trauma. In several cases there were children nearby when the assault happened.

The Biggest Threat

Women’s self-defense scenarios often focus on what might happen when a person is walking to her car in a dark parking lot or shopping on the wrong side of town. Pictures show an assailant who jumps out of the shadows wearing a hoodie to mask his identity.

The problem is, that’s not often how it actually happens. Let’s look again at the Texas statistics.

• When experts analyzed shootings across the nation, between 2009 and 2015, 57 percent of them involved someone killing their intimate partner.
• In Texas 35 percent of the women murdered were wives killed by their husbands. Another 12 percent were separated from their spouse.
• 32 percent of the murdered women were girlfriends.
• 68 percent of assailants shot their victims, 15 percent stabbed them, six percent strangled them and four percent beat them.

That’s just murder statistics. Women are also much more likely to be raped or assaulted by people they know than by a stranger hiding in the shadows. The biggest threat to women, the one that might end their life usually comes from someone she knows.

This creates a problem. Women often say they might be comfortable using violence to protect themselves from an outside threat, but they’re unprepared when assaulted by someone they care about, someone who is supposed to love them back.

What can a woman do when she is caught off guard, overpowered by someone stronger and facing a threat? Women’s self-defense classes rarely take on this complex problem.

Every woman’s situation is unique, and we don’t pretend to have all the answers, but we do acknowledge the problem and encourage an environment of respect and support. As a result, some of our female students have been courageous enough to share their stories in the hope of helping other women experience freedom from abuse.

Understanding The Heart of the Issue

Women of all races and socioeconomic groups are equally likely to be hurt or killed by their partner. Nonprofit organization Domestic Abuse Shelter says in most cases, domestic violence doesn’t happen because one person loses control, but because they’re using anger and pain to gain control. It seems on the outside their temper takes over, but that’s because they are excellent at manipulating others.

Domestic violence is a pattern of behaviors. The point is to achieve compliance or control.

The problem is in the heart. The woman might feel emotions like love, fear, guilt, dependency or inferiority. Sometimes their emotions keep them from taking responsibility for their own safety. Then when things go terribly wrong, they don’t know how to react.

Developing the Right Mindset

If you talk to students at East Texas Krav Maga, especially the ones who came for women’s self-defense, you’ll hear these recurring themes:

• ETKM training leads to increased confidence. We regularly expose students to physical and mental stress and coach them on how to fight through. They learn their own persistence and find inner steel. That spills over into other areas of their lives.
• Self-defense classes at ETKM replace fear with action. When you practice an aggressive response over and over again it becomes automatic. You don’t freeze, even if you’re in a less than advantageous position or you see a weapon.
• Women’s self-defense lessons from ETKM teach students to protect others. If they experience an assault that involves their loved ones, they already know how to respond.

We also teach students they’re too valuable to lose. When people of any gender truly know their worth to their family members, the community and the people at our gym, they realize no one has the right to harm them. They turn that outrage into aggression. Even if an attacker catches them off guard, they will turn it into a very bad day for that attacker.

Domestic violence and violence against women is a very real problem in East Texas. We want to help in any way possible. We’re committed to raising awareness, to providing information and resources and to training women who might be assaulted, but will never be victims.

New Student’s Guide to Krav Maga Training

Posted by: nlundstrom In: Uncategorized 16 Apr 2018 0 comments Tags: ETKM, Fitness, Goals, Krav Maga, martial arts, new student, Self Defense, Tyler Texas

When you take your first few classes at East Texas Krav Maga, you’ll most likely feel exhilarated and empowered. Students leave their very first class with knowledge they could use if they were choked, picked up or dragged. Krav Maga is the official self-defense system of the Israeli Defense Forces because it works, and training makes regular people into powerful weapons in a very short time frame. Here’s how to make your training as effective as possible.

Specify Goals

In Krav Maga, as in the rest of life, people are more likely to achieve their goals if they are specific about what they are. Take a few minutes to think through why you want to learn. Write it down and post it somewhere you’ll see it often, especially on days when you feel like staying home. Some of the goals we most commonly hear are as follows:

Learn real-life self-defense – Krav Maga is useful for anyone, no matter their size, strength or fitness level.
Improve physical fitness – Each class is a whole body workout. It includes a warm-up, drills to develop skills and bursts of activity that are intense cardio. Students who attend class regularly almost always report greater stamina, improved muscle tone and core strength and reduced body fat.
Develop confidence – Some of our students have been victims of violent attack, and they refuse to ever be a victim Even if you’ve never been in a violent situation, most people have felt physically threatened. Krav Maga changes your perspective on fear, makes you more willing to face new challenges and instills a confidence that spills over into other areas of your life.
Increase awareness – Because we consistently train for real-life situations in which the unexpected happens, training makes students better at reading situations and reacting with both their body and head. As you teach your body to respond decisively and inoculate against a panic freeze, your mind begins to focus even when you’re stressed. We also train students not to ignore those warning signals you feel when you face threats. They’re there for a reason.

Understand Aggression

You won’t train long before an instructor watches you practicing and says to repeat what you just did, only with more aggression and more violence. Sometimes students feel confusion, because the act of striking an opponent or a pad is inherently violent.

However, aggression in Krav Maga means understanding you are too important to lose, you have confidence from your training and no one has the right to threaten what matters to you most. Read How to Prepare Your Mind for Physical Aggression if you haven’t already.

What to Expect During Level One

Your first class an instructor will help you learn several Krav Maga basics. Here are a few fundamentals:

Fighting Stance

Stand in front of a mirror with your feet shoulder width apart and weight slightly shifted forward to the balls of your feet. Raise your hands to about eye level. This is your neutral stance. Now, take a half step forward with your non-dominant leg and a half step back with the other. If you’re right handed, your left foot should be in front, and for lefties step forward with your right foot.

Make sure your toes are pointed forward toward your attacker. Bend your knees slightly and distribute slightly more weight to your back foot.

Unless you’re striking, your hands should be up, about where you would be able to touch your cheekbones with your thumbs. Round your shoulders in slightly and tighten your core. Keep your chin down and eyes up, almost like your eyeballs are in your forehead instead of your eye sockets. John Whitman demonstrates a correct fighting stance here.

Palm Strikes

We often teach palm strikes because they are extremely effective. The bones of the hand are fragile, and effective punching requires training. Palm strikes reduce your risk of injury.

Start in your fight stance. You’ll actually make contact with the fleshy part of your palm just above the wrist. Flex your wrist, allowing your fingers to curl slightly. Forcefully drive your palm into the target.

This isn’t just a hand movement. Picture the power coming from the ground, traveling through your core then running down your arm as you send the palm strike. Your core is engaged, and your shoulder should rotate forward as you strike.

Straight Punch

Punching starts with the same stance and motion as the palm strike. Close your fists with your thumbs folded over your fingers. Always hit with the two knuckles on your index and middle finger. Don’t bring your fist out and then swing in, or you will telegraph your attack.

Punches should shoot straight from your core, with any hand rotation happening at the very end just before you make contact. The elbow stays down, with the hand leading the way. See a demonstration here.

While videos are helpful for practicing at home, there’s no substitute for the input you’ll get from a live instructor. Videos show what a move should look like, but they don’t identify what you might be doing wrong. Make sure you’re practicing correctly so you don’t fossilize mistakes.

Common Hurdles

New Krav Maga students report facing challenges in the following areas:

Developing stamina – Even if you’re in good shape when you walk in the door, Krav Maga is different from any other class that develops fitness. It’s normal to find yourself out of breath, muscles begging for a break. With regular practice, you’ll quickly improve and soon find yourself in the best shape of your life.

Bruising – Krav Maga means contact combat, and we train for real life situations with real violence. If you punch incorrectly or do so repeatedly without gloves, your knuckles will show it. When we practice inside and outside defense, sometimes students bruise on their arms. It’s impossible to prepare for real violence without making contact. Your body will adjust and you’ll notice less bruising as time goes by.

Frustration learning new techniques – New students often want to soak everything up like a sponge, and that’s great. However, there’s a lot to learn in level one alone, and sometimes the brain gets tired. If you hit the wall, know that’s common. Ask an instructor to walk you back through what they just demonstrated and help you make better sense of what you’re seeing.

Fear during stress drills – One of the biggest challenges you face as a new student is the anxiety you feel during stress drills. Most of the class you’ll work on developing stamina while learning a new technique, but almost every class provides an opportunity for you to practice that skill under stress. Sometimes you’ll face multiple “attackers.” Other times we’ll ask you to spin with your eyes closed so you don’t know from which direction to expect a threat. It’s uncomfortable for a reason. Stress drills help you understand your body’s natural response to stress and respond even when you’re outside your comfort zone. They might be the most beneficial and critical aspect of your training.

If you haven’t already started, show up at your first class well hydrated and wearing comfortable clothes. You don’t need any equipment or previous knowledge. We’ll help you learn at an individual pace and get you in the best mental and physical shape of your life. Contact us for more information today.

How to Prepare Your Mind for Physical Aggression

Posted by: nlundstrom In: Uncategorized 13 Apr 2018 0 comments Tags: Body Response, ETKM, Krav Maga, Mental Aggression, Preparation, Tyler Texas, Under Attack

What does it mean when an East Texas Krav Maga instructor tells students to act with more aggression, more violence? If as a student those instructions have caused you to feel confusion, you’re not alone. You’re punching the pad as hard as you can or sending endless knee strikes, and that seems violent enough. What exactly are they asking you to do, and why do they stress it so often?

Krav Maga isn’t just about training the body in self-defense techniques. It is powerful in real-life situations because it also trains the mind. Doing one without the other is useless. No tactic, no weapon, no training will be enough to protect you if you’re mentally unprepared and facing people who are more aggressive, more violent, more committed to causing you physical pain.

Mind Training 101

This article is written with the intent of helping you begin that mental training. How greatly it benefits you depends on the time you take to walk through each portion in your own mind and how often you apply its principles. The process is highly individual, because only you know what you most fear and what you treasure.

If you’re training at East Texas Krav Maga, you want to learn to protect yourself. Sure, you might also be there because it’s great for weight loss and we have a fantastic group of people, but you could pursue fitness and personal interaction in a variety of ways.

You’re primarily there because you realize we live in a violent world where bad things happen. You want to have the best possible chance of going home safe if they happen to you. Here’s what you need to know about turning your mind, not just your body into a weapon.

Define Your Threat

You may not have thought it all the way through, but there are scenarios running around in the back of your mind you want to defend against. We’re not talking about a time when you could hand over your car keys and walk away, but a time you know you might not survive.

At Krav Maga, we always counsel students if there’s an option of giving the attacker what he or she wants or using reason, do that and avoid violence. But right now we’re talking about when that’s not a possibility.

For the rest of this article, assume your life is at risk and logic no longer applies. Take a minute to look inward and identify what those scenarios are, what you most fear.

Let it form in your mind like a hologram. Fill in the blank.

The attacker or attackers look like ____.
They say _____ (be specific).
I am at a disadvantage because _____ (they have a weapon, they’re bigger etc).
They threaten to ______ if I don’t ______.

Allow that scenario to fully load in your mind not to be morbid or to cause yourself stress, but to truly understand what it is you fear. What are your surroundings like? What shoes are you wearing and what does the ground sound like beneath your feet? What’s the temperature? How well can you see? Hang on to that scenario; we’ll come back to it in a moment.

Understand the Body’s Response to Threat

Everyone feels fear at one time or another. Fear causes an automatic reaction in the body. You’ve heard about the fight or flight response, which is when your brain’s reacts to fear by sending signals to your nervous system.

Your heart rate spikes, your blood pressure rises and your breathing speeds up. Adrenaline and cortisol flood your system. Blood flows to your arms and legs.

In cave man days, that response was helpful. Cave man didn’t need to think things through. He wasn’t going to stand and fight the sabre tooth, or reason with it. There was no need for complex mental processing.

The bad part is, sometimes the body’s response to fear or stress can actually be detrimental in a violent confrontation. Some people experience tunnel vision and their thoughts become jumbled. Processing slows down. You may feel you’re having trouble getting enough air and that in itself causes panic. Violence often causes people to freeze. If you freeze, you lose.

Ask yourself how you felt when you pictured your attack scenario? If you truly allowed yourself to visualize it, you probably already have a hint of the stress you might experience if violence actually occurred.

Compare Rage with Aggression

Sometimes students think being more aggressive means getting angry, but that’s not what we mean at all. Here’s the difference.

Rage is white hot anger that floods your senses and takes over. You’re ready to smash, annihilate and demolish everything in your path. Rage goes off like an explosion in all directions, consuming everything. Your brain isn’t in control, your emotions are. It’s a powerful emotion, but it impairs decision making. It also burns out quickly, leaving you exhausted and vulnerable.

Aggression in Krav Maga is the commitment to do whatever it takes to keep your attacker from being successful so you are able to go home safe. It’s like a focused weapon you’re trained to use with precision and directionality. It is determination paired with violence. Aggression doesn’t quit until the battle is over, but it never involves the loss of mental control. Even when you’re tired, aggression helps you re-focus again and again.

While your attacker may feel like you’ve turned into the Hulk, there’s no mindlessness to the type of aggression we’re training for. Rage happens when someone flips your switch. Aggression is a mindset you choose, cultivate and focus.

Find Your Motivation

Go back to the scenario you pictured earlier. Find some time and space to look inward again and ask yourself the following:

What do you want to live for?

What would you be prepared to die for?

Don’t accept the quick, obvious answer, look deeper and again allow the answers to those questions time to develop. In answer to the first question, most people say they want to live for their families. Your answer might have involved your spouse, your parents, your children or that person you’ve fallen in love with.

The first question establishes what brings you joy and gets you out of bed every morning. The second touches what’s closest to your heart. Most of the time the answer involves people, but it might also involve your beliefs.

You have years you want to spend with the ones who matter most. You have a responsibility to them, and they rely on you. If you were gone, they would suffer emotionally and possibly physically. You would die to protect them.

Recognize the Cost of Failure

At this point you have mentally defined a threat and uncovered why failure isn’t an option. If your attackers win, you might lose your life or your ability to enjoy it as you currently do. This may be the most difficult part of mentally preparing yourself, but it’s a necessary step.

Imagine you fail. There’s pain involved for you. Everything you fear becomes reality. Your body becomes broken one piece at a time. You experience crippling violence like you’ve never experienced before. Your attacker gets what they want. They win at your expense.

Now take time to think what comes after. You’re gone, but your family isn’t. Envision your loved ones’ reaction when law enforcement tells them what happened to you. If you have children, picture your spouse having to tell them their parent is gone.

It’s difficult, but don’t change the channel. Allow to unfold a future without you. Your loved ones face financial challenges. They are devastated by grief and loss for a very long time. You leave a hole that will never completely heal. Their grief is compounded by the thought you died in pain and were taken by evil people.

In time, they move on. You are a memory. There is a stone with your name on it that stands under the elements year after year until the letters wear away. Failure cost you everything.

Again, don’t just read the words. Close your eyes and allow those emotions to build inside you. Feel it build in your gut. Recognize if you’re facing a violent attacker, they are trying to take from you unless you stop them.

Determine not to let that happen and allow that determination to build like a battery charging. We’re about to tell you how to turn them into something useful.

Go to the Dark Side

We’re raised to avoid physical violence, but in this one situation, it’s okay to find the part of yourself willing to do whatever it takes. When you fight you do it not out of hatred or the desire to harm others, but because someone dared threaten you and those you love.

Find that part of you willing to stop them. You’ll hurt them until they don’t get up. You’ll kill if necessary. Make peace with that.

Develop Your Power Base

Three beliefs will make you strong. Study them, you’ll practice during class.

I am too important to lose, I must prevail.
I have trained for this. I have confidence I will stand.
My indignation is a tool I can use as a weapon.

Worth. Confidence. Indignation. Drill those three into your mind so that you default to them when you feel stress. While you’re still inside your mind, fuse the emotions you’ve been cultivating with your worth, your confidence and your indignation. Wherever you feel those emotions, whether it’s in your chest or your stomach, picture them forming a powerful sphere.

That is your mental aggression, your starting point. When you come to class you’ll learn specific techniques, but every time you must train from that perspective. You are too important for your loved ones to lose, you have training that gives you confidence, and no one has the right to try and take that away.

Inoculate Against Stress

At Krav Maga, we do stress drills because it’s the best way to train your body not to freeze. No one looks forward to them. The more you train, the tougher we make them, because our goal is not to make you comfortable, but to make sure you go home safe.

When you come to class, devote the hour you’re there to training your mind alongside your body. Analyze where you’re afraid and use that to get better.

When you participate in drills, do this. Gather worth, confidence and indignation inside of you like a ball. Allow everything else to fall away and draw power from that sphere. You can still practice safety in training because your mind will be clear. Go there again and again to train your mind.

Start Today

At East Texas Krav Maga, we hope none of our students never face this type of threat, but we know people do every day. We’ve never been about fancy fighting techniques, rules or rituals. We give students the tools they need to face real life threats. Start training your body and mind when you try a class today.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymJY_TWgOy4&feature=youtu.be

Punch Defenses and Knife Defenses

Posted by: nlundstrom In: Uncategorized 19 Mar 2018 0 comments Tags: knife defenses, Krav Maga, Punch Defenses

Written By: John Whitman

I was teaching punch defenses in a Krav Maga class recently, when a guest, who trains in Muay Thai, asked why we don’t simply “cover” or “shell up” against punches. It was an excellent question.

Krav Maga prefers to intercept and redirect straight punches a short distance away from our face, and to block hook punches with an extended defense that is farther from the head. While these are not radically different from defenses you might see in sport fighting, we emphasize these extended defenses more than a sport fighting coach might. We do also teach students to shell up and cover (by which I mean shielding the face or side of the head with our arms pressed close to the skull), but we rarely introduce covering defenses as our primary technique.

Are we right about this? After all, the covering defenses have serious advantages: they are simple, and the attacker might damage his knuckles on your forearms. Also, there is a downside to teaching the extended defenses — I see many beginning students who fall “behind the curve” of the attacker’s combinations, and expose themselves trying to catch up while doing extended defenses. So why not simply teach covering defenses and be done with it?

The reason: edged weapons. One of Krav Maga’s concepts is that punch defenses and knife defenses must be similar, because you probably will not see a knife and you’re likely to treat the movement like a punch. If you use a covering defense, you will get stabbed (although possibly in a less vital part of your body).

Why this emphasis on knife defenses? One of the influential eras of Krav Maga’s history was the First Intifada (1987-1991), when knife attacks in Israel were quite common. I had the honor of meeting and talking with Sheike Barak, one of founder Imi Lichtenfeld’s lesser known but highly respected students. A retired Lt. Colonel in the IDF, he told me about the Krav Maga organization’s efforts to develop techniques that worked for different types of civilians, including children, during knife attacks prevalent at that time.

Given this history, it’s easy to see why Krav Maga places such a premium on defenses that work against both punches and knife attacks. But is the emphasis still appropriate? I teach students in west Los Angeles in 2018, not the West Bank in 1987. Is it so likely that my students will be attacked with a knife that I should emphasize knife defenses rather than a much simpler covering defense?

My own conclusion has been to continue teaching the “extended” defenses as Krav Maga’s primary techniques against punches, especially in surprise situations. I rate the risk of taking a stab higher, even if stabs are less common than punches. At the same time, we are dedicating additional time to teaching students to use covering defenses when necessary. But for initial reactions, especially in surprise situations, we still teach the extended defense. Maybe it’s my inherited bias as a Krav Maga instructor, but I think the consequences of failing against a knife are worth worrying about first.

KRAV MAGA IS ABOUT A LOT MORE THAN JUST FIGHTING.

Posted by: nlundstrom In: Uncategorized 09 Mar 2018 0 comments Tags: Fighting, Isreali Hand to Hand Combat, Krav Maga, Self Defense, Tyler Texas

Krav Maga was developed by the Israelis in the 1940’s to train their soldiers to protect themselves in some of the most dangerous environments on the planet. The Israeli’s needed something that their soldiers could learn in a relatively short time and that was devastatingly effective against a wide array of threats. Their answer was Krav Maga.

In the 1970’s Krav Maga spread beyond the army and was adapted for civilian use. It proved incredibly effective for civilian self defence because of it’s focus on surviving violent encounters rather than winning fights within a limited set of rules.

Once it spread beyond the Israeli army, Krav Maga was quickly adopted around the world by military and police forces, as well as civilian martial art schools. Its popularity was largely due to its logical approach to real violence and it’s effective techniques which are based on the body’s natural instinct and reflexes; this is what also makes Krav Maga quick to learn and practical to use.

Today Krav Maga is taught exclusively in every branch of the Israeli protective services where it continues to develop. It is the the number one choice for military and police forces in the world. And it is taught in civilian Krav Maga schools in virtually every country on the planet.

Krav Maga is a system that continues to develop. As knowledge grows and as the nature of threats around the world change, Krav Maga as a system adapts and grows to meet those threats.