I tumble to the floor and kick out at my assailant’s kneecaps. He jumps on top of me and starts thumping me around the face. I put my hands up to defend my head, elbow him in the abdomen, grab his head and twist him over, kicking him as I make my escape.
At fortysomething, I have started to learn the rudiments of Krav Maga, an Israeli self-defence system that is one of the fastest growing martial arts in the country.
It involves learning fist-fighting, eye-gouging, testicle-kicking — even a bit of ear-pulling. It’s rough, tough, down and dirty. And it’s mostly enjoyable; sometimes painful, occasionally exhausting, frequently enlightening. I’ve had a bad rib, lots of bruises and have questioned why I bother. But I’ve continued, not only because it’s potentially useful but because Krav Maga touches something primal: the need to defend yourself and the development of the animal instinct required to do so.
This week the Home Office reported a 6 per cent rise in violent crime as well as figures showing there were 3.8 million active offenders in England and Wales. It is information like this that has led people like me to Krav Maga.
At the class I attend, in Farringdon, in London, about 20 of us meet and arrange in a circle. The teacher, Stewart McGill, is an ex-karate black belt. He has charm, short hair and muscles on his muscles. He demonstrates how to get out of a headlock or from being pinned against the wall, or how to wrest yourself from someone who is holding you down and inviting his cronies to kick you in the head. Then the class try the moves, using the aggressive counter-measures necessary for a hard-knock real-life situation. To use McGill’s phrase, “It’s not golf.”
Nor is Krav Maga even a martial art, but a “self-defence system”. What’s the difference? “A martial art suggests an aesthetic sensibility and an underlying philosophy,” McGill says. “Krav Maga is a practical, pressure-tested means of defence close to military training, which can be applied under situations of extreme stress.” It doesn’t necessarily look good and you don’t contemplate your navel, but it leaves you better equipped to handle all manner of unpleasantness.
The class is admirably diverse: lawyers, hospital workers, students, City bankers and a vicar in one of London’s more difficult parishes. “We’re targets, I’m afraid,” the vicar told me, aiming a punch at my groin. There’s a young woman about to go travelling in South America, a security guard seeking ways of incapacitating aggressors, and some white collar workers. “I recently moved to Peckham, South London, and if anything happens I want to be ready,” says one classmate, in a typical response.
McGill is one of almost 20 Krav Maga teachers in the UK. He used to specialise in the Japanese martial art Goju Ryu karate. Then he did an accredited Krav Maga course and set up the East London School of Krav Maga about a year ago. Even within that short space of time, his client base has changed. “The interest used to come from people who’d done a martial art,” he says. “Now it’s first-timers; educated and inquisitive people, mostly in their thirties and forties.” Some have had serious experiences like being mugged at cash points. Others, like me, do it for exercise and as a preventive measure. “The perception of crime has really impacted over the past year,” McGill says. “There is the feeling that we have to take personal responsibility for our security.”
He now has about 150 students. He delivers seminars to corporate clients, advertising agencies and street-crime wardens, as well as to police selfdefence instructors, who train in a personal capacity to supplement what they currently teach which is based on aikido and jujitsu forms. After a recent session with a Home Counties special response squad — those chaps that like to visit wrongdoers at 6am — McGill was pleased to find that they admired the brutal efficacy of the Kravist art. “I was really impressed with the system,” one policeman says.
Among Krav Maga’s celebrity advocates are the actresses Jennifer Lopez and Lucy Liu. And women certainly seem to like Krav Maga. “It’s still maleoriented but I see more females in the class all the time,” McGill says. “The class is fun. Karate classes can be boring, doing the same move again and again.” Krav Maga is purposeful — a workout with added value. Sometimes rubber knives and guns are used, but it’s not just for effect. As McGill says: “That’s what you might be up against.”
Krav Maga, a Hebrew term that translates as “contact combat”, was forged in the anti-Semitic stew that was 1930s Bratislava, now the capital of Slovakia. Here, the wrestler, boxer and activist Imi Lichtenfeld developed a hand-to-hand combat system. He fine-tuned it in the Middle East in 1940 and, in 1948, Israel’s nascent government commissioned him to teach it to the police, Secret Services and defence forces.
By 1995, the International Krav Maga Federation had come into being, with affiliations worldwide. It has been taken up by police and military forces, including the NYPD, the LAPD, the FBI and the Swedish Army.
Krav Maga’s ethos is that ordinary people can learn how to defend themselves — using distraction techniques and simultaneous blocking and striking — and part of its principle is that it is easy to apply. A student of McGill’s, whom we’ll call “Dan”, got into a road-rage confrontation after five sessions. “He blocked the attacker’s right-handed swing while kicking him in the groin,” McGill says. “The attacker went down. About 80 per cent of attacks on males are right-handed swings. Attacks on females are more likely to be assaults where the perpetrator grabs the victim in a choke, for example.”
Krav Maga teaches how to manage these threats and to shock the perpetrator with speed and ferocity. “Assailants are often surprised to be counter-attacked,” McGill says. “And while they are aggressive, they are not often good fighters.” Indeed, Krav Maga teaches that pre-emptive strikes may sometimes be necessary. This can be difficult legal territory, as well as potentially landing the Krav Maga student in more trouble than he/she anticipated — with the police and the attacker.
Stewart McGill is on www.kravmaga-eastlondon.com, 0778 6671974; or visit www.krav-maga.com. Krav Maga, by David Kahn, to be published by Piatkus (£12.99) on February 3, is available from Times Books First at £10.39 plus p&p. Call 0870 1608080 or visit www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
SECOND OPINION
This month we published Body Active, a guide to joint surgery, heart surgery and sexual health. Inside, the TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson (far right) wrote about his hip problems and how, at 44, he was told he was too young to have a hip replacement. Many of our readers expressed support for Mr Clarkson and offered advice. Here are some extracts from their letters:
