Israeli Krav Maga’s Tactical Ten Commandants
Krav Maga’s Behavioral Code
Imi emphasized good citizenship and a strong sense of morality. The following pillars of Imi’s system help summarize his teachings.
The Israeli Krav Maga Advantage
Responsible people pursue Israeli krav maga training to shield themselves from violence; not to orchestrate violence. The kravist trains and prepares himself to face down the unfortunate, ugly specter of violence. Krav maga training, by both necessity and resultant design, focuses on the realistic and brutal nature of a physical assault. This self-defense and fighting system is designed to thwart and neutralize any type of threat or attack. The key survival ingredient is your mind-set. Those who train physically and mentally to preempt and, if necessary, thwart violence with overwhelming counterviolence will respond differently from people who do not condition themselves.
You, the kravist, when threatened or attacked must unleash a torrent of overwhelming counterviolence. (This assumes there is no peaceful option and the circumstances are legally justified.) Krav maga’s goal is to neutralize an attacker quickly and decisively. If you must defend yourself, krav maga enables you to effectively stun, incapacitate, and, if necessary, control your attacker. Your honed, instinctive reaction will turn the table on your attacker(s) immediately. Krav maga tactics are designed as defensive capability multipliers. A few mastered krav maga techniques are highly effective in most situations. When properly learned and practiced, these tactics will become first nature.
Conflict Avoidance
Nonviolent conflict avoidance is always your best solution. The following is the most important lesson krav maga can teach you: Do not to be taken by surprise or caught in the “-5.” Becoming an accomplished observer helps you resolve a situation before it fully evolves or gets out of hand. By constantly surveying your locale and its dynamics, you will notice at all times who and what surrounds you.
Walking away from a confrontation is a test of mental discipline and moral fiber. For example, if a situation involves someone taunting you, attempting to embarrass you, or assert social hierarchy, take the sensible action and walk away. Should you (correctly) walk away, be sure to disengage with a heightened sense of potential confrontation awareness. Until you are safe, continue to maintain both a mental and physical preparedness to spring into action. Extricating yourself from a potentially violent situation is both wise and pragmatic for myriad reasons including avoiding potential injury to you, your family, and to avoiding criminal and civil liability proceedings.
Use common sense, basic precautions, and a confident demeanor to minimize your chances of being targeted and assaulted. Notwithstanding these preventive measures, accept the possibility of violence targeting you. There are several types of violence including social, criminal, sociopathic, and professional. Statistically, you are most likely to face the first or second categories, social or criminal, respectively. Terrorism usually falls into a blend of the latter two categories. While you need not live in fear, denial is the most common obstacle to taking appropriate action. This is why you must be prepared if you must face down a violent situation. Sharpen your mental and physical skills so you can implement them without thinking.
Instinctive, Aggressive Reaction Is Required
When in danger, your brain and body respond reflexively. Therefore, your self-defense reaction must be both instantaneously reflexive and instinctive. If you are in a fight and an attacker makes an unanticipated or unrecognized action, the brain cannot find a practiced response resulting in decision paralysis. By training to respond, you will call upon your instincts and reflexes when attacked. With proper training, you will learn to conquer your fear and to control the energy and power from your body’s fight-or-flight response. Realistic training is designed to eliminate the third human reaction, a freeze response. You will learn not to freeze under pressure. While it is unusual to be in a situation where you must fight for your life, it does happen. You must be prepared.
Krav maga harnesses your natural abilities for you to (re)act optimally with little cognitive interference. With practice, you will be able to explode into action. Your attacker will literally not know what hit him—repeatedly. Only serious, hard, and appropriate training can trigger this fighting response. If push comes to shove, literally and figuratively, krav maga is designed to handle any type or number of assaults. For a kravist, there are no set solutions for ending a fight. A kravist may have different physical strengths and capabilities. He may have a strong kick or hand strike capabilities; or strong infighting; or throwing skills; or takedowns, etc. This book will provide you some of the simplest and effective defensive and counterattack measures.
There are no rules in street defense. This essential tenet distinguishes self-defense from sport fighting. In a scripted sport fight the following nonexclusive tactics are generally banned: eye gouge; throat strikes; headbutting; biting; hair-pulling; clawing, pinching, or twisting of the flesh; striking the spine and the back of the head; striking with the tip of the elbow; small joint manipulation; kidney and liver strikes, clavicle strikes; kneeing or kicking the head of an attacker on the ground; and slamming an attacker to the ground on the attacker’s head. These are exactly the combined core tactics krav maga emphasizes
If you must fight, identify the opportune moment to attack the attacker with a continuous overwhelming counterattack using retzev or “continuous combat motion.” Combined with simultaneous defense and attack or near simultaneous defense and attack, retzev is a seamless, decisive, and overpowering counterattack forming the backbone of the Israeli fighting system. Retzev may be understood using combined upper- and lower-body combatives, locks, chokes, throws, takedowns, and weapons interchangeably and without pause.
Exert maximum speed and aggression. Your goal is not to definitively win a fight, but, rather, to escape. Never forget that the level of force you use to defend yourself should be commensurate with the threat. Once the threat is no more, you must cease counteroffensive actions. The krav maga system is designed to conform to you. You do not need to conform to the system or adopt any rigid, set solutions. To be sure, there are preferred counterattack methods using retzev to prevail, but you must react instinctively to the best of your ability.
Training
With proper intense training, you will learn effective physical tactics while mentally adjusting to a harsh, violent reality. When training, practice the select krav maga methods in the upcoming chapters under extreme simulated pressure. Train in the most realistic setting possible to develop the mental preparedness you need to react in life-threatening situations. As you repeat techniques and situations at real speed (with safety in mind), you’ll develop your fighting prowess. To reemphasize, your krav maga techniques will become your automatic reflex whenever you find yourself in danger.
To adopt and streamline the krav maga method, personalize the techniques and make them your own. Choose the ballistic strikes and other combatives with which you feel most comfortable with and that give you the greatest confidence. Put just as much emphasis on mental training as you do the physical through visualization and scenario planning. You can also use your mind to train your body to automatically and instinctively react to danger. Visualization and scenario planning can boost your confidence, reduce fear, improve your fighting technique, and help you cope with unanticipated hostile situations because you will have envisioned them beforehand.
By visualizing a new experience, you deposit a new conditioned response into your memory bank. We perform routine tasks such as covering your mouth when you sneeze because these tasks are just that, routine. They become routine by repetition. By visualizing possible situations and your reactions to them over and over again, your brain immediately recalls your reaction whenever you physically find yourself in such a situation, and you react accordingly.
Your brain does not distinguish between the actual tasks you physically perform and the ones you imagine or visualize. If you’re unsure about this, think about watching an unsuspecting violent real-life encounter on the Internet and how you may cringe or blink in disbelief. Similarly, have you ever felt your heart beating or palms sweating while watching a realistic suspense thriller? Notably, athletes are thoroughly versed with the powers of visualization and have used it with great success.
Emphasis on a Few Core Tactics
Krav maga emphasizes learning a few elementary core tactics that can be performed instinctively and adapted to myriad situations. If necessary, you will know how to maim an attacker by striking vital points and organs or applying choking or breaking pressure to an attacker’s joints. The goal is to embed your subconscious with the proverbial “(I have) been there, done that (through a training scenario).” Therefore, your autonomic response is, indeed, “I’ve been there, done that.”
Optimally, the potential confrontation is over before it can begin. You have neutralized the threat at its inception. Most important, you should have confidence in your krav maga training because all techniques are battle-tested and field-proven. Do not, however, mistake your training for a real attack. In an actual attack you’ll experience an adrenaline surge, a likely decrease in your fine motor skills, your heart rate will skyrocket, your hearing will diminish (“auditory exclusion”), and your vision will narrow (often known as “tunnel vision”). Notably, most people who have survived violent confrontations had the mental commitment to prevail. They do not often attribute their survival to a specific technique.
Legal Considerations
However and wherever krav maga self-defense might be used, it must be legally justified incorporating the appropriate level of counterforce. For nondeadly force, the law generally recognizes that a person may use such force as reasonably necessary to thwart the imminent use of force against that person, short of deadly force. Note that you may step into the shoes of a third party to intervene using and meeting a specific state’s standard.
The law in most countries evaluates a person’s response according to a “reasonable person standard.” For self-defense, the operative language becomes “reasonable force.” In other words, what would the reasonable person do, or how would an objective, reasonable person react, under the totality of the circumstances?
Only fear of imminent bodily harm provides justification to use force. Reasonable force is best viewed on a sliding scale. The level of force employed is often dependent on an assailant’s capability, opportunity, and intent. You can measure an attacker’s capability in several ways. A weapon, large physical size, or displayed martial prowess such as a fighting stance generally indicates the assailant’s measure of capability.
American law, for example, generally recognizes a “disparity of force” when an attacker possesses recognizable physical advantages or prowess such as significant height, strength, and weight advantages, or displayed trained fighting skills when adjudicating liability and criminal charges. In addition, environment might also influence more force, as for example, in struggling next to a busy highway where you could be flung into onrushing traffic.
Force, especially lethal force, is generally never justifiable to protect property. For example, if someone keys your car, spits at you, or knocks over your mailbox, you may not resort to force to settle the score. To use physical force to defend yourself, you must have a reasonable fear of harm. Only when you fear for your own life or that of another should you use lethal force.
For deadly force, state laws generally recognize that a person may use such force as reasonable to prevent serious bodily injury (mayhem) or death. If you must resort to violence to protect yourself, you must be able to explain to a jury why and how you chose your actions and that there were no reasonable alternatives. This is counterbalanced against the understanding that any given physical confrontation has the potential to kill you.
Developed as a military fighting discipline, krav maga employs lethal force techniques. When faced with a deadly force encounter, you may, in turn, need to employ lethal counterforce. Forging an awareness of your own personal weapons (hands, forearms, elbows, knees shins, feet, and head) and an attacker’s vulnerabilities is essential to fight strategy and tactics; especially when he is armed and you are not. The human body is amazingly resilient, even when subjected to tremendous physical abuse. Pain may stop some attackers, but other individuals have enormous pain thresholds, especially if they are taking narcotics.
To assess the necessity of counterviolence, you must instantly gauge several factors, including your opportunity to retreat. Retreat can be problematic if you are with another party such as a child or an elderly companion. Importantly, reacting from surprise allows the use of more force because you do not have time to rationally or reasonably analyze the situation. The moment you are deemed safe, any additional defensive actions may, in fact, become offensive actions. If you continue to injure an assailant who is no longer a threat, you could face civil and criminal charges, especially if you deliberately turn an assailant’s weapon on him.
You’ll need to articulate that you had no choice when faced with a threat who had the:
Notably, intent often involves the wielding of a weapon and verbal threats to your life and limb. If any of the above three criteria is absent or becomes absent or you could avoid the threat, you are no longer acting in self-defense.
Once legal proceedings begin, whatever measures you took to defend yourself will most certainly be painted in different lights by an accuser/opposing counsel and your counsel in your legal defense. Your legal justification for your self-defense actions may center on the following points:
Even if you prevail in criminal court, you are likely to face civil charges, including aggravated assault, and might have to compensate the injured party for lost earnings, medical bills, pain, and suffering along with the prospective of a jury awarding punitive damages to teach you a lesson. It cannot be emphasized enough, when defending yourself, you are only entitled to use the amount of force that is commensurate with the threat. As tempting as it might be to severely hurt or kill your assailant, you must make a deliberate conscious decision when to cease your counterattack. If you use counterviolence, you must believe the stakes are real and the aggressor is playing for keeps.
Self-Defense Tactics: An Overview
The sooner you spot a potential aggressor, the more time you will have to act. A few instinctive tactics will enable you to survive the most common onslaughts. As the next chapters will show, krav maga fighting system is designed to work against any type of aggressor. It cannot be overemphasized that the essential element is your mind frame: intention governs action. True self-defense focuses not simply on survival, but rather how to optimally hurt, injure, cripple, maim, and, if necessary, kill. Make the decision now to use counterviolence as a necessary last-resort tool. Reconcile any ethical limitations now. Understand your own triggers; what abuse/wrongs you will accept and what you won’t accept. Until you are physically assaulted, you still have the aforementioned options of avoidance, de-escalation, and escape.
In krav maga, you will learn a few core techniques that you can perform instinctively and apply to myriad situations. You will learn how to protect your vital points and organs while simultaneously targeting the aggressor’s vulnerable anatomy. If the situation requires, krav maga will teach you how to maximize the damage you can inflict by striking, kneeing, kicking, chopping, gouging, choking, dislocating joints, breaking bones, and taking your attacker down to the ground.
Crucially, self-defense is defending your body; not your ego or pride. The goal of krav maga training may be analogous to learning how to ride a bike; once you learn, you don’t forget. Once again, only use counterviolence when you have no choice. If there be no nonviolent solution, proceed with extreme prejudice until you end the violent confrontation on your terms. While you cannot underestimate the attacker’s ability, the paradox is that the attacker’s skills, in the end, are irrelevant as overcoming the threat is solely dependent on your intent and determination combined with correct combative anatomical targeting. In a preemptive self-defense situation, the sooner you neutralize the threat, the less chance the aggressor will have to dominate you.
Fight positioning determines your tactical advantage. Optimally, a kravist or skilled krav maga fighter will move quickly to a superior and dominant position relative to his attacker, known in krav maga parlance as the dead side. Dead side often provides you with a decisive tactical advantage. This strategy should revolve around your capabilities and preferred tactics involving long, medium, and short combatives combined with evasive maneuvers. Positioning becomes even more important when facing multiple attackers. Once superior position is achieved, the attacker will have a minimal ability to defend or to counter your retzev attack. Remember retzev, by its nature of using all parts of your body and incorporating facets of a fight, provides an overwhelming counterattack.
Fights involve different phases that are best categorized by the distance or proximity attackers maintain as the fight progresses. From a long or medium range, fighters have unhindered movement to batter one another, usually involving long kicks, medium punches, and other hand strikes. From a short range, knees, elbows, headbutts, and biting become options. This includes a variety of standing entanglements involving medium and short strikes, trapping, clinching, throws, takedowns, and standing joint locks combined for “close retzev.” The final ground phase occurs when both fighters lock up to unbalance one another to the ground, involving medium and short combatives combined with locks and chokes.
Movement on the ground is different from standing movement. The nature of ground fighting can allow one attacker superior control and positioning, the other attacker cannot run or evade as he might while standing. Krav maga ground survival is best defined as “what we do up, we do down” with additional specific ground-fighting capabilities. Krav maga employs many of its standing combatives on the ground including groin, eye, and throat strikes in combination with joint breaks and dislocations designed to maim your attacker.
Footwork and body positioning, whether standing or prone, allow you to simultaneously defend and attack leading to seamless combative transitions essential to retzev. The key to evasion is moving out of the “line of fire” or the path of an attacker’s offensive combatives. Clearly, positioning yourself where you can counterattack your attacker more easily than the attacker can attack you is most advantageous.
Human vision is limited by blind spots. You cannot see what is behind you (hence, the effectiveness of rear ambushes). Even when looking straight ahead, you cannot see your feet. Therefore, a low-line kick may come in “under the radar.” Tactically, straight-line attacks are more difficult to recognize and, therefore, to defend. Moreover, recall that the fastest route between two points is a straight line, hence, the effectiveness of linear combatives. Outside attacks such as hooks and roundhouse kicks are more recognizable because these looping attacks break the attacker’s silhouette and must travel approximately three times as far to reach a target.
Trained defenders look for the mental commitment and corresponding physical manifestations noted previously such as blood draining from an attacker’s face, increased breathing, and a subtle weight shift forward before the actual physical attack. One strong indicator is a head-to-toe slight shudder as adrenaline pours into the attacker’s system. If the attacker contracts rather than expands, you may be dealing with a trained fighter coiling to spring into action. While pupil dilation and constriction can indicate an impending attack, an experienced fighter may initiate his attack without demonstrating these phenomena precisely because the attacker has done it before. The attacker’s actions might be practiced; they might have become second nature. Watch for shoulder and hip movements, which also allow a defender to instantaneously recognize an incoming attack.
Self Defense and Fight Timing
Essential to a successful defense is correct timing: using the appropriate tactic at the correct time. Fight timing is harnessing instinctive body movements while seizing or creating opportunities to defend both effectively and logically. Alternatively defined, fight timing is the defender’s ability to either capitalize on a window of opportunity offered by the adversary or to create his own injurious opportunity using whatever tactics come instinctively to end the confrontation. Preemption and fight timing are an instantaneous fusion of instinct and decision-making.
You have the choice to either preempt an opponent’s attack by initiating your own attack or wait to be attacked to exploit and counterattack a physical vulnerability the opponent exposes. In other words, the opponent, even when skilled in delivering his attack, leaves himself briefly open for counterattack. For example, as the opponent delivers a straight punch he shifts his weight forward offering you the opportunity to deliver a side kick to damage his front knee.
Timing must be developed and sharpened with realistic training—always krav maga’s objective. While speed is not timing, speed can deliver a decisive advantage when the defender acts more quickly than the assailant. Krav maga relies on economy of motion to eliminate wasted movement, which, in turn, improves speed.
Multiple Attackers
When facing multiple attackers, you must only engage only one at a time using optimum combatives/movement while putting that attacker between you and any others. Inexperienced attackers, will, fortunately, group together. If you use correct tactical positioning (never between two attackers), you limit the attackers’ abilities to harm you. There is a limitation on how many attackers can occupy the same space to get at you. In select circumstances, you may have to go through them.