Course Content
Sample Combatives
Combatives Tactical Summary (Yellow Belt)
A kravist’s violent intent governs his violence of action. True self-defense or counterviolence focuses not simply on survival but rather on how to optimally injure, cripple, maim, and—if necessary and justified—kill. If you begin with the intent to injure and neutralize your opponent, a trained paroxysm of counterviolence is more likely to favorably conclude the situation. Use the closest weapon to attack the closest target. Your goal is to achieve traumatic injury in the shortest time using the most opportune route. Target the opponent’s vulnerable anatomy, damage that anatomy, continue to damage it, and capitalize on debilitating him to move on to the next anatomical target as necessary. Inflicting injury obviously affords the opportunity to impose more injury. For example, delivering a debilitating side kick to an adversary’s knee usually immobilizes him, exposing him to your further onslaught. In short, a kravist’s rapid infliction of successive damage, mutilation, and wounds epitomizes the optimum use of counterviolence.
Attack the Attacker: Anatomical Targeting
To stop an assailant, krav maga primarily targets the body’s vital soft tissue, chiefly the groin, neck, and eyes. Other secondary targets include the kidneys, solar plexus, knees, liver, joints, fingers, nerve centers, and other smaller, fragile bones. The professional also immediately recognizes that an assailant might also target these same targets and, accordingly, takes measures to protect one’s own vital anatomy. A protective posture or stance is integral to krav maga training. In addition, krav maga teaches you to disarm assailants and, if necessary, turn the weapon against them. The system differs from other systems that may rely primarily on targeting difficult-to-locate nerve centers.
Forging an awareness of your own personal weapons and an adversary’s vulnerabilities is essential to fight strategy and tactics, especially when he is armed and you are not. There are no rules in a fight, particularly in the life-or-death struggle of combat. This lack of rules distinguishes the system from sport fighting.
Krav maga, initially developed as a military fighting discipline, employs lethal-force techniques. Lethal force may involve crushing the skull, cutting off an aggressor’s oxygen supply or blood flow, severing the spine or major arteries, or stopping or penetrating the heart, along with several other slower-acting methods of inflicting trauma. Founder Imi Lichtenfeld was resolute that these techniques remain confined to military and professional security circles. While these techniques are integrated at the highest levels of the IKMA curriculum, trainees who are exposed to them are highly vetted.
In both defending and attacking, recognizing the human anatomy’s vulnerabilities is essential to fight strategy and tactics. The human body is amazingly resilient. Therefore, an adversary may only be stopped when his offensive capabilities are put out of commission by nonlethal concussive force, joint dislocations, bone breaks, or cutting off the blood supply to the brain, resulting in unconsciousness. If necessary, krav maga also employs chokes and “blood” chokes to render an adversary unconscious or worse.
With proper body positioning, an adversary on the ground can be pummeled severely while giving him little defensive recourse. Logically, in both standing and ground fights, it becomes difficult for an adversary to fight effectively if his hands or limbs are broken, and rendering an adversary unconscious quickly ends a fight. Every type of lock requires moving the joint against its natural articulation with breaking pressure. While we teach certain core arm dislocation positions, once you have an understanding of the biomechanics, you can apply the principles to many situations. This is especially important in the fluidity of a fight. Optimally, you will use the entire force and weight of your body to apply pressure against an adversary’s joint. This is the key principle to joint locks. Remember that a joint lock, however decisive and quick, still ties you up momentarily, exposing you to a second adversary—or multiple adversaries—attacking you.
Injuring versus Hurting
Pain may stop some assailants, but others have enormous pain thresholds. Therefore, an opponent may only be decisively stopped when his offensive capabilities are put out of commission by joint dislocations, bone breaks, or by cutting off the oxygen or blood supply to the brain, resulting in unconsciousness.
Spinal reflexes govern the body’s physical reaction to damage. While physically resilient, the human body is affected by structural injury in a somewhat predictable manner. Therefore, a kravist can generally predict how his counterattacks will affect the assailant’s subsequent movements or capabilities. Strategically, inflicting a first-salvo injury against an adversary opens the door to unleash subsequent injurious counterattacks. As another example, when an attacker is hit in the face, usually his head will jolt backward, exposing his throat and neck to attack while also forcing his pelvis forward to expose his groin for further attack. As emphasized, the optimum way to end a violent conflict is to injure the opponent rapidly and repeatedly as necessary.
Deadly, concerted, one-on-one, up-close-and-personal violence usually lasts no more than a few seconds. Adopting a simple survival mind-set is inadequate; you must not get seriously injured or maimed. One usually does not cleanly win a violent hand-to-hand combat encounter. One survives it, subject to an injury scale. Krav maga, at its core, does not reflect “fighting” prowess so much as the ability to damage the adversary. In a fight, experienced combatants understand that specific defensive tactics rarely work or are applied. Rather, it is your offensive capabilities that are paramount. In a fight, a well-timed, decisive pre-emptive attack creating anatomical damage followed by additional combatives usually prevails. In other words, the victor is whichever fighter first successfully exploits an anatomical vulnerability of his opponent with a well-placed debilitating combative and, then, who continues to serially injure the opponent through retzev continuous combat motion.
When there is no choice but to use counterviolence, a kravist is compelled to maim, cripple, or—provided the circumstances are legally justifiable—kill an assailant by, say, breaking bones, disabling ligaments, or destroying an eyeball. In short, and in an animalistic sense, inflicting terrible, debilitating wounds on an adversary—maiming an assailant—balances power in the kravist’s favor.
It is axiomatic that the party who significantly damages the other party first usually prevails if he presses the counterattack home to neutralize the threat. Once again, there is no pity or humanity in visceral self-defense or hand-to-hand combat provided the ends justify the means in the correct use of force. Survivors do not waver in believing they will impose their will on an aggressor to alter the outcome.