grapplinghook.org

We had worked on handgun disarms, knife disarms, and a particular kick combination that evening.

Mark put them all together in a drill, as follows. You stand, with your back to your partner. He gives you a shove and you do a forward shoulder roll. When you roll up to your feet, he is coming at you with one of three things: a gun, a knife or a kick pad. You must assess and respond appropriately.

This in itself was awesome. But then half way through, Mark turned out the lights to the studio, and we continued in 80% darkness. It wasn’t too hard to see what was coming, but it certainly added some atmosphere.

A shared principle among Pekiti Tirsia and Krav Maga is the notion that you never try to disarm someone who isn’t at least stunned.

Pekiti spells it out like this: they must be either hurt, injured or unconscious (’dead’ is the official term) before you try to take their weapon.

In Krav, we almost always strike simultaneously as we seek to control the weapon. I’m not talking about a 1 - 2 motion, but using both limbs simultaneously, one trapping, one striking.

In Krav Maga, often a series of techniques will end with you in a clinch delivering knees. I think some fighting arts call this the plumm but I’m unsure. Maybe it’s plumb, like a plumb line from carpentry, since your forearm is vertical against his collarbone. That prevents him from grabbing your legs.

The clinch is like this:
- your left hand hooks behind his right tricep
- your right hand is draped over his right trapezius
- you have the opponent bent over
- your left foot is forward
- and you are administering right knees up his centerline

The problem I had is that it seemed like I got stuck in that clinch delivering knees, the assumption being that you just keep kneeing until the opponent just crumples away. Getting attached to the opponent is already an issue of mine.

But that won’t always work– you may need to flee or engage guy #2.

So we finally unveiled an exit strategy. When you retract after a knee, instead of stepping straight back, you swing your leg back around behind yourself. That pivots you to the right and gets you off his line. You are in ideal position to fire a couple shots across his bow, meaning a L jab / R cross to the side of his jaw.

A nice, crisp exit. Just what I’ve been looking for.

Your adversary is standing beside you shoulder to shoulder, when he suddenly flings his right arm around the back of your neck and pulls your head down (maybe to apply a noogie, if this is your older brother .

You try to slap his groin with your right arm, but he keeps pushing down.

An alternate course of action: use your slapping hand (right in this case) to reach between his legs and up his back as high as you can, and do a left shoulder roll.

When you come out of the roll, he’s on his back and you’re on top. It’s easier to do than to envision.

Last night we did a drill where B attacks A with a knife. A does the simultaneous block and strike that Krav is known for, but as A tries to strip the knife away, B resists and retains the knife. What we trained for in that eventuality, was shoving him off and grabbing one of the many weapons of opportunity scattered around the area. We had some kick shields, a couple of padded sticks, and some of the padded barrel tops from those punching bags (those ones where you fill the base with sand or water).

For the first demonstration of the drill, Mark grabbed one of those barrels and just trashed his attacker with it. The attacker was a good actor, and we all did one of those “oooh” things when Mark squashed him with the equivalent of a 55 gallon drum.

It was really important to practice improvising weapons from your environment. Everybody talks about it, but unless actually you do it, you’re going to do what you train, and in that case, it’s gonna be you and your fists against the world.

A long time ago, I was play sparring around a big room with my friend Jeff, and at one point Jeff lunged down low like he was going for a shoot. Instead of coming at me, he seized the corners of a 5×5 foot mat. A mat, I suddenly realized, that I was standing on. I jumped off or kicked him before he could dump me on my ass, by literally pulling the rug out from under me, but he was using his environment, and I had to give him credit for that.

One technique I particularly like from Krav Maga is the turning hammerfist, because it allows you to turn, keep yourself covered, and remain agressive.

This is a backhanded hammerfist, so when cocked, your arm is across yourself like a tennis backhand, and a hammerfist means that you are hitting with the knife edge of the hand.

When you throw it, you need to keep your forearm high, at shoulder-height and forearm perpendicular to the floor.

It comes in as a straight blow, not a curving one, it hits straight out and back like a boxer hitting a speedbag. You do get a bit of extra force imparted because of the turn, but it isn’t a circular strike.

Keeping the strike high allows you to cover your head pretty well, you have this horizontal barrier up, and it has the advantage of being a strike that blocks, rather than “turn, block, counter”.

When I was at the Straight Blast Gym five years ago, the emphasis was definitely on grappling. I would say we did 70% grappling 30% standup striking. That may have changed now.

Krav Maga seems to have the opposite ratio, which is better for self defense. You need to have enough ground game to be able to avoid major disaster and get back to your feet, but to escape the situation or handle multiple opponents, you have to be on your feet.

MMA ring fighters always end up on the mat because one or both fighters want to go to the ground. In a parking lot, it is likely that neither fighter would want to go to the ground.

Last night I had a friend put the rear naked choke on, and tried to bite his arm. No go. Once the choke is sunk in, your head is pretty much immobilized, and his arm is safely under your chin.

It’s a bad situation. You only have six seconds to escape, and if he has good technique, his groin is protected by wrapping his legs around you, his eyes are protected by him turning his head away, his fingers are protected by him making a fist.

My summary recomendations are:
- always use your strong hand to resist the choke, get your chin down, and turn into him. That’s the best first step, because if you start with that, you may stop the choke before it gets locked in.
- if he doesn’t have you in his guard (legs wrapped around you) use your secondary hand to go for his groin.
- if he does, go high with your other hand and try to find his eyes, or seize and twist one of his fingers on the back of your head.

That’s about the best I can come up with.

I asked Mark about Krav Maga’s defense against the rear naked choke after the choke has been applied. Answer? There isn’t one.

I liked that answer. It would have been much worse to say, ‘All you have to do is…’ and give some bogus thing that would only work one percent of the time. After all, the greatest submission fighters in the world routinely fall prey to that choke, if there were some easy way out, wouldn’t they take it?

I wonder if you could bite the guy’s bicep when the choke is on?

In traditional martial arts, the term focus, as I was taught is the ability to clench down the muscles at the moment of impact. My analogy for it is if you were trying to strike straight ahead with a chain, you could just flip it out and let it snap the target. But imagine that just at the moment of impact you could weld all the links together and make a javelin. That way the lead link would impart the whole force of the chain. That’s my analogy of what a focused strike does, it lets you impart your whole bodyweight through the punch rather than a loose snappy strike that sends your limb bouncing off the target.

But Mark, a one-time Godan in shotokan, has consciously given up on the notion of focus since switching to Krav Maga and remains loose at impact.

As you can tell from my analogy, I have been up to this point a fan of focus. But I wonder if the true striking experts of our day, boxers and thai fighers, adhere to this concept? If they don’t it is time to rethink my stance.