Is Krav Maga effective? Yes, or the Israeli army wouldn’t teach it. However, you need to train in realistic situations.
Krav Maga is a martial art that was created for the Israeli Defense Forces. The words krav maga are Hebrew. קרבנגע. Krav means “combat” or “battle” and maga means “contact” or “touch”. It was created by a man called Imre “Imi” Lichtenfeld, who was Jewish and was born in Hungary in 1910. He was an athlete and he was a very well trained boxer, wrestler, and gymnast. In the 1930s, there was a lot of violence against Jewish people in Europe and Lichtenfeld helped defend his Jewish neighbors against fascist gangs. He used his boxing and wrestling skills, but he quickly realized that the skills he had learned in the gym or in controlled fights didn’t translate to real fighting in life-threatening situations. He began to create a fighting style that would be effective in a real fight.
Lichenfeld moved to Palestine in the Second World War and started to train fighters for the Haganah paramilitary organization. After the war, this became the Israel Defense Force of the newly formed State of Israel. He went on to train various branches of the Defense Force until he retired in 1964. He then went on to train the police force, ordinary civilians, and other Krav Maga instructors.
When Lichenfeld made Krav Maga, he took a lot of parts of other fighting styles and simplified them. He wanted to make a simple and efficient fighting system that was very easy to learn. A lot of the main martial arts use long and complicated moves that a fighter wouldn’t necessarily be able to remember or use in a real fight. Krav Maga has no ceremony or traditional parts. It is purely about fighting. It is designed to end an attack as quickly as possible, without being clean or beautiful. It is said to be a practical martial art.
The main purpose of Krav Maga is defense, but defense doesn’t just mean blocking. The idea is to end fights as quickly as possible. Krav Maga teaches several things to accomplish this. The first is that there are no rules in a fight. Krav Maga practitioners are taught to go for the eyes, throat, and groin. Anything that will disable the attacker. People are taught to continue the attack even after the attacker is down to make sure they are no longer a threat. They are also taught to use the body’s natural reactions as part of the defense. If someone grabs your throat, your hands naturally go to your throat, so this movement becomes part of the defense.
So, is Krav Maga effective? The Israeli Defense Force have been teaching Krav Maga to their infantry and special forces since it was invented in the early 1950s. If Krav Maga wasn’t effective, they would have found something else in the last 73 years. The fact that they still teach it is proof that they believe it works. However, therein lies the problem with Krav Maga. It is designed as a self defense martial art for soldiers. If a soldier has to actually enter into hand to hand combat, then something has gone seriously wrong and their life is on the line. They are fighting for their life and are willing to kill the other person.
That is the problem with Krav Maga and why it doesn’t appear effective. In order to teach it to regular people, it has to become a more stylized form of itself because people can’t kill each other when they are training. Schools are reduced to teaching just the moves and insisting on non-contact, which makes it the same as any other martial art and most likely ineffective.
When you are fighting for your life, your adrenaline and stress levels spike. It can become very difficult to remember techniques that you have learned. That is why a lot of the other martial arts are not very practical. Krav Maga is designed to be so simple that you can remember how to do it even when you are in a high stress environment. To test this, though, people who are going to use Krav Maga have to practice using it in the same kind of situation where they will be using it. That means a surprise attack that brings about adrenaline release and stress. The only way this can be done is with a lot of body armor and most Krav Maga schools don’t go that far. The military do teach it in this way. If people do learn Krav Maga in those kind of situations, they are more likely to be able to respond accurately when they are attacked. And then Krav Maga is incredibly effective, which is why the Israeli Defense Force use it. And this is what I learned today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imi_Lichtenfeld
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krav_Maga