Sport & Fitness

You’d think the phrase ‘tough Israeli military self-defence technique’ would be unequivocal enough to prepare you for a krav maga class. In my case, you’d be wrong. The class starts gently enough, with jogging around the room – though dropping to the floor to do random press-ups is strangely like being in an Oliver Stone movie.

Next, we have to pair up and, well, grapple with each other. The first bit is fun, jumping up and down on the spot, trying to touch the other person’s back, while defending oneself against being touched. However this develops into getting one another into a headlock, aiming to twist the other person round so you’ve got them from behind (the most common position from which to attack). It’s not pleasant. We swap partners a few times – it must be difficult for the poor chaps who have to pretend that taking me on is any challenge. There are only two other women in a class of around 20. Feature continues

Next, we are put into teams of three to perform an exhausting ‘workstation’ series of press-ups, sit-ups and an extraordinary kind of one-handed press-up dance. I cry off, pleading back problems, at which point instructor Mike Alcroft tells me that he always starts the class with a 45-minute warm-up. Physical fitness, he insists, is as much a key to being able to defend oneself as knowing the techniques. This is the warm-up? Good God.

Fighting for fitness

Alcroft has been teaching krav maga for seven years and set up the Krav Maga Centre eight months ago. ‘I’d learnt Thai boxing at university, and while it’s great for fitness and as a competitive martial art, I didn’t feel it was relevant to self-defence,’ he says. He found that krav maga was gaining a reputation in the US, mainly among certain police units, the FBI and Swat teams.

Krav maga was originally developed in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1930s by Imi Lichtenfeld, a successful boxer and wrestler. He taught his special hand-to-hand combat method to Bratislavan Jews to protect themselves against the Nazis; then, on arriving in Palestine before the establishment of Israel, to Haganah, the Jewish underground army. It went on to become the official combat system of the Israeli defence forces.

Back at the class, after some stretches, it’s time for the actual self-defence. ‘The point of krav maga is not to turn you into a fighter,’ says Alcroft. ‘It’s to enable you to defend yourself to the point where you’re able to run away.’ Thus kicks to the knee and groin are encouraged, as well as punches to the face and throat. We are taught how to escape if somebody has their hands round your throat (drop your hands between their arms and pull outwards, while simultaneously kneeing them in the groin), how to perform drop kicks when you’re on the ground and – crucially – how to defend yourself against knife attacks. T'ai chi it ain’t.

It’s all intensely – scarily – practical (‘make it a reflex always to look around as there’s likely to be more than one attacker’ is one piece of advice) and very hard work. But fun, up until the last ten minutes. Then, the majority of the class puts on knee, groin and arm shields and
gets engaged in the real deal: proper, vicious, hand-to-hand fighting.

I am initially paired with Liz, a new recruit who has joined the class because, she says, ‘the area I live in isn’t very safe’ (put that in your pipe and smoke it, Diane Abbott). However, after a few minutes, Alcroft insists we fight some of the men as ‘in real life, 99.99 per cent of the time, you’ll be attacked by a man who is much stronger than you.’ This is really, really disturbing and quickly I want it to stop – which I guess is the point.

Krav maga is not for the faint-hearted but if you are dedicated it is an extremely useful skill to have. I leave the class aching, sweaty and somehow emboldened – though acutely aware of how much work is needed to improve my own fragility.