I’ve been instructing and running civilian classes since 2012. I’ve done the big classes. Pre-Covid I had almost 120 members across my two clubs in Swindon and North Bristol, with average class sizes of around 30-40. This is great from a business perspective, but not great in terms of instructor-student dynamics. Even with assistant instructors, it is impossible to guarantee one on one time with an individual student, and inevitably some good people slip through the net and quit because they’re just not getting the attention they deserve.
And then there’s the attitudes. On the whole, I would say that 95% of the people who have ever attended taster sessions with the club and I have been good people, but the bigger you cast your net, the more difficult personalities you’re going to pick up. And bad attitudes in a class are like dandelions on your lawn – one is a curiosity, but leave it there and before you know it all the good people have quit and the bad ones are all you have left!
As the book has become more sucessful, and other work has really eliminated the need to pursue civilian classes as a business, I’ve naturally wound it all down. I closed Swindon altogether, and kept North Bristol because it’s closer to home, and most of the people there have been training for years and are close friends now. It’s not like work for me, more like a weekly get-together of people I like to spend time with. I’m not alone in saying that I want to keep it that way.
I love meeting new people, and welcoming them to the world of Krav Maga. Watching people empower themselves with effective self-defence capability is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever experienced. But nowadays I set a rule with the club – welcome only the number of people that maintains the wonderful atmosphere and community we’ve built here over the years.
I’ve set the maximum membership of this club at 30, because I’d like to see it grow, and add diversity to the membership because that will benefit everyone’s training – it’s always good to train with new people. It’s good learning. But 30 is sufficient.
If you’re thinking of starting Krav Maga, this is just the place, so long as you’re a genuine person with no ego who will value the group as much as you value the training. That’s all we ask. In return, you’ll find the group excel at helping newcomers learn rapidly and reach their best.
If this sounds like you, get in touch today, before we hit the 30!
From Lawful Survival by Krav Maga North Bristol instructor, Will James. This excerpt, from the introduction to Lawful Survival, discusses the problem with bravado in the martial arts and self defence world. Whether you live in Bristol or anywhere else in the UK, you will have encountered such attitudes to self-protection, and it is essential that you learn to see through bravado to the ugly truth beyond.
If you prefer audio, here is a reading of this chapter:
“The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband’s bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool.” – Pearl S. Buck 1892 – 1973
Our first job is to challenge assumptions. Facing fear means facing the facts of the situation, unguarded, unprotected, and unadulterated. In the theatre of real-world violence, illusion has no place.
Neither does bravado.
Yet in bars across Bristol, and in training halls and gyms, there are people talking about self-protection as if it were commonplace, easy, everyday. Uninformed by research or experience, casual bravado underpins conversations that vary little in meaning and substance. What would you do if someone broke into your home? Would you care about the law? Do you leave a weapon by the door, by the bed? Would you use it? What would you do if someone pulled a knife on you while you were out jogging? Demanded the phone and those new Beats headphones? The key to the new Discovery? The pin number for your AMEX?
What if the next domestic call you attend while on duty involves an offender with a knife opening the door and trying to kill you? Would you handle it? Would you put them down?
You know the conversation. If you haven’t had it, maybe you’ve heard it. “God help anyone who comes into my house. I keep my old cricket bat by the door. I have a crowbar by my bed. I keep a Maglite in the car — the heavy kind with four D cells. I’d hit them with that. I don’t care what the police say, if someone comes into my house I’m going to do them with my torch.”
This overconfidence isn’t limited to civilians, either. Even in the world of the violence professional — police, military, security — there can and does exist a culture of complacency around violence. When you knock on five doors a day, six days in a set, and for months or years nothing bad happens to you, you inevitably tend towards complacency, towards the unconscious belief that you don’t need to worry, that you can handle whatever happens. Complacency breeds false confidence, a confidence untested by exposure to real threat.
Civilian or professional, complacency comes from rolling the dice and getting lucky for too long, from making the mistake of thinking that because you’re okay now and have been okay in the past that you always will be okay. This error in thinking is called Survivorship Bias, and it’s very common.
Complacency rapidly breeds confidence. To listen to people talk about violence it is easy to think that self-protection is as simple as picking up a bat or a torch and swinging it at an intruder or a mugger. To a police officer it may seem as easy as grabbing hold of an arm and putting someone on the floor like it was the simplest thing in the world to do that. Unfortunately this simplicity of thinking doesn’t take into account the unpredictability of real world violence, nor the deterioration of cognition and skill that occurs in the face of such threat.
There is a place called violence. Most don’t know it. It is a lonely and terrible country, torn apart by war. The people you find there are monsters, predators, everything that an average person, in the bubble of civility, would call evil. How many times has an average person been to that place? Honestly? And we’re not talking about school-yard scuffles or two drunken friends sticking their neck out at a party and shoving each other. We’re talking about being attacked by a wild animal and having to fight, literally, for your life.
Most civilians in our culture have never been to that place. A good percentage of police have, and yet in the force, complacency is still commonplace.
If violence has happened to you, if you have been there to that country, bravado will have deserted you. The people who know that place are typically silent on its nature. Silent and humble. And those who have been there, how many times have they been there? Once? Twice? How long each time? Most assaults are decided in seconds. So their experience, across a lifetime, likely totals just a few seconds. Does that make them experts? Travel guides to that country’s horrors?
No.
For civilians, or police officers in initial training, reading this, try to imagine a person.
He is in his early twenties, but looks a decade older because of the brown he’s been putting in his arms for the last dozen years. He’s malnourished, his body fucked up on years of opiate abuse, on the cycle of constipation and laxatives, on junk food and chain-smoking, his teeth falling out and his nose bent and corroded from his forays into stimulants — amphetamines, adderall and cocaine. The moment he comes through your door, in the dead of night, he’s been off the smack for a day and a half. He’s in a fever of pain, fear, nausea, cramping and worse. He knows that his hunger will deepen by the hour, until it incapacitates him, until he no longer has the ability to do what he’s doing right now to solve his problem. He needs his solution more than you have ever needed anything. He knows desperation like you never have and never will. He is coming into your house to take something, something he can sell for a fraction of its value to fund a solution that will last him a few hours at best. And he will literally kill to do it.
Still not with me?
There is nothing this human will not do to get what he needs. Absolutely nothing. If you don’t stand in his way, he will take and run. If you stand in his way, he will stab you or punch you to the floor, and he will take and run. If you go at him with a weapon, and you’d be the hundredth person to try, he will take it off you and beat you to death with it to make sure you don’t pose a threat to him, then he will take and run.
Your morality, your frame for looking at the world, he doesn’t have that. It’s gone, along with any notions of guilt, remorse, conscience, or self-respect. Years of addiction have drummed all that out of him.
But don’t think that his addiction makes him weak. He’s a strong kid, stronger than you can ever know, driven to the solace of the drug by a life of terrible violence and abuse.
When you were taking your first steps, he was sitting in a crack-house full of addicts, starving and undernourished. When you were going to nursery, he was stealing food and getting beaten when he was caught, learning how to take a beating with the minimum of serious damage, desensitising to the pain and the fear. When your parents came home from work and cooked you dinner, his sent him out to run money and drugs, or came home loaded and beat him until his eyes swelled shut and his gums bled. When you were doing your entrance exam for secondary school, he was out in the parks fighting other kids over selling territory, knowing that if he lost he’d lose more than territory, that he’d take it badly at home, that he might not get to eat. While you were mastering maths, English, maybe even a language, he was mastering violence, learning through the weekly, if not daily fights and beatings how to most effectively beat another human to the ground and into submission. While you were learning the ropes in your first job he was learning how to use surprise and the threat of a weapon to paralyse a victim so that he could take what he needed with the least risk to him, and in the least time. By the time you were competent in your career, he was a master of his, the veteran of a thousand or more assaults, beatings, stabbings, muggings, burglaries, deals and arrests.
You may have had a fight once, maybe you even won. But the threat he will bring to your door won’t be a fight. He doesn’t want to fight. He wants to beat you and take. This isn’t a boxing ring, or a dominance game in a bar, this is violence. And he has experienced immediate violence almost every day of his life. No solace. No saviour. No police to call when it all became too much. He’s lost count of the times he’s struck someone, knocked them down, stabbed them when he was too weak to fight any other way. And he’s lost count of the times he’s been the victim of the same. The violence, it holds no deep fear for him like it does for you. And in that lack of fear, in that almost total desensitisation, there is a certainty. Not certainty that he will win, because truly he doesn’t care about win or lose in the way that you do, but certainty that he will fight. Certainty that he will do everything that is necessary to get the job done and come home with his solution. While you are finding your feet, recovering from the shock of the break-in or mugging, he has already beaten you. You’re the hundredth person to swing a Maglite at him. The hundredth person to leave a cricket bat by the door for him to arm himself with when he comes into your house.
And when he comes he will come without hesitation. At the moment you become aware of him, he’s already had hours to come to terms with what’s about to happen. He has momentum, practice, initiative.
All you have is surprise, shock, fear.
Your surprise. Your shock. Your fear.
Think about this.
Carefully.
That land we were talking about, that country of violence, at best you are a visitor. He’s a native.
Bravado has absolutely no place in this fight. Because, when it happens, it won’t be a fight. It will be an assault, and if you are arrogant, unprepared, you have little chance of coming out the other side. In what other arena would you, as an absolutely untrained, inexperienced amateur, expect to overcome a lifetime professional in a game where the stakes are your lives? Would you take on Mike Tyson in the dead of night, ten million quid against your life and your family’s lives when you’ve never as much as thrown a punch before? What about going three sets with Federer with the same stakes, when you’ve never so much as picked up a racket?
And yet, the world over, there are people in bars with little to no training or experience talking about the arena of violence as if they have dominion over it, and over those who live there, those who carry out assault as a livelihood and as a way of life. Have you heard such talk? Do you see the error in it?
Time and time again, the statistics tell us that there are only two significant predictors of success in the survival of real world violence. The first, overwhelmingly, is exposure to previous instances of real-world violence.
The second, self-defence training that involves close approximation of real-world violence through stress inoculation, contact drills and adrenalisation.
In today’s world, the vast majority of people have neither experience nor relevant training and, predictably, fail when victimised by the violent, freezing up and suffering injury or death. To survive violent assault, a victim must come to the assault not with bravado but with realism and humility. You have to see that to run is not shameful. You have to realise that to die or kill defending property is hubris. You have to understand the difference between defending your life and defending your ego. You fight when there is no other choice, when you’re on the stairs and you meet that man from that terrible country and it’s clear there is no other way. And on that night, make sure it isn’t a fight. Train until you are the master of your fear. Train and find a way to surprise. Hit first. Hit hard, with so much aggression that you overwhelm your attacker. Train for that moment with the real-world firmly at the front of your mind.
A violent assault is not a competition decided by technique. It’s an existential struggle decided by will and fear and conviction.
Once the dual arsenal of aggression and violence are deployed, technique is an afterthought.