Newfound Respect for Buffy: My first classes in Krav Maga for self-defense

I have newfound respect for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

If you’re not familiar, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a TV show in the late 90s and early 2000s centered around Buffy, a high school girl who finds out she is the chosen one – The Slayer. She has super strength and other non-visible but highly effective super powers that allow her to defeat vampires and other assorted demons with the kick of a foot and the punch of a hand. On top of that, she has stopped the end of the world several times. Pretty good credentials.

Crazy premise (and based off a successful movie off the same name) but they must have done something right because it lasted seven seasons, all of which I just finished watching. Yes, I’m a bit of a nerd.

Why do I bring up Buffy?


Well, she's a queen of martial arts, and we finally signed up for Krav Maga lessons per my 40 by 40 goal to learn how to defend myself. In case you aren’t familiar – and I certainly was not – Krav Maga was developed originally for the Israeli Defense forces and now is taught to law enforcement agencies and civilians like myself throughout the world.

Krav Maga focuses on instinctive movements and more realistic training scenarios for self-defense than many other martial arts. Here’s the Wikipedia article if you’re interested in reading more.

It’s been an interesting experience so far. After the first class my outer wrists were bruised from blocking in an exercise that, well, was designed to learn how to block attacks.

In two of the three classes, we kneeled over a flat punching mat called a strike shield, and punched as hard as we could – over and over again. Ouch. And a little bit of yikes. Looking around the room, I saw a lot of people tapping into a lot of pent-up aggression. I had a much harder time going all out. Although in one class, I had to kick my partner – a guy – who was holding the strike shield up to himself. He kept telling me to kick harder.

I suppose my husband was right when he said we should never be partners in class. It’s probably not a good idea to punch and kick each other, however protected we are!

I get the principle behind the thing: getting your body prepared to fight in a real-life situation rather than a more controlled one. Oh, and punching and kicking things is a good workout, as is all the of the pushups, situps, squats and so on that they make us do to get our pulse racing while practicing the new moves.

But it will definitely take some getting used to.

I wanted to learn how to defend myself, and it seems like this might be the right way to learn how. But it’s much more physical, and much more aggressive than I expected it to be. I supposed that makes sense, as if I were to get attacked one day, my guess is the attacker isn’t going to wait for me to be ready first.

We signed on for six months of this, so I’m hoping it gets easier!

Here’s the YouTube video from the Colorado Krav Maga Regional Training Center we are going to. Feels a bit chaotic, but you'll get a better idea of what it's about.