Denver Magazine / Denver Magazine Summer 2008 / Krav Maga

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Krav Maga

The latest workout craze is great for self-defense, beats up every part of your body, and beats the hell out of yoga.

I don't have anything against Todd.

Todd probably doesn't have anything against me. Yet here we are, me lying flat on my back, and Todd straddling my chest, pointing a Beretta semiautomatic pistol at my nose. Exhausted after nearly an hour of fighting, my shirt is soaked through with sweat and the muscles in my arms and shoulders are near their failure point.

It's hard to breathe with what feels like Todd's full weight pressing down on my chest. Still, I'm able to force the gun away from my face and, with a quick lift of my hips, toss him violently to the side. We grapple a few seconds more while I try for the checkmate: getting the gun away from him. I fail, and Todd turns the gun against me once more.

Then the instructor blows his whistle and we do it all over again until I get it right. This, I think to myself, sure beats the hell out of yoga.

Students of the Israeli martial art known as Krav Maga don't come to this Broomfield studio to realign their chi or break boards with their foreheads or earn pretty colored belts. They come to Colorado Krav Maga to learn how to kick ass! With an emphasis on aggressive gross motor movements such as punching, kicking, elbow- and knee-strikes, and ground fighting, Krav Maga is designed so that even the smallest practitioner can fell the largest attacker swiftly and with devastating force. Here, men and women train together at all levels, and it is advisable for men to keep jokes about females being the weaker sex to themselves if they want to keep their teeth.

I arrive at Colorado Krav Maga in time for the 12:15 p.m. mixed-level class. Today's lesson: how to disarm an attacker with a handgun. Our instructor, Mike, starts us on our warm-up, barking orders above driving, bass-heavy speed metal that plays at volume over the studio's speakers: run, shadow box, spar with a partner, gimme 40 crunches, and when you're done, gimme 40 pushups.

All this, over and over, ad nauseam, literally, until our lungs, and every muscle in our bodies, burn. After a demonstration by Mike and his assistant, we take model Beretta pistols made of bright yellow plastic and pair up with partners to begin the actual training.

Krav Maga, loosely translated from Hebrew as "close combat" or "contact fighting", was designed in the late 1940s as a self-defense method for the fledgling Israeli military. With realistic scenarios and moves such as eye-gouging and brutal kicks to groin, Krav Maga is not, and was never intended to be, a sport.

The inventor of Krav Maga, a Czechoslovakian named Imi Lichtenfeld, made a reputation for himself in the years before World War II fighting fascist gangs in the streets of his native Bratislava. Lichtenfeld, who was Jewish, fled after the Nazi invasion of his country and ended up in the British-controlled territory of Palestine, the area soon to become modern Israel.

Eager to participate in the creation of an independent Jewish state, he joined the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization, and taught his fellow soldiers basic hand-to-hand combat techniques. After the founding of Israel in 1948, Lichtenfeld developed the formal system known as Krav Maga. Born of necessity and refined through decades of constant close-quarters combat in the Middle East, Krav Maga is today used by militaries and law enforcement agencies around the world.

James Hiromasa, compact and muscular with a quick sense of humor, owns Colorado Krav Maga, along with his wife and fellow instructor, Shannon Lukeman-Hiromasa. According to James, it's Krav Maga's effectiveness as a self-defense tool, as well as the relative speed with which the art can be learned, that draws so many fans.

As a nightclub manager in Hawaii during the late 1980s and early 1990s, James saw more than his share of fights break out. Though he had studied martial arts since age 9, James found they "required too much precision," to be practical. "So I went looking for something that worked in the chaos of an actual fight."

His quest led him to Los Angeles and the Krav Maga National Training Center. There he studied intensively with Darren Levine, a protégé of Lichtenfeld and widely considered to be the foremost instructor of Krav Maga outside of Israel.

While Krav Maga eschews the spirituality component of traditional martial arts, James admits that, with time and practice, the art offers something more abstract than the ability to physically defeat an opponent. A practitioner of Krav Maga, he says, walks with confidence and an exact knowledge of what he's capable of doing. James calls this the "command presence."

Another instructor, Michelle Blalock, echoes this notion. Petite and athletic, she teaches both children and adult classes. Some of her female students, she says, had been victims of violence. "I've seen women come in here traumatized," she says. "Six months later they're completely different people. Their self-confidence, their health, everything, is through the roof. After a few months of training, you're going to hold yourself differently."

I leave Colorado Krav Maga exhausted and hurting like hell. I'm covered in sweat, my own and that of my training partner. My right wrist is swollen from Todd wrestling the gun away from me. And there are bruises the color of eggplant on my throat from an exercise in how to break an attacker's chokehold. Still, I feel good.

Today I learned how to hit and how to take a hit. Today I wrestled a gun away from an attacker. The safe, yuppified, father-of-two I've become has been shaken a little, toughened up, and thrown headlong out of his safety zone.

In the end, Mike, my instructor, is right: anyone can learn Krav Maga. Sure, I'll feel this workout in my muscles for a full week. But the hurt will go away with time and only the confidence Krav Maga instills will remain.

Colorado Krav Maga is located at 6821 W. 120th Ave., Broomfield 80020. For more information, call 720.214.1691 or visit coloradokravmaga.com.