A large part of Krav Maga is being prepared for the unexpected and being ready wherever you are. So it would make sense to try and train in different environments and conditions, which is why No Fear Academy’s outdoor series is an excellent idea.
The event started at 10PM, on December 06. So it was dark and cold. Once we were all gathered we ventured into Lord’s Wood in Southampton, a large forest area that offers a mix of open and dense areas.
The techniques we studied throughout the night were all very relevant to the forest, everything from walking in the forest, to knife and stick defences.
As soon as the night started, Jose [NFA’s head instructor] began to give us simple and effective safety tips for travelling through the forest, things like having your feet at a certain angle, head tipped slightly down and walking on light areas of the ground to avoid sinking into mud. This advice is something that could easily be overlooked if you don’t travel through a forest often.
We started off with a simple warm up and some slow fighting, this really helped us to understand the difficulty of fighting on uneven ground and in the dark. It really surprised me how much more difficult it was to do simple things like scan (for danger); the added difficulty of watching out for hazards in the dark really made the night interesting.
After this we worked on knife defences; Jose ran through how easy it is to miss a knife, even if the moonlight reflects off it. Once we’d worked on a couple of knife defences, we did circuits. We split into two groups, with one group walkingwhile the other group waited en route, either as attackers or as innocent passers-by – this really put on added pressure to ensure you didn’t react unnecessarily. Jose encouraged us to use any defence we could; this meant we had to consider using simple evasion techniques, de-escalation and the full combat techniques. In a gym, it can be very difficult to train all of these defences, especially evasion.
Throughout the night we progressed deeper into the forest: as the trees got denser, the moonlight dissipated. So we pulled out some torches and did some simple defences while using the torch to disorientate the attacker; an annoying andeffective technique.
We used the same area for some stick defences, followed withsome more circuits, and due to the forest being much denser it felt fresh and exciting.
After the long night of techniques we began the trek out of the woods; Jose had us walking in a line, swapping who was first often to ensure we were able to walk through the forest looking for the lighter areas of mud, and therefore easier to walk on.
We eventually emerged from the forest, covered in mud (or I was at least!) and headed home.
This event was a very interesting and unique experience; Jose intends to do some similar events and I can’t wait to see what he has in store for those who attend.