A "Resting" Week

At the start of the week our commander told us that it would be a good chance to rest after what was a considerably difficult prior week - I still don't know why I believed him. Going into the week we knew that we were going to be getting ready to give back all of our gear in preparation to change bases. What we didn't know was how they would fill all of the downtime.....

Sunday our entire company went to the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem for a cultural day. When we got back to the base for dinner we were warned against eating too much food. This I assumed was a sign that we would be going for a run in the near future. In fact this was to be the first of many Krav Maga lessons we would have during the week.

***For those of you unfamiliar with Krav Maga, according to Wikipedia "Krav Maga is a military hand-to-hand combat systemm developed in Israel, which assumes no quarter will be given, and emphasizes maximum threat neutralization in a "real life" context. (Here is a quick video I found http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0CjWX9-Z14&feature=related, it is pretty realistic in terms of what we do).***

Until this point in our training, all of our Krav Maga training had essentially been conditioning. We did a lot of suicides, sprints, and crawling, but no actual drills. This was the first week we actually put on gloves and gear. Each lesson has a "warm-up" in the beginning of about 30 minutes of sprints, after which the Krav Maga begins.
Our first lesson we were taught different punch and kick techniques, which we practiced on a partner who stood against a wall with his hands in the air. Monday we graduated to actual "fights." It started out as one-on-one, but quickly moved on to two- and three-on-one. The idea being that the person who is getting double and triple teamed is given no chance to catch his breath before two new people enter and mount a new assault.

The truth is that I actually enjoy the Krav Maga itself, the one downside is that after more than one day of Krav Maga in a row your entire body becomes tight and sore. Not to mention that after the second day it hurt to walk because of the bruise on my right quad from all of the kicks I had taken.

By the third day, there was a hault put on Krav Maga because of the number of injuries people had sustained (oddly enough no one had been injured in an actual "fight," rather people were coincidentally hurt during the lessons). There was one member of my team who had to get a staple in his arm after he cut himself on a screw sticking out of a door, in a mad dash to change the two left gloves he had selected. Two more people got hurt when they ran into each other during sprints.