Krav Maga, first impressions...

As promised I headed to my first Krav Maga training on Monday, and after only one session I already find myself having second thoughts about the whole thing.  I will try to persevere with it for a while longer, though.

Like I said before, I tend to quickly lose interest in martial arts once I actually start them, so this time I tried to identify my problem.  Part of it is that I don't seem to like starting out as a beginner in a group with more experienced members.  Not sure if this is not wanting to look like a tool, or some sort of inferiority complex, but it's something I'm going to have to work around.

I did get paired up with the only other beginner, which helped, and we both spent the lesson practising attacks our trainer taught us on each other, one person holding a big cushion-shield-thing while the other directed blows and kicks at it.  During our first exercise - kicks to the knee - another member came up and introduced himself, which was friendly, and then launched into what I thought to be an over-vigorous attack on his partner's shield.  Now, maybe I imagined it, but it did remind me that I really hate all that alpha-male macho rubbish.

Not to get bogged down on the negative, though, the guy I was paired with seemed alright, and the trainer came over on a regular basis to help us out, taking time to answer questions and correct our moves if we were making a balls of it.  It's also a martial art for real life, rather than being set for tournaments, one of the main ideas being to subdue an attacker asap, while regularly scanning your surroundings in case one of his/her mates comes at you with a bottle, for example.  This, I agree, is a sound approach, but my only concern would be in a situation where the police become involved, as the counter-attacks we learn to put an aggressor down seem so frenzied and aggressive that a witness arriving on the scene could easily believe the assailant to be the victim, and vice versa.

The trainer also mentioned something along the lines of 'letting the anger out' during your attack.  I wasn't too happy about it, to be honest, as I would think that the ultimate goal of learning a martial art would be to eliminate rage and have total control of your actions so that in the event of a confrontation you don't keep pummelling a guy's face when he has ceased to be a threat, and so the battle fog doesn't clear to find you standing over a lifeless, faceless body.  But that's just me.

The last thing that irked me just a bit was other members joking and being all pally-pally with the trainer when he's trying to explain something, or telling us what to do next.  The training is a lot less formal than other forms of martial arts that I know of - come and go as you please, no bowing to a photo of the guy who created the discipline at the beginning and end of each training - but no apparent code of conduct either. I know, clubs are meant to be fun, and it's great that the instructor is a nice guy but there is a time to mess around, and it's not when he's trying to address the whole group, even if you are super funny.  Well, maybe I'll change my mind when someone super funny gives it a go, but for now that's where I stand.