A FORM OF SELF-DEFENSE THAT HAS ITS PRIORITIES
STORY BY Anne Haddad PHOTOGRAPHY BY Mary C. Gardella
November/December 2016
On a Sunday afternoon last summer, about 50 women gathered at a Columbia gym for a three-hour seminar. The objective was, in a nutshell, to learn how to beat the crap out of an attacker.
The secondary outcome was exercise (lots of it), which makes sense. Strength definitely helps when a woman summons all the muscles in her entire body to launch into a bad guy’s “nutshell,” and then make a run for it. Because practice makes perfect, doing those moves on a regular basis could help muscle memory kick in during a crisis.
Fight training and fitness make for a value-added combo, both focused on empowering the student.
Using self-defense training as a form of fitness has attracted women, in particular, to such programs as krav maga, used by the Israeli army, and the soteria method, developed by a former dancer to help her overcome a traumatic assault. It isn’t surprising, since boxing and kickboxing have already infiltrated cardio fitness classes.
The krav maga method, however, emphasizes the self-defense part, which becomes the basis for the fitness classes. The method is touted as “reality-based,” and was developed to train Israeli Defense Forces in hand-to-hand combat. It’s now taught in police departments in the United States, as well.
“In traditional martial arts, you’re taught that there is mutual respect and sportsmanship, but this is not for sport – this is about fighting dirty to save your life,” says Rebecca McHugh, 42, a math teacher who trains and works part time at the Krav Maga Maryland gym in Columbia. It’s a family thing – her husband (a firefighter and krav maga instructor) and 22-year-old daughter (a police officer) also train at krav maga. At the Columbia club, McHugh’s nickname is “Momma,” and Momma can probably kick your ass.
“I did traditional martial arts for a while, but my krav maga self could kill that self in a real fight,” McHugh says. The combination of training and practicing defensive and attack moves, plus the allover conditioning, stress release and confidence she gets from krav maga have made her stronger in every way, she says. As a cardio and core workout, it’s all she needs, and she supplements a bit with weight training.
“I certainly wasn’t an athletic person when I started this,” says McHugh, who eight years ago was in a bad marriage, doing nothing for fitness and putting on weight.
“I had fallen into a rut,” she says. Then one night everything changed. “I was awake at 3 a.m., watching TV, and a krav maga commercial came on. I thought, ‘That looks like something I would love to do.’ It was the best, most life-changing thing I have ever done for me and my daughters.”
CLASSES VS. SEMINARS
The Columbia Krav Maga gym operates much like any fitness club, with membership fees, a locker room, weight machines and cardio classes. New members can take beginner classes and move up to more advanced levels when they’re ready.
In addition to the daily cardio classes, Maryland Krav Maga’s clubs (a second location is in Owings Mills) also offer special seminars, such as the three-hour women-only seminar and another one focused on surviving an active-shooter scenario. The seminars are open to nonmembers as well as members.
Self-defense classes use many of the same moves as those in cardio classes, but here they are executed with imagery, strategy and aggressive shouts.
The women’s seminar emphasizes fighting an attacker who expects his victim to be weaker – because she probably is – but who is not expecting her to fight back with such expertise. Surprise, momentum and swift kicks to the most vulnerable body parts are key. Statistics being as they are, an attacker is likely to be a man (whether an intimate partner or a stranger), and likely to be bigger and stronger than the woman he has targeted.
The goal is to create distance,” the teachers say, as they teach students to deliver an efficient kick.
A classic knee lift in a cardio class becomes a knee attack – a move that, incidentally, burns as many calories when repeated in krav maga as it does in aerobics. The women work in pairs, with one holding up a cushion as the other strikes it.
The knee jabs, kicks, punches and footwork are designed to use the attacker’s momentum against him.
At the summer women-only seminar, a few club members brought along friends who weren’t krav maga regulars, but were interested in the self-defense seminar. In fact, many in the class – a couple of mother-daughter dyads – were there because of one teen girl, Emily Casto. She credits her krav maga training for surviving when a young man began shooting in the food court of The Mall in Columbia on January 25, 2014. The shooter killed two young people and fired many more shots before turning the gun on himself.
RUN, HIDE, FIGHT
Emily, then 13, had just six months earlier enrolled at Krav Maga for self-defense classes at the urging of her father, who had actually tried to get her into martial arts classes earlier, but she wasn’t interested as a child. Krav maga appealed to her as a teenager, and she found her timidity yielding to a newfound sense of strength and eventually aggression, in a good way, when called for.
On that tragic day in 2014, the Casto family was in the food court. While her parents and little brother were at the Subway, Emily had gone to Chick-fil-A to get what she wanted. She was separated from the rest of the family when she heard the pops; it took three shots before everyone realized it was a gun.
“My first thought was, ‘Oh my God, I have to go back to my family.’ But my krav maga kicked in and I realized I can’t run toward the shots, I had to run in the opposite direction,” Emily recalls.
She remembered her active-shooter directions: Run-hide-fight, meaning run away if you can, but if you can’t run, then hide, and if you can’t hide, then fight. She ran until she saw an opportunity to hide with others in a store where a clerk was letting people into a back room. She didn’t have her cell phone, but she used someone else’s to let her mother know she was safe.
The experience scared her, as it would any young teen, and loud sudden noises still make her “freak out a little bit,” she says. But she emerged stronger, knowing she could take care of herself in a crisis.
“I’m more aware – when I go into a room, I think about where my exits are,” Emily says. “A lot of the class is mental training as well as physical training. I think half the battle in a fight is having the confidence to know that I can get myself home safe.”
Emily’s little brother, Ehren, 9, had started training just before the shooting, and continues to go regularly. Her mother, Joanna Casto, finally attended the women’s seminar in July, with Emily as her training partner, urging her mother to go ahead and hit the cushion with all her might. And with senior year ahead and college looming for Emily and her peers, two of her friends and their mothers joined the Casto women for the seminar.
In mid-August, Joanna Casto started training regularly at Krav Maga. She does it in addition to her normal cardio exercise, not instead of it.
“I’m getting physically and mentally stronger with every class,” she says. “It is intimidating, being a woman in a class with men who are bigger and stronger, but it is completely worth it. It is empowering to know that I can kick hard enough to make them stumble. This is completely out of my comfort zone and I’m learning so much about myself by doing it.”*
