Attacks are aimed at the most vulnerable parts of the body, and training is not limited to techniques that avoid severe injury some even permanently injure or cause death to the opponent.
If this is impossible or unsafe, it promotes finishing a fight as quickly and aggressively as possible. Krav Maga encourages students to avoid confrontation. There are several organizations teaching variations of Krav Maga internationally such as the British SAS and the US Marine Corps. Closely related variations have been developed and adopted by Israeli law enforcement and intelligence organizations. Krav Maga has been used by the Israel Defense Forces' special forces units, the security apparatus, and by regular infantry units. Krav Maga has a philosophy emphasizing aggression, and simultaneous defensive and offensive maneuvers. As a result, Krav Maga has built on its original base in Western boxing, wrestling and street fighting. In the late-1940s, following his migration to Israel, he began to provide lessons on combat training to what was to become the IDF.įrom the outset, the original concept of Krav Maga was to take the most simple and practical techniques of other fighting styles (originally European boxing, wrestling and street fighting) and to make them rapidly teachable to military conscripts. It was derived from the street-fighting experience of Hungarian-Israeli martial artist Imi Lichtenfeld, who made use of his training as a boxer and wrestler as a means of defending the Jewish quarter against fascist groups in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in the mid-to-late 1930s.
Krav Maga is known for its focus on real-world situations and its extreme efficiency and brutal counter-attacks. Krav Maga is a military self-defense system developed for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israeli security forces (Shin Bet and Mossad) that consists of a combination of techniques sourced from boxing, wrestling, aikido, judo, along with realistic fight training.