April 2016 – Avi Nardia Kapap Krav Maga

“Failing To Prepare Is Preparing To Fail”

One of KAPAP’s fundamental modern Martial Arts goals is to enhance it’s traditional Martial Arts roots by assimilating hand-to-hand and combative skill-sets but also CPR and emergency medical components that can save lives. We also add skills such as Rope Adventures that work on team building and rescue operations through the use of ropes including how to even make ropes from toilet paper! Knots can play an unexpected important roll in making fire, or can be utilized for rescue, but ropes can also come into play in self-defense. Someone having a heart attack needs CPR. Someone choking on food may also need that skill applied on them. We also incorporate nutrition and fitness education, and as I’ve said in the past when some have asked me how to disarm a knife – I try to teach people how to disarm a fork first! More people die from over-eating and being over-weight and more yet will likely die from living the wrong lifestyle. This is why Kapap is more about teaching people how to live a quality lifestyle and not to live fearing people. All of the “Don’t be a victim” slogans are generated for those that are most likely to be become a victim through their own hands and by living a dangerous lifestyle. Fear cuts deeper than swords and this is why we teach people not to fear others, but to approach them with love and peace and friendship.

Another Part of KAPAP – Israeli Krav Maga, is survival. We include survival skills as yet another component of our modern Martial Arts package. We teach subject matter that includes SERE school components, which used in the Army teaches Psychology, mental preparedness and mindset skills, and also teaches hand-to-hand (CBQB), medic skills, navigation and more. In the U.K., SERE is an acronym for Survive, Evade, Resist and Extract. SERE also provides U.S. military personnel, U.S. Department of Defense civilians, and private military contractors with training in evading capture, survival skills.

We do not go so deep in training these skills as our military models do, but we do try to teach the mental aspects that you’d need to deal with a bad situation that you might face and how to keep calm and not panic. We teach escape, hand-cuffing and escape from kidnapping situations in part to prepare our students to know how to deal with a ‘bad day.’

We add urban survival techniques to prepare our students how to deal with situations that can happen within inner-city neighborhoods in bad times and during crisis incidents that come about due to terrorist events, mobs, protests or any other urban unrest due to any number of unseen events, including storms, floods and other natural causes.

We teach parts of what is professionally called ‘TradecCraft.’ These skills can include cleaning runs, surveillance, counter-surveillance and third-party protection. We also teach basic security training – how to secure your own home, and also how to build your own security program. Kapap is a progressive and dynamic Martial Arts program, but also much more than to be simply labeled as a Martial Arts discipline – we are progressive in that we always strive to expand our educational program, to always include new technologies, new ideas, but we also strive to learn from what has already been examined, and to re-examine and improve on that, to revise, and expand on what came before us.

We are not a ‘normal’ Martial Arts training program, because we provide more tools for our students including training in tactical driving, swimming and free-diving and cold weather survival – all components that make Kapap a Modern Martial art.

“Genuine wilderness exploration is as dangerous as warfare” Theodore Roosevelt wrote after nearly dying on an Amazon river tributary in 1914. Survival skills are an important component in what Kapap offers, and for good reason. You may be more likely to need those skills than fighting skills! I can add the words of my friend and trainer from Thailand “in our jungles everything is designed to kill you.” After experiencing it first-hand, I thought: so true. If you study how to survive and survive, you also get a great bonus: mental training and mental stamina! We are starting to build a seminar we call ‘Warrior by Nature.’ We’ll have you start your day meditating somewhere deep in a jungle, where all of the insects and creatures of that habitat will be bothering you and this is where and how you will learn to keep your mind calm and relaxed.

Kapap can also teach you to understand how much your own ego will not help you here, and show you that you’ll need your integrity – and here we can say that using your integrity is doing the right thing because no one will see what you do here. There is no Facebook, or Twitter, you’ll have no access to mist modern electronics devices or personal media. You won’t be able to post your very own ‘hero’ pictures as many do from their own comfortable surroundings while pretending to be warriors. This is where we will introduce you to our unique program that we call ‘Only Knife.’

Survival teachers will tell you that people who try to be heroes quickly die. They may have stamina but they lack the proper attitude. A Martial Arts teacher will say the same thing same as self-defense starts and ends with proper attitude, and there are no heroes in self-defense. This is why in Kapap – Israeli Krav Maga we always avoid slogans like “touch me and your first lesson is free.” When your ego is driving the bus, it’s not about self-defense.

The ‘Only Knife’ seminar concept came about as an idea to demonstrate that most knife teachers and systems only demonstrate the evil aspects of using this simple tool. They teach you how they can kill with knives, but we should all know that any fool kill someone with something as simple as a stone. As an example of one of the problems within the knife culture, and the recent love of the Karambit knife specifically, we feel it was designed for only one purpose – to kill, like the gun. A lot of this comes from the movie culture, and our own gullible nature – we get sucked into the newest fad and buy into it without ever questioning it. Think of the Karambit as a tool – and wouldn’t you really be better off having a survival knife due it’s multiple use nature and it’s multiple functions, than having only a one-trick pony like the Karambit in your survival kit? A knife is a tool first and can also be used as a weapon if necessary. But, keep in mind that you can kill someone with almost any other item used as a weapon too. You will be much better prepared and for more possibilities if you learn how to use a knife for survival.

We will come out with a new DVD soon, produced by Budo International Magazine, that will introduce you to why survival skills are important skills that we need to add into our Martial Arts programs. We hope that our friends, instructors and students all enjoy this latest production hosted by our Survivalist Trainer Toby Cowern and gain knowledge and skills through viewing it. This DVD is not to teach survival skills but more to explain the connection between Martial Arts and survival. To truly study survival you must take the training. It’s not something you will learn simply by watching a DVD or by being a YouTube Sensei!