(ECNS)-- Freeing herself from the last "attacker," Wang Jingyi dropped to the ground and gasped. In about two minutes, she and her partner Jane had worked together to fight through an S-shaped obstacle course guarded by multiple men who continuously tried to drag, pull, control, and pin them to the ground. The two girls had to draw on all the defense techniques and tactics they had learned over the past weeks to break free of their attackers.
"I didn't think I could make it through a month ago," said the 30-year-old Beijing white-collar. "It's so great to find that I have become stronger."
Fight for safety
The simulated group attack is the final test for the 20 participants in a women's self-defense workshop offered by the official chapter of Krav Maga Global on the Chinese Mainland (KMG China), a training institution specializing in the Israeli system of self-defense and combat.
In the introductory course that covers four weekends, the participants have all been taught basic techniques and strategies to deal with threats like hair-pulling, choking, dragging, etc. And as with all classes taught by KMG China, the final drill was designed to test each woman's ability to use the newly learned skills under pressure, while also working with their partners to "survive" the course.
Greeting the girls at the finish line, Yonina Chan, general manager and instructor at KMG China, was more than happy to see the accomplishments of each student. "Escaping the group attack is not easy even for higher level trainees. I have to say they all did a very good job."
Krav Maga is Hebrew for "contact combat." It's an unarmed self-defense system first developed by Imi Lichtenfeld for street fighting and later more famously adapted by the Israeli Defense Force. Lichtenfeld's disciple, Eyal Yanilov, was responsible for combining the individual techniques that Lichtenfeld created into a system, as well as bringing this system out of Israel back in the 1980s. Yanilov headed up several Krav Maga organizations over the years, but founded Krav Maga Global in 2010 with the goal of creating a professional organization for teaching and training. Today, Krav Maga is taught to civilians, bodyguards, law-enforcement and military personnel worldwide, thanks to its practicality and easy-to-learn features.
With the women's self-defense courses, much of the training is tailored for tackling threats that are more common for women. "We hope to teach our students some useful skills, which have proven effective in real-life situations. But more importantly, we want to train them to develop a sense of situation awareness to avoid problems in the first place," Chan said.
