IMPACT self defense for women

[lor]

Sunny, you summed up what my classmates and I love about Impact.

1) I knew going in that most women would have trouble hitting the attacker our first day. However, I thought after taking KM for a few months that I would *at least* be able to nail him with a good palm heel strike. Yet when I turned to face him, I froze. I couldn’t knee him fluidly either. I wanted to, but my body wasn’t following as quickly and with the force I was looking for. The other women had the same problem.

Impact did a smart thing. They video taped all of our fights and made them available on DVD. We can watch the evolution of both our techniques and our minds as the days passed. And sure enough, the girls on the first day in no way resemble the girls on the last day.

2) The confidence to wait for a good opportunity is key. In our specific rape scenarios, we were straddled and pinned in some way. The first time the class encountered that, a few of the women panicked and struggled. You could see the fear on their faces ~ it was like they forgot where they were, and all they knew was they had a guy on top of them, threatening them. The rest of us on the sidelines literally stopped breathing for a moment, reacting with a degree a fear ourselves.

We could see struggling got us nowhere. Our instructors taught us to relax and breathe in that situation. He may be on our chest or pelvis, he may have our arms pinned, but we needed to focus on A) what he was saying and B) where he was moving. Eventually we conditioned ourselves to do that. We learned to respond to our attacker and tell him what he wanted to hear. When the time was right, we exploded and didn’t look back. We went from compliant and helpless to an \”all out brawl\” in seconds.

Among the things I’d love to see evolve in this type of training is the frequency. We need to do this with some kind of regularity and with more scenarios. Many of the women were willing to take the class again to improve their skills, but we don’t want to take up spots that would otherwise be used by brand new students. Impact offers advanced classes with weapons, but the schedule varies.

So nothing is perfect, Impact included. Can’t KM develop something like this to help us? Something specific for women? I’m sure it’s not easy playing the part of the attacker, swearing at us, threatening us, being graphic. And it can’t be fun being kicked around regardless of how much padding is used. But we NEED this!

[rls]

IMPACT

Although Iíve never taken an impact class I have taken a few similar seminars like impact. I am a huge believer in the seminars.

Two things that this training can identify is the tendency to over react when angry or ìpushedî or under react Öfreezing, limp. When you leave a class like this you often leave this some insight on how you respond to stress/verbal attack/attack and are more likely to act more appropriately or aggressively in the future. Most people think of scenarios that could happen and think about how they would react and rehearse these scenarios in their mind. That alone is valuable.

I guess on this web site, for the most part Iím preaching to the choir.

I tried to set up a impact type class for a group of women and a few men that I work with however the people were conducting the training were not comfortable with training people that did not have experience in karv/ martial arts so they didnít train the group. This bothered me quite a bit because untrained/ inexperienced people stand to gain the most from an ìimpactî type seminar. Just two weeks after we were scheduled to take the seminar we had a woman from the organization was attacked in a parking lot (by an ex-boyfriend) he shot her several times and killed her. He walked up to her and pulled the gun on her. She ran away from him and he killed her. I canít help but think if she would have attacked him, when he was close perhaps she would have lived. Unlikely but possible.

One area that I hadnít really thought about before reading some post is that during these type of adrenaline sparking seminars is the ìbad guyî is in a suit and faceless. The kicker is that many, the majority of violent crimes against women are at the hands of someone that they know. In the training seminars this is not really addressed but I believe it should be. Reacting aggressively to someone when you know who they are changes the field quite a bit. Even having the narrator of the seminar tell participants to imagine that the attacker is a familiar person that or in the case of young people ìan authority figureî or some sort I believe makes the scenario (statistically) what a participant is more likely to encounter. Attacking someone who is a familiar face really takes a higher level of resolve. Can this be accomplished by saying ìpicture a person you donít know but are friendly with? My guess is yes.

I am very interested in reading comments on what is effective and ideas to make the training more effective.

Also, I thanks to those folks out there that provide these type of seminars to people even if they know nothing about krav or martial arts.

[anonymous]

Are there any specific gun defenses in IMPACT? Had the girl you talked about trained in Krav Maga, she would have known a gun defense that might have saved her life. It would have worked perfectly with the attacker close to her.

[Author]

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