I actually went to class as planned!

Despite my weird knee /back combo hurty thing gaving it some major hurties Sunday night and yesterday morning, I duly trotted off to krav class last night.

It was a nice night so I had a funny feeling we might be outside for a bit. Had a wee nosy over the fence and the circuits class looked like they were having a fab time in the sun lol. Right enough Lee took us outside for the warmup. We started with a run round the pitch - I actually did okay with that, pretty much kept up with the others for the first 3/4s then had to drop right back for the last 'side'. Then we did some bodyweight stuff - squats, sprint out to the posts and back, star jumps, situps and some more squats.

Our 'audience' was growing so it was back inside for the class proper. We warmed up with some combos on the pads before moving onto knife defences. I was fine with the hand strikes, but I was wary of the kicks and knees just because of my sore bits.

Lee then had to leave to catch a plane so Michael took over and we worked through some knife defences. The first was a fairly straightforward response to a highline front attack - take the attacker's knife hand off your centreline and step through to off balance them. Was a good thing we were using wooden training knives - UTP promptly tried to slice her own chin off! That kind of set the tone for the rest of the session!

After working both sides, we then added some follow up strikes to the defence, and then added in a wrist press and / or strip style disarm. From there we looked at two defences to a midlevel attack. I confess that I don't like the standard krav maga defence here; it involves pushing the attacker's knife hand away, paired with a groin strike. The idea is to buy you enough time to run off. I guess it makes sense, but I was previously taught to monitor or control the knife hand, so the thought of having a live weapon 'active' felt odd to me.

I preferred the Tactical Edge version whereby you 'clapped' both your hands over the attacker's hand and used that to gain the leverage for the wrist press. Finally we looked at defending a knife presented to your back.

UTP needed to leave at this point so she missed the best bit - eyes closed, partner attacks you randomly with the knife. I got Michael attacking me - discovered that I am way too fond of the wrist presses, and tend to forget about other strikes such as groin kicks etc.

Fun class though.