From Barny's Desk

There are no victims, only volunteers.

With the holidays coming fast, the violent attack rate will be getting more frequent. Muggers and thieves will be out in force to try and make an easy buck. Be aware of your surroundings and let your senses work for you. If it feels like something is not right be ready to do what ever is necessaryif you cannot avoid the problem. Statistics provided by law enforcement show that a person caught in a violent attack who fights back has a 50 percent chance of surviving the attack even without any training. A person with training to negate an attack and has an organized counter attack can up his or her chances to a 90 percent or better survival rate. Those who submit to whatever their attacker wants is a victim by choice. If you are attacked fight back to your last breath, as a lot of people die because they think they don’t have a chance to live. Even if shot or stabbed, if you're not unconscious, keep fighting back, it could make the difference of surviving or not.

Barny

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Announcements and Events

Krav Maga Holiday Open House

Come & bring your friends for an afternoon of food & fun! Try a 30 minute sample classes of Yoga, Krav Maga, Cross-fit, or Heavy Bag. There will be raffle drawings all afternoon. Win private lessons, free memberships, and Pro Shop items such as Tshirts, Krav Pants, hats, duffle bags, shin pads, boxing or bag gloves.
There will be SPECIAL DEALS for new members who sign up during our open house!

Date: Saturday December 16th
Place: KMSF Training Center 1455 Bush Street
San Francisco, CA 94109
Time: 1-5 pm

$5 admission fee (includes 2 raffle tickets)
Additional tickets $4; 10 for $30; 20 for $70
All proceeds benefiting Home Away from Homelessness: www.homeaway.org



Hey Ladies! Pass it On!

We're excited to announce that CRAVE PARTIES has landed in San Francisco! We have been busily preparing for a fantastic season full of fabulous CRAVE events, opportunities to grow your network of wonderful women, and of course, PARTIES!

JOIN US for our first big CRAVE PARTY in San Francisco
Date: Tuesday, December 12th
Place: At the Green Room, War Memorial Opera House
401 Van Ness Avenue
Time: 5-9 pm

Everything you CRAVE under one roof!
Designers and Boutique Stores
Fabulous boutique clothing, handbags, jewelry, home accessories and more!!
Fashion Show with the newest and hotest trends
Brought to you by CRAVE Party SF

Help support Home Away from Homelessness by donating your gently used shoes and handbags.

Invitation: www.cravepartysf.com/SF_holidayparty2006.htm

Home Away from Homelessness: www.homeaway.org

Upcoming Belt Test:

Orange Belt
December 9th

Christmas and New Year's Holiday Schedule:

Closed: December 24th and 25th
Closed: December 31st, Jan. 1st

Tuesday December 26th - 7 am class will be cancelled.

Annual Member Survey - Win a private lesson!

At the Krav Maga Training Center in San Francisco we are always looking for ways to improve. During the next few weeks, we would like to hear your input, feedback and suggestions. It will help us continue meeting the needs of our members and identify any areas that require our attention. Thanks in advance and please get your surveys turned in by December 20th. On December 22nd we will draw 3 names from surveys turned in and each person will receive a 1 hour private lesson with the instructor of their choice.

New Slideshow - Sword and Staff Seminar

In this one day seminar, students learned techniques of sword cutting, katas and sparring. Also taught were staff striking and sparring techniques. Check out the slideshow at our Seminars page here: Seminars

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Interview: Grappling Instructor James Maiz

KMSF: Why don't you start by telling me your martial arts resume? What kind of things have you studied, what was your first exposure to them?

JM: When I was twelve, I started with Shotokan Karate. A friend who was into it got me into it. I did one tournament, and for some reason, no students or teachers from my school showed up. I was signed up for both sparring and kata competitions. So they call my name, the first thing I had to do was sparring, and I just remember we had shin pads and boxing gloves, and it was very controlled since we were kids.

I remember fighting and thinking, "I don't know what's legal." So I just kept kicking the guy in the stomach, and eventually it was over and I won. I remember that the overriding sensation was confusion, of like, "What am I doing?" And I think the other kid felt the same way, because I remember looking at his face and we were both like "What are we supposed to do?" but once we started making contact, we guessed that's what we were supposed to be doing. In retrospect, it was so controlled it didn't feel like a real fight. Then, I was supposed to do a kata, and I completely blew the very first move, so I improvised the whole thing. I stuck with Shotokan for a while, and then I got out of it. I think I was just bored. I didn't really dig katas at all, and it was just so much formality. We would do meditation at the beginning of class - which I kind of liked, but the rest of it got boring.

I got into jiujitsu when an acquaintance challenged me to a fight, but very playful. It's funny because I reverted to the self-defense stuff. So, this friend challenged me and tried to put me in a headlock, and instead of punching him I swept him. I thought "Oh, I'm doing pretty good," and then he got me on the ground and started doing all this stuff. This guy was from Brazil. I was thinking "What is going on?" and just that feeling of "Wow, this is so cool and I know nothing about this." After that, we'd clear a floor at parties so I could practice an arm bar or a choke. I got the bug to do it, and I started training with a Muay Thai fighter who had moved to Brazil to learn jiujitsu with Renzo Gracie. His name is Amal Easton. He was a great motivator and teacher, and his first school was a block from where I lived, so that was it.

KMSF: Yeah, that's the way it was for me when I watched the first few UFC fights, and seeing the Gracies. It was so cool and so unusual. It was like the true martial art aspect that you just didn't see in a lot of those early UFCs when most of the guys would just maul each other. The Gracies would just come in there and take them out without really hurting them. So how old were you when you started doing jiujitsu?

JM: Late 20s. My last teacher pushed me beyond where I was comfortable. In Brazil they emphasize the workout aspect of it, it's very geared towards competition. You'll have fights within a school just to determine who's going to go to a competition. And there's a certain kind of attitude, like it's both more laidback and more intense than a lot of schools here. But my last teacher Rinaldo Santos, a second degree black belt under Carlson Gracie, was just a madman. He really brutalized us and pushed us way beyond what we were comfortable with. At one point we were training for acompetition and we were without a school to train, so we trained in someone's backyard in what was practically a chicken coop! That place was so small with a low ceiling, and we had the most intense sparring sessions there, with Rinaldo screaming at us to go harder, especially when we were already exhausted. The last day of sparring, a couple days before the tournament, I broke a guy's arm, and I split my chin when this huge guy threw me down. I had my chin in his eye socket, so when my head hit the ground, I blackened his eye totally shut, and the scar on my chin is from that incident. That was the same day! And two days later we went to compete. That training was just incredible, it was crazy, but it changed how I fight,and I'm a different animal for sure than I was when I started.

KMSF: I think it's good to do that sometimes. You have to find out what you're capable of withstanding, or you don't know what's going to happen to yourself when you're put in that situation by surprise. It's a fine line with a large student body, depending on what kind of people you're dealing with. So have you studied anything else besides jiujitsu? It seems like what you do isn't pure jiujitsu, that there's some sambo and judo in there.

JM: I borrow from a lot of styles. There've been really good wrestlers that I've trained with. I don't think I'm a great traditional wrestler, but I like to put myself in that position with good wrestlers so I can learn different ways to defend, even on the way down. There are always guys that will take you down, and it's good to start your offense on the way down instead of just getting slammed. I've trained with a few judo black belts, a few sambo guys... mostly it's important to be open. Sometimes teachers will pass through town and I'll go check them out, or if I train with peers who are also teachers, or students who have good game. There's a lot of people who are purists about jiujitsu, they don't do anything else, they don't go without the gi, they look down on leg-locks. To me, I think it's all fair game.

KMSF: I thought leg-locks were a part of jiujitsu.

JM: They're legal in tournaments, but there's this attitude of it being kind of cheap, like you should pass the guard instead of going for an ankle lock. But a knee bar is devastating. I'd rather have my arm broken than my knee. It's like why shut your eyes to half of the game? You're ignoring half of your body.

KMSF: It seems like in every style, particularly styles with long traditions, there are practitioners that are more uptight about deviating from it, and there are people that are more open. I didn't realize all that about the leg-locks, I thought it was all fair game.

JM: You'll see it, but you get that attitude in some schools. It could be that they haven't developed that aspect of their game, so they try to discourage it.

KMSF: The ego is a funny thing that way. It's better not to have one.

JM: Well, yeah. I think it's good to have a little bit. It keeps you from developing habits that are too nice. But at the same time, if you have too much of it you end up getting injured or you injure someone else.

KMSF: Well, pride and self-respect is a good thing. Some of it. So what else do you do? You said you're in a band. What kind of music are you into? What instruments do you play?

JM: I play guitar and bass. I play bass in this rockband called The Girlfriend Experience. We just played our last show of the year at Slim's last Friday night. We toured a bit the last couple years - up to the Northwest, Seattle, Portland, Eugene. We've gone down to Southern California a couple of times. We made one big loop out to Texas and back through Denver. It's fun, it's a pain in the ass. One of our last tours, our van broke down over four times. It got to be a joke, because it would break down in the worst places, like in the middle of nowhere 30 miles outside of El Centro. There's nothing, no services, and you just have to laugh.

KMSF: Have you found that martial arts affects how you approach music or vice versa?

JM: I've found that when I try to convey to someone something that doesn't fall into the context of either of those things, I end up using metaphors relating to music or grappling. There's give and take, and in music there's listening and committing to something. You walk down the street in a certain way, and there's a whole set of relationships going on. The connection you have to an audience or astranger, it's such an energetic thing. It's like you're going for a ride. With training or fighting... Both things make me completely present, like I'm not thinking about anything else or worried about anything. It's a little easier to think about other stuff when you're playing music, because a lot of other stuff is going on, especially if you're familiar with the music. You don't improvise as much. In fighting, you're having to constantly adapt to the situation. You're engaged in every moment. But yeah, I've found that if someone is having a head trip about something, I just keep coming back to those fields - that's how I think now, and I can't help but frame whatever I'm talking about in terms of music or a fight.

KMSF: Is there a particular way you approach teaching? How do you create your lesson plans?

JM: When I first started, I actually constructed a series of basics for all the different positions, so people would have a couple of different escapes from bad positions, some sort of submission to do, just some fundamentals for them. However, it's a little sporadic when people show up, there's a mix of different levels. So now I try to base it on who is there, and I'll just start in one place and go from there. My main approach to teaching is to try to keep the techniques we work on in the same ballpark for one class, and try to not do too many moves or moves that are not connected to each other, because you can only digest so much. If you limit yourself to one area, you familiarize yourself and learn the tiny nuances even though you might be doing a slightly different technique. I love teaching. At the same time, to use a musical metaphor, it's like I could talk about my band or I could just rock out and show you. That's the difference between teaching and sparring. You don't want to force a technique in every situation. When you can't pull off one, another door opens. The main thing I do in class is just pick a place to start, oro pen it up to the students in case anyone's wanting to focus on a particular area. After that it just goes its own way. Sometimes I go around and let everyone do the technique on me and I can feel what they are doing better than I can even see it. You sometimes can't tell the subtleties by looking, but then once I'm in it, I can help fix it.

KMSF: Is there any other kind of work that you do, besides making music and teaching?

JM: I had a dog walking business for quite a while. I still do it. I actually just rescued a pit bull that had jumped out of a second story apartment, and was on a back walkway. Animal control was there, but they were worried about dealing with the pit bull. But I knew the neighbor, and knew the dog, so I just got up there and let it back in the house. I don't know, maybe I could take over Steve Irwin's job. That would be fun.

KMSF: Or be another Dog Whisperer. I have a friend who does dog walking too. That's a whole other area of interest to me, the parallel between dealing with people and dealing with dogs. They are sosimilar in a lot of ways, especially when people get stressed out; they become that animal nature. The rules that animals come up with to interact with each other are so very similar to how people do at a gut level. If you come into an animal's space and make them feel uncomfortable it can get bad quickly, and if you make them comfortable, it's completely different.

JM: Yeah, I've learned a lot from dealing with dogs. Animals respond to body language and tension. I was at a party once and had gone outside to get some air, and there was this huge bull mastiff on the porch, and I thought, "Oh, what a cute dog." The neighborhood was really crazy, it was like a park, but there were a lot of crack deals going on there. So I was amped up being aware of the surroundings, and this dog just clamped onto my wrist and wouldn't let go. He wasn't biting me, but at the same time he wasn't letting go. And I realized he could feel I was tense and it was probably making him tense, so I just relaxed and he let me go. That was a huge lesson, because when you grip someone really hard, they're going to grip you really hard back.

KMSF: Martial arts probably help you with that kind ofattitude, because you start being aware of yourself, and what it's doing to someone else. Especially with grappling, because you're so close andyou can feel what the other person is doing and vice versa and you can get all these little clues of what's going on. I noticed that a lot in teaching beginners. I was teaching a lot of sparring classes for a while, and the people who were out of control or getting hurt were the intermediate people who'd been sparring for only a short period of time. They would get so tense and they wouldn't even know it. The guys that have a lot of experience know it's just a workout, and the newbies would come in and start wailing on them. So then they would get hit really hard and that would stress them out even more; they had no idea. They thought it was the other guy's fault. People don't realize the harder you go, the harder you're going to hit. Animals can sense that stuff immediately.

JM: I worked with a lab-pit, I don't know if it had some Great Dane in it or what, because it was really tall, and the poor thing... the person who owned it had moved from the East Bay where they had a yard to SoMa where they didn't have a yard at all. And the only grass nearby was outside the jail, which is tiny anyway. At the time I didn't have a vehicle, so I couldn't take him anywhere. So I would practice jiujitsu with him. He would get on the bed to try to get a height advantage and would put his pawsup on my shoulders, and I would toss him back down. It was really playful, but I got so I would be like, "Oh, I could finish him here," or "I could avoid the bite this way," you know, I was never like cranking on him or anything. What was funny about that dog was that people would walk across the street to avoid him, but if a poodle half his size came up to him, he would roll over and expose his belly. That's funny too, the whole perception that people have. People walking down the street, the whole eye contact thing and looking really hard. Most times when someone's looking at you really hard, all you have to do is look back to show you're unafraid, and they'll eventually check themselves. Just being aware when you're walking through the Tenderloin or parts of Oakland keeps you out of a lot of trouble.

KMSF: That's true, I've had lots of situations in this city where if I tried to avoid the confrontation, it would be worse. Just acknowledging a person and not stressing out, that's defused a lot of situations that could have gone either way.

JM: Well, you know... people have issues.

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Adaptation

"Change in behavior of a person or group in response to new or modified surroundings."*

Adaptation is the defining feature of the human species. In anthropological terms, it is a slow, many centuries long process of genetic modification leading to new and improved capability to survive and control our environment. On a day to day basis, and on a moment by moment basis, adaptation can be the key to becoming a victim or a violent crime or surviving or avoiding this fate altogether.

Here we are not concerned with the genetic modification process. We are not going to grow wings to fly away from muggers or develop eyes in the back of our heads in time, or any time soon I would bet. What we humans have made good use of to adapt to situations is our minds, our ability to project future events out of current events, using our memory and imagination together to predict what might happen to us if a particular course of action is taken.

In order to successfully adapt in time to a rapidly changing situation, it is essential to develop a sense of awareness, preparedness, and openness. Too often we get tunnel vision, a sort of narrow focus on what we are pre-occupied with, whether it is something that is bothering us at home or work, or just being focussed on getting somewhere within a certain amount of time. These are states of mind that can close off our ability to perceive threats or potential threats. It's easy to lose context, like "Why is this man approaching me while I'm walking down the street talking on my cell phone, I'm busy right now!" This is the sort of self-absorbed activity that can make you profiled as a victim by an opportunistic criminal.

Krav Maga gives you the skills to be prepared, but all the physical skills in the world won't help you when you get surprised. Most of the time we get surprised because we are not paying attention, and not thinking ahead in ways that will help us adapt to problems. The combination of developing physical skills, and developing an adaptable mind gives you the best chance of survival when you are confronted with threatening situations.

* The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition