Female Urban Krav Maga Student Fight back -and wins.

One of our lady students was attacked recently. She handled it brilliantly and the attacker was left with more than a few bruises. Read the story below:

“I was just getting off the 381 bus just outside Waterloo Station around 2:30am after attending a party with some friends. I was alone as my friends were gone, and the bus was at its last stop. I stepped off the bus, walked a few meters, the bus pulled away and a man seemed to come out of nowhere. He was around 6ft 3“-6ft-5” tall, and stocky holding a beer can in his hand. He came straight towards me shouting and swearing right in my face, I was a little surprised, but was not too startled as there was really no time to figure out the situation.

Before his hands came up I dropped my bag and went straight into his face with an eye gouge, gripping his head tight with a mixture of finger tips and nails, which sent the beer can flying and his hands straight up to mine. I held on but was pushing hard which sent him backwards; I got in 2 palm strikes to the nose, managed to knee him in the groin twice but it was a bit unsteady with the 1st kick and the 2nd kick was the one he seemed to feel. He fell backwards on the ground holding his nose and groin, I fell down on him too as I was leaning in towards him with the palm strikes making me unbalanced, but as I was getting up I continued on him with 4 more palm strikes to the face… as I hurried away I called for an ambulance for him.


The lady, let’s call her Margaret, did a fantastic job here, particularly as she has only had 10 lessons with us. From a training point of view we see this as vindication of our practical, scenario-based approach.

If it kicks off there’s a good chance that you’ll be holding a bag, so we condition people to drop the bag and counter attack aggressively. We teach pre-emptive strikes as a fundamental part of the syllabus, who knows what would have happened if Margaret had let this jerk continue and lay his hands on her (I suspect that she would still have knocked the hell out of him but I’m glad that I’ll never find out).

We also train for the real chaos and mess of a real fight - things go wrong, Margaret shouldn’t have let herself get taken down by the guy but she responded perfectly by continuing the assault on the guy. N.B. the use of heel-of-the-hand strikes rather than punching: very effective close-in, where most fights actually take place, and you don’t end up with aching and cut knuckles.
Congratulations to Margaret and her teacher, Aasim.

Mark