Thursday 8 December 2011

Urban Krav maga used to defend multiple attackers

Below are some kind words unedited from one of our new students on how he defended himself against a nasty confrontation.


An Urban Krav Maga and Mark O’Neil testimonial:

After having attended Sussex Urban Krav Maga for 4-5 weeks I was mugged at UKF bass culture (a London music event at Alexandra Palace) on the 25th of November. The techniques I had learnt even in this short period undoubtedly protected me and prevented a severe beating as suffered by others targeted during the same evening by the same gang – here are the details of what occurred:

10 000 people attended the event and the incident occurred during Nero’s set, so the arena was packed tight with people, it was dark lights were flashing and the music was incredibly loud, unbeknownst to me the gang of 5 were pointing out their targets and pushing through the crowd until they were surrounding them, one directly behind and the other four within one or two people on all sides. I was wearing a gold chain given to me as a special gift for my 18th birthday – a silly choice given the escalated price of gold and the nature of the event – but something I’ve worn every day since receiving it so I didn’t think! This was the gang’s target and many other people outside when I went out after were reporting chains being snatched.
The lad who had moved directly behind me grabbed the chain, I felt this and began to turn to my right straight away, he turned to run away into the crowd as his hand pulled on the chain to snap it, as the chain gave way his right hand was to the right of my neck because I had turned, I grabbed over his knuckles with my left hand, twisted sharply outwards and pulled his arm towards me – as per a knife to the neck from the rear drill from the class. This flung him to the floor and left him lying on his back, head at my feet and legs away from me – looking shocked. Had it just have been him I would have very easily managed to take my necklace back and prevent him from following me using any of the finishing techniques we had practiced – however I then got punched in the side of the head from my right. I let go of the first lad who I had thrown to the floor and turned to the directing of the punch realising there was another person involved to my right, he swung again and I had already adopted the rhino defence as we were told that if there were multiple assailants or when a punch was being thrown that the best way to protect your head was to adopt this defence. I drove towards him with my elbow up and his punch went behind me, his right arm colliding with my left, when I felt this collision I opened up and grabbed behind his head in a muay thai style clinch, I pulled his head down and kneed him to the forehead sending him falling into the crowd, I was then punched in the back of the head by a third attacker his punch connected hard and his hand slid past my right ear, I rotated to my left quickly and threw a punch as I turned – connecting well with his jaw and knocking him unconscious to the floor. By this time a 6ft circle had appeared in the crowd inside in which only me and the remaining boys were left the first lad I had thrown had got up and run, the remaining two pushed me across this circle from behind and ran away into the crowd leaving me and the unconscious lad in the circle – I shouted loudly after them words to the effect of “come on then I’ll have you” to ensure that they wouldn’t come back and then turned my attention to the lad lying face down to my left, he was lying face down and was beginning to stir, I jumped on his back and pulled his right arm out and behind him – I bent his wrist and locked his arm behind him as shown to us in the class, picked him up to his feet and walked him 30meters to the side of the venue where the security were. I explained that him and four other lads had just mugged me and he was escorted to the front door where he was handed over to the police – upon searching him the police found 4 mobile phones and 6 wallets in his possession and he was arrested.
Several other people outside also identified him as one of the muggers that had attacked them – however most of the lads outside had extremely swollen faces, bleeding lips and signs of having sustained a lot more damage – one lad described them snatching his chain he turned to grab it back and was then beaten to the floor and had his wallet and mobile taken – this left me certain that had I not acted in the way I had and known how to act I would have suffered a similar fate – unfortunately I did not manage to recover my chain and as the police were unwilling to enter the event or stay until it closed they did not catch the other participants – I did however report the crime and was able to give full descriptions of all involved.

Had I not attended Sussex Urban Krav Maga – I would not have been able to bring the first mugger to the floor, I would not have been able to defend myself against, or distance myself from, the second mugger, I would not have turned to strike the third mugger I would have definitely just attempted to hit the floor to get out of trouble – as per the other victims of this group. In short I would have lost my mobile, wallet and keys as well as my necklace, I would have sustained a lot more physical damage and I definitely would not have managed to get one of them arrested or have been able to describe or identify any of the gang – I think everyone can benefit from knowing how to react in these situations, I strongly believe that knife defence is something everyone should learn and having even the smallest amount of knowledge and practice made a huge difference for me.
Thanks and kind regards
JP


Train Hard...Fight Easy

Mark

Tuesday 20 September 2011

MMA Conditioning Instructors


Sussex Urban Krav Maga is very proud to announce that we now have 6 REPS qualified MMA Conditioning instructors.

Qualified instructors available for private lessons are:

Chris Finan
Juan Hayward
Ben Humphries
Bryan MacGuire
Mark O'Neil
Tim Singer



Our instructors now have the martial arts and conditioning grounding enabling them to train clients like UFC fighters and are able offer fun and challenging ways to increase clients’ muscular strength, endurance and cardiovascular health including using skills from the following key martial disciplines:


•Muay Thai

•Kickboxing

•Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

•Greco-Roman Wrestling

•Judo

To pass everyone had to:

Demonstrate competent ability to teach and train individual clients of various abilities and fitness levels using MMA techniques and accompanying fitness drills.

2. Demonstrate competent ability to teach and train a group using MMA techniques and accompanying fitness drills.

3. Vary MMA Conditioning program on a session-by-session basis keeping clients constantly interested and challenged

Well done all

Train Hard................Fight Easy

Mark

Tuesday 16 August 2011

no krav 17th Aug

​​I am really sorry to do this guys and its the first time in 3 years, but I am not going to be able to do Krav again tomorrow.

Have been ill since Saturday (will save you the gory details, suffice to say shares in Toilet Paper have inceased substantially).

I would not want to risk passing this on to any of you so better safe than sorry, so Krav cancelled.

Sorry we have now had an effective 3 week break, but bar war famine and death will be back next week.


Mark

Wednesday 20 July 2011

Urban Krav Maga and Brazilian Ju Jitsu

A couple of years ago somebody on an American forum criticised us based on his viewing of some of our You Tube clips: he said that our stuff was a mixture of Muay Thai and Judo. Now we didn’t really take that as a criticism: those are 2 well established and respected martial arts and to be honest, if somebody put together a martial art based on Muay Thai and Judo with some decent pre-emptive moves and half decent weapons defences, I’d do it. They say you should write the book you’d like to read yourself, and I guess with Urban Krav Maga we’ve tried to create the martial art that we’d like to do ourselves.

This short article will be about the Brazilian Ju Jitsu (BJJ) element in what we do: note that BJJ derives from Judo: Maeda, who founded the style with the Gracies, was a Judo-ka who never trained Ju Jitsu in his life: the term Ju Jitsu at the time just happened to be the term used at the time in Brazil for the Japanese fighting systems.

McGill was thinking on this after a discussion with one of our new affiliates in Scotland who had previously trained with another style. He had a class which was a mixture of small women and big guys: using a couple of our techniques based on leverage the women were dropping the guys on the floor with a loud crash; this was not something they would have been able to do in his previous system heavily based on punching, a very un-leveraged technique.

The development of our system really began a few years ago when Stewart began training with Leo Negao, former 4-time world BJJ champion. Leo would teach Stewart BJJ, and he'd show him some of our techniques. We begun to modify our stuff based on working with Leo and his input. He’s a big lad with a neck that is probably a welterweight in itself so close-in punching wasn’t such a good idea and Stewart had to work on some other means of getting control; establishing control is an important element of Leo’s BJJ so his input was vital in upgrading our techniques. Conversely Leo was able to integrate some of our stuff into his teaching and continues to do so.

Importantly, Leo was originally a Vale Tudo (no holds-barred style which allows punching, elbows, butts, knees etc) fighter who did BJJ to enhance his ground game, he has also trained extensively with Anderson Silva, Vitor Belfort and Minotauro so his stand-up and groundfighting style was readily adaptable to a reality-based sytem like ours. This wouldn’t have been quite the case with more sport-oriented grappling styles.

Leo’s input became very important to our teaching and from November 2009 he has done the Instructor Courses with Stewart. The style we have produced is something more than a straight combination of Muay Thai and Judo/BJJ, though we fully acknowledge our huge debt to those and other systems such as Western boxing and Freestyle Wrestling. Urban Krav Maga is an integrated fighting system based on the principles of leverage learned from our martial arts backgrounds and fighting experiences. For example, punching people around the head with bare knuckles will hurt those knuckles; if the guy is a lot bigger than you, you will probably hurt your knuckles more than you hurt him so we recommend hitting with the heel of the hand, taking his eye out or taking him down aggressively. Our takedowns are based on solid BJJ/Wresting principles but as we’re doing this for the street, we show how to takedown without going to ground with the bad guy. On the ground we teach people how to get up quickly as a priority but we also teach various guards, locks, chokes, armbars etc.

People need this knowledge as this is what some of the bad guys will try to pull so we have to make sure our students know what to expect and how to counter: if you don’t know how an arm bar is set up, how do you expect to be able to defend it? They also need this knowledge for when Plan A – getting up straight away – goes wrong. We known that there are many Instructors out there who say that all you need on the floor is to be able to bite, gouge, strike etc to be able to fight grapplers; frankly they need to spend some time on the floor with grapplers like Leo to realise just how wrong this can be; you need a firm grasp of at least the principles of ground-fighting to defend yourself adequately on the floor. I must confess that I at one time subscribed to this fallacy, but a few sessions rolling with Leo disabused me of the notion quickly and painfully.

Check out our YouTube channel here for an indication of what we teach:

http://www.youtube.com/user/stewartkrav?feature=mhee

Friday 15 July 2011

Spicer Fight Update

A great first fight for Spicer. Very proud despite a loss. Started off beautifully and exactly to plan, with some great head shots, knees and a chance for an early submission with a good guillotine that he just could not quite get sunk in. For my money he was well ahead, relaxed and causing the guy some real damage with low kicks.

Unfortunately he made one mistake and gave the guy a chance to get his back against the fence and a rear naked choke was set in and game over.

However I was greatly impressed with how Spicer kept his focus as we had a few issues outside of the fight. Firstly he nearly failed the medical with a recorded heart murmur and I quickly had to disabuse the doc that there was any issue, then we find out our semi pro is now pro and the rounds are now 5 minutes and not 3 and elbows allowed, then we get into the ring only to have to wait for 5 minutes as the opponent cant find his gum shield, rather than do a no contest we agree to come back further down the bill- exit the cage, get halfway back to the dressing room and the gum shield is found, so we run back in and get them to agree to start the fight.

Hope to have a video shortly so you guys can see it, but Spicer can walk tall and a good future fighting awaits.

Tuesday 5 July 2011

Search & Rescue Event Cancelled

Chaps

In the last 3 weeks the organsiers of the event have gone from 8 teams to 3, therefore therefore they are having to cancel this year’s Challenge

Apologies for the short notice and thank you for your continued support

Thursday 23 June 2011

Kent Search and Rescue



We now have two teams for KSAR 09 July ·from 10:00

Location: Swattenden Centre, Cranbrook, Kent

Swattenden Lane

Cranbrook, Kent TN17 3PS



A mixture of mental and physical challenges based on Search and Rescue



Team 1

The What

Brian

Juan

Juan’s plus 1(!)
Dean

Team 2

The Who

Mark

Mark

Charlie

Plus 1 KSAR chap stuck without a team



entry is £100 per team- those who have not paid please bring to next class if possible.

ALL funds raised go to this very worthwhile charity

KSAR exists to offer a special service to the Police, RAF Search & Rescue Units, other emergency services and local councils throughout Kent, and the rest of the UK if called upon. The unit is manned by volunteers and is operational 365 days a year. We are activated at the request of the police and other emergency organisations.

On average 1800 people go missing in Kent every year, although they do not all require a full call out or search. We have a high percentage in the Kent area of people that can be classified as being vulnerable and will need our assistance. These include the elderly and those suffering from senile dementia and children that go missing for a number of reasons.

Our aim is to alleviate the suffering and distress, not only to the missing person but to their families
and to reduce the pressures of manpower resources of the police and other emergency services.

Thank you for your support

Mark



Friday 10 June 2011

The 5 Levels of Urban Krav Maga



We are drawing near to the conclusion of a revised syllabus for UKM featuring 5 levels (Level 1 Incorporating the Top 10 attacks that some of you have completed).



We estimate an average student should be able to complete this in 5 years- though depends on aptitude, previous experience, commitment etc.



More details to follow once ready to publish



Train Hard................Fight Easy



Mark



NO classes on the 15th and 29th June

Please remember no classes on the above date due to alternative used for the Hall etc.

Keep training though

Friday 27 May 2011

10th Legion MMA



Spicer "The Ginger Ninja" fight poster above.



Please let me know as soon as possible those who need tickets. I wont be able to travel up with you this time as will be working the corner!






Thursday 19 May 2011

Results from the Buses



















Well done to everyone who attended the buses course, some great bruises to show for it.

A few pictures from the day here, for more please see the facebook site.



Mark

Thursday 5 May 2011

Krav on the Buses



A reminder that Krav on the buses is the 15th May 10 to 14:30 at Plumstead Bus garage. Pettman Crescent. Plumstead.



Those who have not paid yet (£30) please let me have your money by this Wednesday as places are restricted with a waiting list and I will pass any unpaid for places over.



I have space for 3 more in the Battle Bus for those who want a lift- first come first served. twitter/email or facebook me.






Train Hard.........Fight Easy.....get a Bus!!!!!!

Wednesday 16 March 2011

10th Legion Invasion of the Warriors and no class 6th April




Well done to everyone at the 10th Legion on Sunday.
Results posted below.
No class on the 6th April.

PRO

Main Event - 10th Legion Championship Fight
Welterweight World MMA Title 77kg
Jess Liaudin Def Rafael Silva

Unanimous decision

Co Main Event - 10th Legion Championship Fight
Welterweight European MMA Title 77kg


Pete Irving
Iron Wolves (UK) Def Morten Djursaa Jensen
(Denmark)

Unanimous Decision

10th Legion Championship Fight
Welterweight British MMA Title 77kg

Merv Muholland
IFS Ireland Def Panikos Kleanthous
Urban Kings

TKO first round


Lightweight MMA 70kg
Fadi Jameel
New Wave Academy Def Alexandre Vieira
Moring Team (France)

RNC first round.


SEMI PRO FIGHTS

Lightweight MMA Title Fight 66kg
Ramon Silva
Team Negao Def Tom Tailford


Toe Hold first round


Welterweight 77kg
Wes Nunns
Selby MMA def Finbar Doran
IFS Ireland

Arm bar first round 45 sec


Welterweight 77kg
Faruq Omar Azam
Andrew Scott def team negao
IFS Ireland

Descision


Lightweight 70kg
Kieron Coxon
Iron Wolves def Justin Watson

Unanimous decision



Total Martial Arts
**SPECIAL EVENT** - Boxing Match - **SPECIAL EVENT**
Leo Negao
(Brazil) def Simon Liste
Iron Wolves

Unanimous decision



AMATEUR

Lighweight 70kg
Ben Jones def Marcelo Mansur
(Independant) urban kings


Decision