Article by Tsahi Shemesh, Founder & CEO Krav Maga Experts
A father came into my school because he was worried about protecting his family.
He had children, a job, and the kind of schedule that makes it easy to put yourself somewhere near the bottom of your own list. He was about twenty pounds overweight. He wasn’t exercising regularly, and anxiety had become a bigger part of his life than he wanted. He wasn’t thinking about any of that when he contacted me. He was thinking about violence.
If someone tried to hurt his family, would he be able to do anything about it?
I understand that question because I’m a father too. Having children changes the way you calculate risk. Your physical ability is no longer relevant only to you. If something happens while your child is standing beside you, you may have to think, move and make decisions for more than one person.
So we started there.
He learned how to strike. He learned how to move when someone came toward him. He practiced dealing with grabs and physical pressure. Like most beginners, he discovered that understanding a technique while an instructor demonstrates it and performing it while another person is resisting are very different experiences.
He also got tired quickly.
Once he was tired, his movement became less organized. He held his breath. Decisions that seemed simple became harder. Sometimes he knew exactly what he was supposed to do and still hesitated for a second before doing it.
That second interests me as an instructor.
Violence creates problems faster than most people are accustomed to solving them. There may be fear, surprise, pain, noise, another person depending on you and very little time to decide what comes next. Learning a technique is part of preparation. Learning what happens to you when pressure enters the room is part of it too.
Training lets us study that safely.
We can slow a problem down, understand it and then gradually make it more demanding. The student gets enough time to think at first. Later, there is more resistance and less certainty. Eventually he begins recognizing his own reactions before they control the whole situation.
The father kept coming twice a week.
His body changed. He lost about twenty pounds. He became stronger and fitter. His anxiety decreased. He became more willing to challenge himself.
Those changes didn’t come from a motivational speech. They came from showing up again after the first class, then doing it again the following week. He spent months choosing an activity that exposed weaknesses he would have found easier to ignore.
Adults get very good at avoiding that experience.
We build our lives around things we already know how to do. A successful person may go years without willingly becoming a beginner. At work, people ask for his opinion. At home, his children ask him for answers. Then he comes into a Krav Maga class and can’t figure out where to put his feet.
I think there is value in that.
A grown man can discover that a smaller woman has better timing than he does. Someone who considers himself strong can find out how quickly strength disappears when he doesn’t know how to use his body. A parent who spends all day correcting children suddenly has to listen while somebody corrects him.
There is no shortcut through that experience. You pay attention, make the adjustment and try again.
Over time, people become more comfortable being in situations where they don’t immediately know the answer. That quality has obvious value in self-defense because real situations rarely follow the script you practiced in class. It also follows people out of the school.
I can’t tell you every area of this father’s life that improved after he started training. I can see the obvious ones. He lost weight. His anxiety improved. He was physically more capable. I also saw a man who became willing to challenge himself twice every week, and that habit rarely stays confined to one room.
The question he originally brought me began to get larger.
Protecting your family can involve fighting. I teach people how to do that because sometimes physical force is necessary. Protection also depends on your ability to notice problems early, make decisions while stressed, control your emotions and move another person toward safety.
A parent may spend an entire lifetime protecting a family without throwing a single punch.
We protect children when we notice the person making them uncomfortable. We protect them when we leave a situation before it becomes dangerous. We protect them when we speak clearly instead of hoping someone else understands the hint. We protect them when we stay calm enough to make a better decision than the frightened person standing next to us.
Children can begin learning the same judgment early. Physical self-defense is only one part of it. A child who practices setting strong boundaries without aggression is already learning how to recognize a problem, communicate clearly and decide what to do when another person refuses to respect the boundary.
Parents often ask me to help their children become more confident. I understand what they mean, although confidence is difficult to hand to another person.
Experience builds it much more reliably.
A child struggles with something and eventually does it. Someone puts him under manageable pressure and he keeps thinking. He gets something wrong in front of other people and survives the embarrassment. A technique that felt impossible three months earlier becomes normal.
Now the child has evidence about himself.
Parents need that evidence too.
One of the things I enjoy about families training together is that children get to see their parents learning. Adults usually occupy the position of knowing. We tell children how to behave, remind them to practice, push them to finish what they started and explain that improvement takes time.
Training puts the adult under the same rules.
The child sees Dad make a mistake. He watches Mom struggle with something. Sometimes the child learns faster. Sometimes everybody looks ridiculous for a few minutes. Then they keep working.
There is something useful about a child seeing a parent voluntarily do something difficult.
Children pay close attention to how we live even when they appear to ignore everything we say. They see whether we take care of ourselves. They notice whether we keep commitments. They learn what frustration looks like by watching our response to it.
That has changed the way I think about responsibility as a father.
Parents can become very comfortable putting themselves last. There is always a reasonable explanation. Children need something. Work is demanding. Money has to be earned. Dinner has to be made. Someone has to handle the thousand small responsibilities that keep a family functioning.
Years can disappear that way.
I learned personally how a small problem can become the weight of neglect when it is carried long enough. Physical problems grow when they are ignored. Stress accumulates. Fitness disappears gradually enough that we can adapt to every small decline without noticing how far we have moved.
Taking care of yourself becomes especially important once other people depend on you.
The father who walked into my school understood responsibility. That was why he came. He loved his family and wanted to be useful if they were ever in danger.
Training expanded his understanding of what being useful required.
He became better prepared for violence. He also became healthier, less anxious and more physically capable. His children had a father who was choosing difficulty twice a week because he expected something from himself.
He came to prepare for a day he hoped would never happen.
The work improved the life he was already living.
For a parent, staying capable is part of taking care of the people who depend on you.
About the Author
Tsahi Shemesh is the founder of Krav Maga Experts in New York City. An Israeli-born IDF veteran, he works with individuals, families and organizations on self-defense, resilience, situational awareness and decision-making under pressure.
