Before you begin your Krav Maga journey, you might want to ensure that it isn’t crazy difficult and torturous to your body. Thus pops out the natural question, will Krav Maga be a harrowing experience, or will it be an easy ride?
Krav Maga is quite hard on your body as it involves drills and exercises constantly challenging your strength, stamina, and endurance. Expect mild muscle soreness in different parts of your body as a constant companion for as long as you train, especially if your trainer keeps increasing the intensity.
In this article, we’ll dive deep into what makes Krav Maga so physically and mentally intense!
How Intense Is Krav Maga?
There is no concrete number on a scale of 1-10 that I can give you to denote the intensity and call it a day. Why?
Because everyone who trains in Krav Maga brings their unique strengths, weaknesses, and other characteristics to the table, which makes the intensity experienced unique to them.
Still, the following paragraphs contain my observations after training in Krav Maga six days a week for almost two years. Take it with a whole salt shaker, though!
Also, you don’t need to train six days a week. Read my article on how many times a week should you do Krav Maga to know what’s best for you!
1. Lots Of Sweat and Exhaustion
Krav Maga is great for complete beginners and you’d be thrown into a physically strenuous routine from day one.
Of course, your instructor might ask you to take it easy initially, at least for a few days, till your body becomes accustomed and you don’t throw up mid-sessions.
But as you progress, you’ll realize that more and more is being expected from you regarding physical capability. This includes strength, cardio, and endurance.
Krav Maga places a lot of emphasis on physical fitness so that you can fight long and hard. The objective of Krav Maga is to finish a fight as quickly as possible, but we often train to fight for extended periods.
Why? Because the adrenaline rush causes a stamina drain pretty quickly in a real-life fight and thus we train to build that stamina.
Expect a lot of weight training and conditioning to build muscle strength and endurance. These exercises will get tougher as you progress through various levels.
A light session which is quite rare, will burn anywhere between 200-300+ calories. Regular sessions burn 400-600+ calories, while the body shock therapy ones expend 800+ calories.
These are the average recorded figures on my MI Fitbit during a peak summer week in May, which usually sees average high temperatures touching 40°C (104°F) in New Delhi and a peak winter week in January, which sees average low temperatures touching 8°C (46.4°F).
2. Physical Bruises and Injuries
As you train, you will get bruised and injured. It’s inevitable. How serious the bruises and injuries are depends on how carefully you listen to your instructor and how closely they watch your form.
Good institutes always have one instructor/assistant for every 6-7 students. Bad ones will leave a class of 20-25 students with only one instructor in a cramped space with no supervision.
Strenuous exercises, punching and kicking the bag, striking practice, shadow fighting, defensive techniques resulting in body parts clashing with another warrior, and body conditioning will cause muscle wear and tear and bruises which is quite normal.
The bad form leaves you injured and unable to continue, contrary to what you’re trying to achieve, i.e., a functionally fit body.
For example, your trainer might make you punch or elbow hard on the ground covered with mats which will tear off the skin and cause some bleeding.
But with time, these outer layers will harden, and you might not even feel anything in the future.
Another example is that your trainer might kick everyone on the thigh with his shin or punch you in the gut with 20-50% power. They might also punch you mildly on the head, and you cannot close your eyes.
Then there is the bamboo stick being rolled with pressure on your forearms and shin, which might make you wince in pain.
To top all this, get ready to endure a few hits during sparring sessions with other students, giving you a minute idea about a real fight unless you’re going hard at full speed and power with proper guards.
Expect these tortures once every few days.
3. Mental Frustration
If you thought Krav Maga is hard on your physical being, then know it is equally hard on your brain too. Initially, you might be one of the slowest people in your class.
You will feel frustrated when you see others do the same drill quickly while you try to catch up and are only running out of breath with every count.
You’ll also often feel agitated when the trainer doesn’t slow down the pace of the count despite clearly seeing that you’re struggling.
In such scenarios, try to do as much as possible at the same pace rather than expecting others to go slow and easy on you.
Yes, there will be frustration and tears, but you will cruise through it eventually if you do not give up.
Being the slowest person in the class today is fine if you don’t limit yourself by believing that the current state is your best.
Say you’re doing sixty pushups on the trainer’s count, and if you can’t catch up with every count, then instead of just giving up and sitting idle, forget about the one you skipped and focus on doing the coming one.
Apply the same attitude to every drill, and you will see improvements.
4. Frequent Mild Pain In Different Muscles
There are days when going to the class feels painful because the previous class was so intense that my body didn’t recover fully.
It may be due to the exercises or drills I was made to do or simply because of conditioning or sparring, where my partner might’ve hit me too hard.
On other days, it may be mild fatigue, and rarely there are days where some part of my body doesn’t feel a bit sore.
Not too much to be a problem, but a mild feeling that some parts got a good workout yesterday. Before I proceed further, let me say that this experience might be specific to me, and yours might differ.
It could be my diet, where I only eat normal-sized regular meals like everyone else and take no nutritional supplements.
Further, despite training six days a week, I am not putting enough protein into my body since I mostly eat vegetarian food and don’t enjoy non-veg very much. On some days, it is purely the lack of adequate rest.
The feeling of muscle soreness or mild pain might vary in intensity for you, but you will experience it a lot in your Krav Maga journey.
Conclusion
Krav Maga can be challenging if you’re enthusiastic about training seriously.
Some sessions might be light, while some may be hard, but you’ll get used to the intensity sooner or later if you keep pushing yourself.
At the same time, you’ll also NEVER get used to the intensity as long as your trainer keeps pushing you to bring out the best within you.
Your overall experience of intensity and how hard Krav Maga would be on your body would be unique to you depending on your mindset, strength, stamina, weakness, and how your body copes and recovers.