BROOMFIELD — Johnna Brightwell stands
completely still, her eyes shut and muscles tense.
Suddenly a man approaches, grabs her neck with both hands,
and starts pushing her backward. She opens her eyes, raises
her right arm, and turns sharply, causing her attacker's hands
to release their grip.
"Time!" shouts
James Hiromasa.
The word transports Brightwell from her imagined dark alley
to a small studio with green and blue mats. A large wall
mirror reflects five people dripping with sweat from
practicing the Israeli self-defense technique called "krav
maga."
"What I love about krav maga is we try harder than anyone
else to mimic the stress of a real attack," says Hiromasa, a
certified krav maga instructor and co-owner of a new training
center in Broomfield.
This vigorous street-fighting system is gaining wider
national recognition, almost two decades after its arrival in
the United States from its native Israel. Krav maga is taught
in about 200 locations around the country, according to
Michael Margolin, president of the Krav Maga National Training
Center in Los Angeles.
Law enforcement agencies are embracing the practice, which
was featured in the 2001 movie "Enough," in which actress
Jennifer Lopez uses krav maga to defend herself. The key to
krav maga's rising popularity is one of its main messages:
women can fight back.
"Women that come in here learn that they can punch, and
they can punch hard. They carry that with them when they walk
on the street," says Shannon Lukeman-Hiromasa, a certified
krav maga instructor and co-owner of the Broomfield center
with her husband James.
A no-frills combination of martial arts and physical
conditioning, krav maga, or "contact combat" in Hebrew,
attracts devotees through its realistic, common-sense approach
to safety. Unlike other self-defense systems such as karate or
tae kwon do, krav maga has no uniforms, hierarchies or
dramatic moves. A student can progress quickly through the
five levels of training, often reaching the second level in as
many months.
"It's all martial and no art," Hiromasa says. "It's
straight to the point. We don't waste time on flashy things
that look good and sell memberships." Because every level
builds on each other without requiring new movements, krav
maga is more effective than other techniques, Lukeman-Hiromasa
says. She earned two black belts during her 18-year study of
tae kwon do and karate, but says she felt the elegant actions
could not save her life in an assault. When she found krav
maga, she was sold. "You go, 'Wow, this is what I've been
waiting for. I need to do this,'" she says.
The Denver Police Department adopted krav maga as its
self-defense training system in 2003. Police Cpl. Kim
Pfannkuch, a krav maga instructor at the police academy, says
the department chose krav maga because officers can grasp its
principles more quickly than other self-defense methods.
"It's a more reaction-type technique," she says. "If you
don't practice it every day you can still use it."
Krav maga shares a likeness to model mugging, a
self-defense technique developed in the 1980s as a
rape-prevention system for women. Dick Pulhamus, owner of Safe
Passage, a model mugging center in Boulder, says both krav
maga and model mugging rely on easy motor skills rather than
showy moves.
"Simple is good," Pulhamus says. "Why build a skyscraper
when you only need a shelter?"
Simplicity may not be a tenet of other martial arts systems
such as tae kwon do, but flashy maneuvers can be equally
important as the easier moves, says Nic Brummell, assistant
instructor at the Boulder International Tae Kwon Do Club.
For example, mastering advanced moves makes defaulting to
basic motions more natural for students.
"If I'm out on the street, I'm not going to kick (an
attacker) in the head, I'm going to kick (an attacker) in the
knees. You can focus on the fancy and more difficult stuff
just to stretch yourself," he says.
The fighting
spirit
On a recent Wednesday evening, Brightwell
and her fellow class members elbow, knee strike, kick, punch,
choke and bear hug their partners.
Heavy metal and rap music filled with expletives blast from
the loudspeakers as the students spar, one-on-one, faces
hardened in concentration. Hiromasa weaves between the pairs,
encouraging what he calls "the fighting spirit" to take hold.
"When people build confidence in their own abilities, when
they get that fighting spirit, they learn to turn the switch
on. The more confidence they build, the easier it is to turn
the switch back off," Hiromasa says.
And gaining confidence is exactly how krav maga empowers
women to take charge of their lives, Lukeman-Hiromasa says. A
mother of two daughters, she says girls are discouraged early
on from pushing themselves physically, particularly in school
sports. "Women are taught from a young age that we're kind of
weaker," she says. "Even if it's not taught explicitly, it's
very implicit."
Brightwell, a Denver police officer since 2000, practices
krav maga to protect against suspects who might take advantage
of women police officers. "You may not be able to beat this
person up. But you're going to be able to get away, and that's
what (krav maga) teaches," she says.
The Boulder County Victim Compensation Program, an
initiative of the district attorney's office, pays for abuse
victims to attend krav maga classes at the Broomfield
facility. Sylvia Salas-Aguilar, coordinator of the program,
says the classes provide victims "with as many tools as
possible, especially the physical tool to be able to put space
between themselves and a volatile situation." Most of the
recipients of the funding are women who have experienced
domestic or sexual violence.
However, Heather Arnold-Renicker, case manager at the
Boulder nonprofit Moving to End Sexual Assault, does not
advocate self-defense classes for women. "Their focus is on
being attacked in the middle of night in bushes from a
stranger, instead of focusing on the fact 84 percent of
attacks are from acquaintances," she says.
But when they do attack, Arnold-Renicker says men seek out
any vulnerability in women. "You see those e-mails about
'don't wear a ponytail,' but it's not true. It doesn't matter
what you're wearing, how your hair is put, if you're on a cell
phone," she
says.
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