Becoming a Full Instructor - the will counts!
At Krav Maga Union we believe that becoming a good Full Instructor is a vocation. That's why the most important thing for a trainer license is the absolute will and a great motivation to want to teach Krav Maga. The reward is then the satisfaction of the members who are trained by our Full Instructors.
During the intensive Full Instructor training, didactics and methodology are therefore in the foreground in addition to physical fitness and sophisticated technique. How do you deal with your members? How to correct optimally, how to bring a group together, how to communicate? How do you deal with legal and juridical questions and what, for example, is behind Friedrich Glasl's Conflict Escalation Model?
Our prospective Full Instructors learn all of this and much more over a period of seven months on 20 presence days in 7 blocks as well as five additional, coached practice sessions. The prerequisites of the participants can be quite different; important is a solid basis in Krav Maga (two to three years of experience) or alternatively in applied martial arts and self-defense systems. And, of course, the absolute enthusiasm to be able to teach Krav Maga successfully afterwards!
And this is how it works:
Evaluation course: 2 days, result: admission to education
Methodology course: 2 days
F1-F5 level seminars: 3x3 days, result: Selfdefense Trainer (SDT)
F6-F10 level seminars: 2x3 days
Exam weekend: 2 days (1 technique exam, 1 instructor drill), result: Full Instructor (FI)
With the successful certification as a Full Instructor you get the permission to prepare for your brown belt and to get tested after 3 months.
Example from training - defense against a stick attack
Becoming a Full Instructor - fitness counts!
The more than 150 Full Instructors trained by us describe the final sequence of the training they have undergone as a "way through hell". The 13-minute so-called Instructor-Drill, during which you are attacked non-stop under maximum pulse and have to stay defensive, is the peak of the seven-month training period. However, this does not mean that physical fitness does not have to be demonstrated right at the beginning of the training!
"One must not overestimate oneself," says Bo Demirer. "A Full Instructor must be able to implement everything he teaches without problems. But especially as a Full Instructor it can happen that you think you are so experienced that you don't challenge yourself anymore". Especially in Krav Maga, regular self-critical questioning is therefore necessary, because the street knows no rules and no referee to stop the fight in case of emergency.
In order to avoid disappointment and to train every single Full Instructor candidate ( Trainee ) at the highest level, the first day of training is considered a sport entrance test. Whoever does not pass it, breaks off the training. "We train under real conditions", explains Bo Demirer. "This means that we put ourselves in a negative situation, in which the body reacts differently, namely with a flood of stress hormones, which take up an insane amount of energy within seconds". The heart rate jumps from 70 to 160, the blood pressure rises immensely - and still there must be enough energy for efficient self-defense! The prospective Full Instructors should be able to demonstrate this fitness, because the actual training is about much, much more.
Example from training - defense against head kicks
Becoming a Full Instructor - the training contents
The KMU education to become a Full Instructor is subject to a structured, comprehensive concept, in which the participants internalize the overall structure of Krav Maga from the ground up. This begins with intuitive reaction techniques and continues with special individual techniques and attack scenarios, right up to the essential question of how to teach Krav Maga most effectively.
"Our methodology goes far beyond the usual 'learning by doing' on a model, i.e. it involves more than just the simple 'demonstration' of a technique by the Instructor, which is then imitated by the participants in the training", explains Bo Demirer. The focus is on the instinctive implementation of what has been learned in a dangerous situation. This begins with weaning laypersons from the tunnel vision they automatically have when they are attacked. Or with intuitive hand defense movements such as the two-handed defense, which a Krav-Maga beginner must first experience for himself before he can learn to use them consciously. That's why we also focus on an implementation of the "Combatives" to better fulfill the Reality-Based claim.
"By going through the entire training process themselves, the future full instructors test the effectiveness of the methodology and recognize the usefulness of this approach," says Bo Demirer. "For many, this is new because they have learned by imitation without understanding where their inherent reactions actually come from." For most of them, this too is initially a process of rethinking - which, however, subsequently produces all the more successful full instructors.