Our feature ASK THE EXPERT covers a key self defence topic you’ve asked us about.
QUESTION: ‘How long does it take to learn Krav Maga?’
This perennial question is being asked to Krav Maga instructors worldwide by new students every day of the year.
Most instructors can give the obvious and correct answer; that Krav Maga is based on instinctive and natural movements - and that your progress towards efficiency is based on the time and effort put into training.
Like any other skill, this is true. It is however valuable to understand HOW the brain learns to master new physical skills and WHAT this means in terms of HOW you should actually train.
In ASK THE EXPERT, we will briefly answer this and give you the principles of learning faster.
To understand how we acquire new physical or motor-mechanical skills, whether this is playing an instrument, doing a new movement or indeed mastering a self defence technique, we need to understand how the mind works with our muscles.
When we learn new motor skills, the grey matter in our brain will process the new information before despatching signals though nerve fibres called axons to the relevant muscles to enact the movement we want to do.
The axons are like other electrical carriers in as much as they lose efficiency on the way to the muscle. This loss of efficiency is what you feel when your brain ‘knows’ what to do but your muscles don’t quite seem ‘to get it’.
Repeating a physical task - and importantly; repeating it SLOWLY - builds up a fatty substance called myelin which acts as an insulator around the axon nerve fibres. The more you repeat the task, the more myelin (insulation) is built up. The more myelin around the axon, the less electrical signal is lost, just like an efficient electrical current being conducted in real life.
Quite simply, training repetitively insulates the messages from your mind to your muscles so they are not lost along the way. Some people refer to this as ‘muscle memory’. This is a misnomer. The muscle doesn’t ‘remember’. It only acts each time on the quality of the signal coming from your brain. Repetition protects the axon neural pathway quality of the signal through insulation (myelin) of the carrier of it.
Knowing this, how can you change your self defence training to make sure your proficiency curve is optimised?
There are three simple principles you should follow:
1. Focus intently when training.
Research shows that intense concentration operating at the edge of your abilities will bring progressive results. This practice should be interspersed with sufficient break periods so that your mental focus remains high during training. Simply doing mechanical motions in a ‘working-on-an-assembly-line’ manner without this intense concentration is far less effective in learning new skills.
Focus is your number one goal.
2. Slow means fast.
Doing the physical action slowly makes the neural pathway (the build up of myelin around the axons) stronger as the mind can both ‘see’ the execution of the action and conduct any remedial corrections in real-time as you train. Doing the action incorrectly simply embeds the wrong action as your nerve fibres learn a different neural pathway which later must be undone before the better one is cemented. Hence, slow means a faster way to proficiency.
Working no faster than you can do the physical action is your second goal.
3. Imagining the techniques in your mind.
Research has also shown that you can solidify the actions into your neural pathways simply by thinking about them and imagining doing them when at rest. Studies have indicated that in some sports this meditational training can produce equal skill development to actual physical training.
Taking time out outside of the training session and ‘see’ and ‘feel’ the actions you’re working on is your third objective.
If you follow these three principles with great care you’ll find that you can progress faster, even with less training than others.
The overall truth still remains; and will answer the question posed at the start of the article: ‘How long does it take to learn Krav Maga?’
The more you train, the faster you’ll learn it. But how you train is also all-important.
Just put the two together and you’ll go far. Fast.