The Stages of Learning Krav Maga

Understanding how your body and mind progress from learning techniques to performing them instinctively.

PART 1 — The Cognitive Stage: Learning the Fundamentals

Learning Krav Maga requires more than learning the individual movements, concepts and tactics.
Krav Maga is a physical system that requires not only understanding, but execution of the learned material. This requires the practitioner to feel every step of the technique, to develop the necessary proprioception and awareness to build the neuromuscular connection, linking the muscles involved with the exercise to the brain that is processing the activity. In other words, learning how to learn a new physical activity requires specific guidelines that we wanted to briefly share with you to guide you in your Krav Maga journey.

The early stages of Krav Maga training require relatively choreographed, slow and controlled drilling, with limited variability to allow the practitioner to build the necessary neuromuscular connections associated with every new technique. Speed is a detriment to this stage of learning, as it prevents the students from making the needed body-to-mind connections necessary for learning the activity. That’s why you often hear us slow newer students down, so that the brain has the time to process the executed movement. In sports science, people often refer to this stage as the cognitive stage, where you are tasked with remembering the specific movements, allowing your body and mind to build a blueprint for the execution of these newly learned techniques.

Coming next: Once the basic movements become more familiar, the way you train, and the challenges you face, must begin to change.