Mike Lee Kanarek Blog

36 new Combat Fitness Coaches and 18 new FIGHT Instructors… ALL eyes on John’s Combat Wrestling Certification now!!!

Have a Great week everybody

Always use movement for attacks, in other words if you could have moved and just used the movement for defense you waisted the movement.

FIGHT Instructor Certification here at the National HaganaH Headquarters is in session and JB asked me, ” why we dont move on the sensor/defensive elbow ? ”

My answer was simple :  If you could have moved out of his punch you should have did the “defense against a straight punch” technique , the first technique in our Street Scenarios curriculum!

hope everybody is having a blast of a day, I know we are

ever wonder why kids pick up languages faster than adults?  Part of it, is because they are not afraid to speak wrong. In other words they are ok with making mistakes down the road as long as they try to communicate.

I have been teaching for over 20 years in south Florida. My first school was a traditional Tae Kwon Do and Kick-Boxing School, with the majority of the students then being kids. I can honestly say the kids were better students, at least in the beginning years of their training,  because of 3 major reasons : 1) agility, Tae Kwon Do is more acrobatic then HaganaH and it requires a certain set of attributes to truly excel in it. On this the kids clearly had an advantage. 2) Kids don’t care if they do it wrong as long as they having a good time with the training. The fear of not having it right simply does not exsist with the kids. 3) The fact that the kids are truly like a sponge, when they walk in to the school they absorb 100% of the training presented. Adults tend to bring their world on the mat and have a harder time disconnecting.

but, let me stick to the subject of this post :  Fear of doing it wrong…

The fear of doing it wrong sometimes is bigger obstacle of doing it right for beginning students. Almost to the point that they will stop themself of doing the technique in the middle and actually freeze. It is very important for beginner students to accept the fact that they will make mistakes as they progress in the system. In other words enjoy the journey of learning and develop your skills as you go, the mistakes will be cleaned up so to speak as you understand the materials presented better and your set of skills has developed to a proficency level  needed to match the strategies deployed.

And in parrallel , as in self-defense training and anything in life, if you first emotional thought going into doing something/anything is fear you will have more chances of failing that specific attempt. Versus if you first emotional thought going into that specific attempt is fear free, you will have a better chance succeeding it. Being fear free is not a guarantee , but it gives you much better odds!

hope every body has a Kick Ass week, its FIGHT Certification week here at the National Headquarters, I know we going to have a Strong week of training!

The Israeli army is called  ”Tva HaganaH Le Israel” , the Israel Defense Forces, not the attacking force or simply the Israeli army. Part of that is that the Israel wanted to give credit to the HaganaH for fighting for its independence prior for it to be an official state in 1948.

I always tell my students that defense is like the King in a chess game, you can’t afford to lose it, you will lose the game if you do. And attack is like the queen, while the queen is important in the game if you lose her, the game is still on. In other words , if you mess up on the attack its forgivable, but if you mess up on your defense it not forgivable.

A lot of people forget that element in their training and get consumed, or almost greedy so to speak , on their attack portion of the training. They train to hit faster, hit harder…but  they neglect the conditioning , both phisycal and mental, to be able to endure a strong defense that go beyond learning the self-defense techniques.

If your enemy is more committed to his attack than you are committed to your defense, you already lost.  A lot of people fail to realize that self-defense is mental first and phisycal second. In other words in many cases “perfect intention will beat perfect technique”.

While HaganaH has a set principal and strategies with techniques that fit that specific intergration Mentality is the factor that will change the plateau on a violent level. When learning self-defense you must commit yourself to embrace a certain level of violence and intensity, without it you will simply be doing the techniques in a memory muscle manner that will have no effectiveness behind it.

this morning one of my students, JB, interviewed me and asked me to answer a question during the interview : “Sir, what would you tell our listener if they were going through tough times and them not giving up?”

my direct answer was simple : “Giving Up Is Not An Option!”

but then I broke it down. In life sometimes things will be challeging and you will be theunder dog so to speak. At the end of the day if your goals were worth sitting down and thinking about them and you deciding you wanted them…they are worth FIGHTING for, and giving up is truly not an option.

I often tell my students in classes : ” If you give up during this drill…you give up everywhere in life! Giving Up Is Not An Option…you can slow down, but no matter what Don’t Stop”     9 out of 10 it pulls the struggling students out of that momentary hole and they end up pushing through

whatever it is you are going through….if it was worth it when you began that journey, keep going, you won’t regret it…