We held a amazing series of seminar covering the north of England, they were hosted by two of Israeli greats Sensei Oren Gorgov and Kubi Mizrahki, two of the worlds most foremost martial art experts in practical fighting.
They not only teach the Israeli army and special forces, but also travel the world teaching special forces and police agencies such as FBI NIA and many more.
The largest of these seminar was at the Leeds Metropolitan University state of the art sports centre complex, Carnegie in Headingley Leeds and was arranged by their old training friend Sensei Sean McHale of Tai Jutsu Leeds.
Sensei Sean started the seminar with a brief introduction about his guests instructors and out line what to expect. He also gave us a friendly warning and a reminder to tap out rather the die ( which turned out to be excellent advice).
Sensei Sean then set the pace with a fast and furious warm up giving us a taste of things to come.
After that our guest instructors went straight in to it, from the start we knew we were in for some thing special. But we didn’t realise how special at the time.
We were shown numerous practical and elective techniques against punches and kicks and one of the most memorable of these being, what as I can only describe a a dead leg, which they called a Tromer kicks I have ever seen before, this easily dropped the hardest of us, including the many kick boxers and the Israelis seemed to do with the greatest of ease and hardly any effort.
The pain from these kicks was still felt quite a few days afterwards and I was glad they didn’t do it as hard as they could have, or we wouldn’t been able to walk for at least a month.
Someone later explained to me, that this had happenned to Sensei Sean on more than one occasion in the past with his Israelis friends.
We then moved on to knife techniques ranging from defences to attacks which Oren and Kubi turned out to be masters of.
I can honestly say I have never seen anything like it in my life, every thing the did seemed to come so simply and naturally– from bare hand defences, to knife against knife techniques with incredible double-knife techniques being the most spectacular of all.
From a straight attack with a knife, they diverted away their attackers knife hand whilst, at the same time, cutting opening up their wrist and then, with a quick turn of their body ended up behind the would be attacker back ,cutting his attackers throat with both knifes in a cross-hand movement ( a very scary technique).
We were then entertained by firearm disarming techniques, which is something I haven’t done before, but after this I would most certainly love to do again.
You could tell by just watching these guys, that they have done this for real, they were so fast and smooth, it was incredible to watch and even more fun to do and before you could even pull the trigger they had the gun turned on you.
Later on, I inquired why of of the guns didn’t have holes in them for the trigger guard, Sensei Sean kindly explained that from years of experience training with his Israeli friends, in the majority of these techniques the gun is turned so fast, it nearly end up ripping of your trigger finger. He though it was far safer not to have holes put in the guns for us. This seem logical answer, but I was still daft enough to ask him for a demonstration and he was only too happy to oblige using a starting pistol– lets just say it was a bad mistake and I now know why he didn’t put holes in the rest of the guns.
After several techniques against punches the then moved to defences against knives using a rope, which was incredibly fast , effective and painful.
One particular technique saw a attacker throw a punch, which Oren blocked and within a fraction of a second and had the rope around the would be attacker’s neck putting on a strangle hold straight away before throwing the attacker with a incredible meaty throw to the ground with the strangle still on.
Until the end of the seminar I hadn’t realised just how many different styles and associations had attended and how battered and bruised they were.
However everyone really enjoyed themselves and it made you realise just how much there is to learn in the martial arts no matter what colour belt to wear and there is always something to learn.
