LITTLE ROCK — Stephanie Keenum fights like a girl.
It says so right on the back of her pink tank top.
If that conjures up an image of limp wristed, poorly aimed slaps, well, you probably don’t want to be her sparring partner at Little Rock’s Krav Fit on Saturdays.
Neither do the new guys in class, who tend to go easy on her. The regular guys, those who’ve seen her in action, know better.
“The guys won’t take it easy on me because I’m a girl,” the 37-year-old Keenum says, standing with her 12-year-old son Connor after class on a recent Saturday morning.
“Yeah right, Mom, you say the guys aren’t hard on you,” Connor interrupts.
“The new guys,” Mom replies.
Krav Fit was having an open house that day. Instructors and clients took turns wresting fake knives and phony guns from each other, blocking stabs and punches using Krav Maga, a form of martial arts.
Krav Maga, which means combat in Hebrew, was developed for the Israeli military. It teaches aggressive self-defense techniques that require courage and skill - and the judgment to sense when they aren’t needed.
Every situation is different, as instructor Devin Shirley says. “You have to gauge the intent of the attacker. If you honestly believe they are not going to kill you, the general recommendation is just to let them pick your purse because those things can be replaced really easily.
“However there are criminals who don’t want you to be able to ID them, like in a line-up, so they’re going to shoot you no matter what you do.” In those cases, knowing Krav Maga could save your life, he says.
But its skills cannot be acquired by reading: “If someone’s just reading this article, I would not try to do these techniques.”
Shirley, owner of Krav Fit in Little Rock and a 1996 U.S. Military Academy at West Point graduate, caught the Krav Maga bug from J-Lo. Not directly, but one evening on the way home from work he heard on the radio that actress Jennifer Lopez was learning Krav Maga during her training for the film Enough.
That was back in 2001 and Shirley was living in Dallas. He opened his studio in Little Rock as Krav Maga and Fitness of Arkansas in August 2004. “We’ve been growing ever since.” It was originally on Markham Street and is now off University Avenue.
The gym offers evening and morning classes. Its schedule and other information can be found at kravfit.us.
Shirley said his clients are usually males between 20 and 50. He’d like to see more women in the classes, particularly since he contends Krav Maga “works for anyone of any size.” Almost a third of his clients are women, he says.
The business offers “rape prevention” classes that teach self-defense about twice a year. But it’s not just women who benefit from such training, he says.
One of the men in one of his classes who works at a mental hospital had a patient put him in a headlock. “He was able to get out quickly.”
The classes train for the worst-case scenarios, sneak attacks, weapons, being kicked when you’re down .... “It’s not about being perfect or pretty, it’s about surviving,” Shirley says.
Improvise, improvise, improvise, he says. “If you forget a whole technique, throw a groin kick.”
Groin kicks are to Krav Maga what crust is to pizza.Shirley’s favorite episode of The Simpsons involves a girl taking Bart down with a well placed groin kick, or 10. “No groin, no Krav Maga ... hello, groin,” she says. Shirley would love to put that quote on a T-shirt but worries it may be copyrighted.
He tries to instill in his students the truth that conflicts are messy. Or as he puts it: “The gun will go off.”
“We teach awareness. We’re trying not to create a bunch of overinflated egos,” he says.
Keenum, who drives in from Jefferson, says she knows not to be overconfident. Still, she says, “nobody can see if you can avenge yourself or not, but you know.”
Dave Coles says the moves are “empowering.” The 43-year-old from North Little Rock says he came to class in pretty good shape - at least that’s what he first thought.
“The typical fight is long ... a minute,” he says. That’s a minute of pushing and pulling, grunting, grabbing, turning, bending. “You do get bruised.”
“You leave class in a sweat,” says 42-year-old Carol Ann Massanelli, Coles’ partner for the day.
Keenum says practicing Krav Maga has helped her shed 30 pounds and become more confident that she can look after herself and her five sons when her husband is deployed with the Navy Reserves. She even has a KravMaga tattoo between her shoulder blades.
“I went from being a couch potato to this,” she says.
Her son Connor pipes up: “I went from being really athletic, to really athletic.”
“And you’re very humble too,” Mom says.
Which leaves Connor with a question: “What’s humble ?”
ActiveStyle, Pages 23 on 02/14/2011