It's exercise with a kick of self-defence

What is Krav-Maga Cardio?

Its a fast paced, high energy workout designed to tone, build, sculpt, and strengthen your body to be all it can be. Designed by a team of top fitness experts and defensive tactics instructors known for building fighters, Krav-Maga programs use cardio classes, heavy bag work, and sports conditioning techniques to burn fat and tone muscles.

Krav-Maga Cardio involves cardio kickboxing in a fast paced, high impact workout routine. It's a full body workout from head to toe, incorporating Krav-Maga style kicks and punches to build strength, shape and condition your body. The benefits of Krav-Maga are many. According to medical doctors, chiropractors, and fitness experts, Krav-Maga training provides a tremendous full-body workout. Krav-Maga can help increase one's stamina, flexibility, upper-body strength and lower-body strength.

Why is it so effective and better than any other cardio workouts?

The fitness advantages of programs such as Krav-Maga Cardio lies in the short, high intensity explosiveness that occurs in muscle fibers, explained Melyssa St. Michael, founder and president of UltraFit Human Performance, Inc., Baltimore, MD. "When you are building up kinetic force, you are developing really strong neurological pathways from your brain to your muscle, which helps instincts and reflexes. Any type of really short, intense workout helps elevate metabolic rate and burn more fat," St. Michael said, adding that students performing Krav-Maga expend 20 to 30 percent more energy than during a less intensive activity such as step aerobics.

The program's fitness classes differ from standard aerobics classes not just in their self-defence inspiration (like Tae Bo, the kickboxing-derived cardio class), but in their constantly changing patterns. Instead of a routine, fitness buffs get a workout that constantly varies from week to week, more aerobic workouts one week and more bag work the next, in an effort to keep people intrigued and interested in Krav-Maga classes.

"People get bored, the body gets bored when you work the same muscles the same way always," Whitman says. And despite the military origins of Krav-Maga, "we're not drill instructors," says Vicky Kapoor, who heads the Krav-Maga India. "We let people go at their own pace but add a little positive encouragement."

The students really build into workout combinations and are taught how to properly throw a punch or a kick.. Other sessions are called "Combative's," in which participants punch, kick, elbow and knee heavy bags to music. Other classes might teach 15 minutes of aerobic kickboxing, then switch students to run circuits of punching bags, push-ups, and running in and out of obstacles. "It's not step class," Vicky Kapoor says.

Advantages of Krav-Maga Cardio

• Fun workout
• Weight loss
• Fat loss
• Improving your fitness
• Improve well being
• Improved posture
• Rehabilitation
• Increased self esteem and confidence