I was talking about weightlifting with a colleague who said the biggest frustration with Olympic lifts was the need to push to failure. In weightlifting, the whole point is to see how much heavy stuff you can lift off the ground. It stands to reason, therefore, that you won't know how much until you reach a weight you can't lift; i.e., until you fail. This person doesn't like failure (which is why we are colleagues) and insists on pushing through it (which is why we are friends). On a rational level, she gets it, but on a visceral level, she dislikes it. She insists on pushing through it, and finding some new level.

That's what I like about her, and many of the other friends I've made in Krav Maga. It's what I want the Krav Maga Alliance to be about: a group of people striving for new and better training methods.

In the book Complete Krav Maga, I wrote that "techniques are the beginning of your understanding of self defense, not the end." It's a good policy, as far as it goes, but it's perspective is limited to actual self defense. I have a broader saying that I've adopted for myself, and for the Krav Maga Alliance: our achievements aren't pinnacles, they're platforms. They're the launch pads for our next endeavor.