Scottsdale Community College offers many non-academic activities including a Krav Maga  self-defense class.

Krav Maga originated as a military self-defense mechanism that was initially designed for the Israel Defense Forces. The self-defense skills include techniques taken from boxing, wrestling, judo, karate and Aikido.

The instructor, Marc Huisken, teaches this course and when asked why he thought learning self-defense was important—he emphasized one reason in particular.

“I think it’s important because it’s kind of a crazy world and women are getting either battered or sexually assaulted, like 1 in 5 in the United States, so it’s good for everybody, I think to learn how to protect themselves,” Huisken said.

Huisken starts off each self-defense session by having his students grab a mat to stretch and warm up to energetic music.

After the warm-up and stretching, students grab a different mat to resume yield palms, hammer fists, and kicking, then Huisken walks around to make sure each student is performing the moves correctly.

Northeast Valley News visited the session and Huisken demonstrated a technique to use in the event an attacker were to come to the side of a victim and attempt to choke—this, just one of the strategies a victim needs to know in order to use their body to get out and away.

Huisken methodically walked around to see the students knew what steps to take and how to use them. Once that happened, students were asked to move to the front and perform the moves.

One participant in the self-defense session, Stephanie Rodriguez, told nevalleynews.org that she really enjoys the class.

“It’s awesome. It’s really good, you do things you don’t even know you can do,” Rodriguez said.

Once Huisken reviewed the moves in that session with the participants he began to demonstrate the “part two” of the move—explaining how every move mattered and how, when done correctly, would put the attacker in a vulnerable position Huisken then makes students repeat each move learned for muscle memory. This self-defense class can be beneficial especially for both men and women to feel safe on a daily basis.