Men, women, young and old, there were about sixty to participate this weekend in Granville in an introduction to self-defense techniques. A course organized at the initiative of the city’s karate club. For its president Roger Le Moal, we should learn very young the reflexes and the right gestures to be able to defend ourselves and be able to react in the event of a problem, even when we become old:
We teach all children to swim at school, even though we are more likely to be attacked than to fall into the water. So it’s something that needs to be taught to as many people as possible. I think the more people there are able to retaliate against an attack, the fewer attacks there will be.
Roger Le Moalkarate club president
And for this course, the club has invited a star in the world of martial arts, Franck Ropers, master of Penchak Silat and one of the self-defense specialists, at the head of an academy bringing together several schools in France, in Switzerland and Belgium. In front of him, about sixty trainees came to listen to the advice of the master and above all this message: thanks to the technique, everyone can be able to defend themselves.
The idea is to take someone who doesn’t necessarily have a good physical condition, young or less young, and adapt the tools for him to defend himself. It is obvious that someone who is twenty years old, who is in great shape, who plays sports, will have a much more physical self-defense than someone who is seventy years old. So the seventy-year-old, I’m going to work more on prevention, and on strikes that he could do to escape
Frank Ropers
Among the trainees of the day, several women and young women eager to learn simple techniques to get out of a bad situation. And more and more of them are taking part in this kind of internships all over France, some organized specifically for them, like in Quimperlé in Brittany for example, where the town hall has chosen to finance the operation.
Women who not only learn targeted defense gestures, but above all gain confidence, as explained by Gwenael Fléjo, a martial arts and self-defense teacher who runs these courses.
Learning to defend yourself allows you to be more serene at the level of mediation, to stress less in the face of the aggressor and to say to yourself: “I have tools to defend myself”. There are plenty of vulnerable areas in a man. Even if he is muscular, no matter how big he is, a man has sensitive points.
Gwenael Flejomartial arts teacher