By Matt Roberts, Black Belt Instructor, Krav Maga Dallas
I’ve trained Krav Maga for almost 15 years. For most of that same stretch, I’ve also carried a handgun for self-defense. On paper, those two facts should reinforce each other. In reality, for a long time, they lived in separate rooms in my head.
I did what a serious person is supposed to do. I sought out training. I signed up for outside pistol and tactics courses, spent the money, put in the hours, ran the drills. And I walked away from most of them with the same quiet frustration: none of it aligned with my Krav Maga. The shooting was fine. But it was all bolted on — a separate skill I had to switch into, sitting next to my Krav Maga instead of growing out of it. If anything, the more outside training I collected, the more I noticed the seam between “I train Krav” and “I carry a gun.” I couldn’t close it. And I teach this stuff.
If you carry and you train, you may already know the seam I’m talking about. Most people just never say it out loud.
The course I signed up for to learn “one or two things”
So when I heard there was a new curriculum built to bridge exactly that gap, I was interested — but I kept my expectations low. I went hoping to pick up a technique or two I could fold into my own carry process and maybe pass along to the students of mine who also carry. Low bar. Learn a couple of things, go home.
I left with far more than I came for.
What I found wasn’t another menu of drills. It was a system — the same principles and methodologies I already knew from Krav Maga, with the handgun brought inside them instead of set beside them. Somewhere in the first day it clicked, and the way I’d describe it now is simple: it’s Krav Maga with a handgun. Not Krav, and also pistol. It’s one thing.
I’m not going to lay the method out step by step here, and I’ll be honest about why. Part of it is that it’s the actual work — the sequence, the logic, the way one piece sets up the next — and that belongs in the training room, under instruction, not in a paragraph on a website. And part of it is that reading about it wouldn’t do what going through it does. This is a system you experience in your hands, in order, on the clock. A summary wouldn’t do it justice.
I was impressed enough that I came straight back and started working pieces of it into my private clients and students. Then I did something I almost never do for a course: I signed up and took the whole thing a second time — partly to retain more of it myself, partly to be ready to run it for my own school.
Why the experienced shooters are the loudest
Here’s the part I did not expect, and it’s the part I’d most want you to consider most.
When I ran KMD’s first course, the people who raved the loudest weren’t the beginners. They were the experienced shooters. The ones who compete. The ones who, like me, had already spent thousands of dollars and countless hours in other courses. They were the ones walking out asking why nobody had ever taught them this — why they’d had to find it here, this late.
That tells you something a beginner’s enthusiasm can’t. A beginner is impressed by everything; they’ve got nothing to compare it to. When a person who already shoots well, who has been through the good courses, tells you they found something they’d been missing — that’s not novelty talking. That’s a real gap being named and filled.
Vertical training
There’s a phrase I keep coming back to for what this program actually is: vertical training.
Most training is horizontal. You add a new skill next to the ones you already have — another technique, another discipline, another thing to switch into. Your pile of skills gets wider. Vertical training goes the other direction. It takes what you already know — in this case your Krav Maga — and drives you deeper into it, so the thing you already know starts to do more work than you knew it could. The handgun stops being a separate subject. It becomes another expression of principles you’ve been drilling for years.
That’s why it lands differently for Krav people. You’re not starting over. You’re going up, not out.
What it looks like now
Since I came back, we’ve built the KMW Handgun Series 1 coursework into a program at Krav Maga Dallas — a six-week series. Five weekly ninety-minute classes over five weeks where we work the skills on SIRT training pistols, followed by a sixth week on the range, live fire, where students confirm everything they’ve built in a controlled environment.
Our first group ran ten students. The reviews were the best kind — the kind where people immediately ask when Level 2 is coming. We’re most of the way through our second group now. Both times the room has held everything from someone who had genuinely never fired a gun to someone who competes in tactical shooting. Everyone found the process accessible, and everyone walked out with something that made them better.
If you carry and you train
I’ll leave you where I started. If you train Krav Maga and you carry a handgun, there is very likely a seam between those two things that you’ve felt but never quite named. I lived on the wrong side of it for years, and I’m an instructor.
This is the first training I’ve found that actually closes that seam—not by adding a gun to your life, but by integrating it into your Krav Maga. That’s worth considering. If the chance to go through it comes across your path, take it seriously. And if you’re anywhere near Dallas, come find out what the experienced shooters in our first group keep raving about.
