Dr. Meghan Horn is a self defense instructor, certified in Krav Maga by the Wingate Institute in Israel. Lomboy heard Dr. Horn’s interview on The Fight Focus Podcast hosted by Buck Grant. During the interview she addressed specific challenges that women face when learning self defense.
“She talked about things like mindset and socialization and how they can affect women’s willingness to seek out self defense training, how they perform in a class, and where most programs for women go wrong,” Lomboy says. “These were ideas I never even considered as an instructor, but they made a lot of sense.”
After listening to her interview with Grant, Lomboy reached out to Dr. Horn and invited her to be a guest on his own podcast Everyday Fighter.
“While my typical approach is to interview my guests about their fight experience,” Lomboy shares, “I really wanted to get her perspective on how I could improve the way I teach self defense to women.”
Lomboy says that the subject is very personal for him. “As the father of four girls I want them to understand their personal responsibility for their own safety and also make sure that what they’re learning is actually useful for them.”
During her interview on Everyday Fighter Dr. Horn shared that she noticed that her female students required much more encouragement and direction to display aggression and physicality. She says, “I have to do double, triple duty around the room and tell these women, ‘Stop apologizing to your partner for hitting the pad and possibly making them uncomfortable. It’s okay. I want you to yell. I want you to hit that pad so hard that it rocks your partner back. This is a good thing.’”
Dr. Horn continues, “Why is there such a difference between my female and male students? It’s not because of some psychological weakness, per se, or a difference in genders of wanting to learn or ability to learn. It’s [because] we’re socialized differently.”
After the podcast interview Dr. Horn agreed to join Lomboy on 2-part live webinar series to encourage more women to train in self protection and to help instructors improve their women’s self defense programs.
Lomboy says, “I felt that we just scratched the surface on the podcast interview. I want to dive deeper into these subjects in a more interactive forum and she suggested that we do a webinar series.”
Dr. Horn and Lomboy say that these webinars are meant to be interactive and not a lecture. On a recent Facebook video Dr. Horn encouraged people to participate, saying, “I think it’s just great to have the conversation. Some people want to be right, they want to be profound, and that’s no longer a conversation – that’s a lecture. We don’t have all the right answers, and I don’t claim to have all the right answers. I just have an interesting training and education background, and I have found some things to be true in my experience. People should join in and add to the conversation. More knowledge makes everybody better.”
Part 1 of the webinar series hosted by Everyday Fighter begins with a session geared for women getting started with self protection on Friday, November 16th at 10am Pacific Standard Time.
Part 2 takes place on Friday, November 30th at 10am Pacific Standard Time and is geared towards instructors that want to discuss the current gaps in women’s self defense programs and the possible ways to address them.
Registration and live stream information on the series can be found at https://www.everydayfighter.me/webinar