A Woman Defending Women

The Women’s Self-Defense six-week seminar is a new program offered at the Koret Health and Recreational Center. Maggie Mai, 24, is the instructor for the course and she explained the class meets once a week to practice the combined techniques and defense strategies that she has come across in her past 10 years of martial arts training.

“I was into break dancing in high school, and my dad did not like me dancing around the streets,” said Mai. As an alternative, her father suggested she do martial arts instead of dance. “I loved it. I just love how I could just generate so much power with my little body,” she said, “I could like, really throw a kick and throw a punch.” Throughout her decade of training, she has gained a prominent background in the Korean martial art known as hapkido, in which she has earned her black belt.

“I’ve been doing martial arts for the majority of my life. I’ve learned it, it’s natural, I’ve been training, but I sometimes see that some women, they don’t know how to defend themselves,” said Mai.

“I did have some students [tell] me that they had been attacked before,” said Mai, explaining how the victimization of her students is an incentive for her to teach. According to Mai, if any student of hers has been attacked, they can talk confidentially with her via email about their experience and she will demonstrate in class the techniques that could be used to escape from that specific situation.

However, Mai explains it is hard to predict the outcomes of certain attacks as there are numerous variables that could arise: “what if that guy has a knife? What if they have a weapon? What if there’s two or three people?” Therefore, Mai gives options in defense techniques, opposed to saying one specific one will work or not.

“I just take what I’ve learned from different disciplinary martial arts and just put them all together,” said Mai. However, there are reasons why the class is specifically women’s self-defense instead of a mixed martial arts seminar: “we don’t have the equipment to teach that yet,” Mai admitted. Yet while Mai said she has the capability to teach such a class, she emphasized how she wants to teach women: “I want women to come in. I want people to come in.”

“Sometimes women are like, really scared to be in a room full of guys,” said Mai. “In my studios that I’ve been to, usually I’m the only girl, or there’s two girls.” Her class, she feels, is more appealing and encouraging for women to join since there is not the intimidation from men that Mai said some women might feel. “[Self-defense is] not like, a really kind of macho, ego environment. It’s more like a calm, chill, come together, nobody hurts each other [environment],” said Mai. “Some martial arts schools I’ve seen or heard that guys do kind of want to flex their muscles, but not all schools are like that, not all guys are like that, but there are some that are very egotistic,” Mai explained.

“I’m not like, a super strong person,” laughed Mai, “I know how to use leverage to defend myself, not strength, that’s my whole philosophy.” Mai explained leverage to be certain angling techniques or “[pushing] yourself away instead of pushing the person away.” An example of leverage, Mai said could be seen in Brazilian jiu-jitzu, where people training could be attacked while on their backs and still be able to defend themselves using a their hips.

Mai said that there are students, USF faculty, individuals unaffiliated with USF (besides her class), and even senior citizens that attend her seminar. She said she would continue teaching the class “as long as people show up.”

“It’s really empowering to see that that I could give [my students] the confidence in knowing they could protect themselves or know they have the tools to protect themselves,” said Mai.