[1]Chehalis resident Lisa Isom, center, is coached by self defense instructor Rob Gebhart on a move she’s trying with Katie Gift.
By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
CHEHALIS – One of them is a registered nurse who sees potentially out-of-control patients, three are teenage girls who want to feel safer on college campus’s and two are mothers of those girls.
Their instructor is a friendly-looking man who’s been studying and teaching martial arts for about 40 years.
On a recent cold weekend in Chehalis, they came together to learn what he calls common sense self defense, for women.
“We won’t be doing a bunch of wristy-twisty, trying to hold someone down type stuff,” Rob Gebhart said.
The focus is how to protect yourself and then get away, he said.
“My goal is to make you harder to kill,” he said.
Gebhart is a fourth-degree black belt in Danzan Ryu Jujitsu. He operates Ohana Martial Arts [2] in Chehalis.
The two-day class was held in the upstairs of the Chehalis Fire Department, where Gebhart is a captain.
The lecture and hands on training is drawn from various disciplines and only one-third of it involves the physical aspects of a fight. As important, according to Gebhart, are the emotional and psychological components of a confrontation.
And preparation.
For example, Gebhart tells the group to get comfortable with violence, in terms of, instead of looking away from it, to do some research to reduce the fear of it. Like someone might do if they’re afraid of snakes, he said.
He talked to the women about paying attention to their intuition, that feeling one might get in the pit of their stomach when something is not quite right in their environment.
The introductory physical responses to a surprise attack were straightforward and simple.
“We take what the body wants to do naturally and show how that can be used in self defense or combat,” Gebhart wrote as he described the course in an invitation to observe.
The class ran from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. on a Saturday and was scheduled for the same hours the following day.