An excellent question. I will be honest- it is not easy to separate the genuinely good and committed teachers from the pretenders. Feel free to contact me and tell me privately via email where you are based, and I can ask on your behalf of the people that I know in my organisation. Any personal information will be kept completely confidential.

There are a lot of different Krav Maga organisations out there, as you probably know. The ones that I know are almost surely not worth going to include Darren Levine's Krav Maga Worldwide, as they are considered to be a "belt factory" by some of the Israeli organisations that I've worked with.

Some useful rules of thumb for detecting the bullshido outfits:
– Do they allow and encourage full-contact sparring? If no, it's bullshido.
– If you ask them about the concept of continuations, do they look at you blankly? If so, it's the sort of place that concentrates more on "churn" than on producing students with really sharp technical skills.
– Do they insist on 3-hour tests for your first belt/patch? The reality is that yellow belt/P1 material is very basic and requires no more than 15 minutes to test. But the test has to be done at FULL speed and aggression. Any organisation that insists on testing people for 8 hours for a black belt is not actually "testing" anything under simulated combat conditions; rather, it is attempting to give its students a sense of accomplishment by making them do the same thing over and over again under something similar to classroom conditions.

That last one is not quite as big a red flag as the first two; a lot of international KM organisations, for better or worse, have resorted to the latter approach and you can't really get away from that.

I'm in a rural area, so while you can find various schools, it's hard to be able to tell whether they know what they're doing or they're bullshido bases. Is there a valid association or something that can point people to valid teachers?