The
problem…
Kenpo and the striking arts in general are harder to master
than the grappling arts. A guy trained in Kenpo for 6
months will get plowed by a guy who has done grappling
for the same amount of time. We must not do Kenpo in isolation
or in a bubble, but press it through the filter of public
perception surrounding MMA type approaches to fighting.
If we do not we are destined to take a smaller seat to
another of the less useful styles. Grappling is great,
and wonderful to train in, but certainly not the way to
go for most real life encounters. We must be effective
in not only communicating but also demonstrating this
to our students in their first days, weeks, and years
of training. "Traditional" kenpo fails miserably
at this. Trying to make Kenpo into Jujitsu fails at this.
Trying to compete with MMA & Jujitsu by adapting their
techniques into ours fails at this. It ultimately makes
us look silly…"look, we do the same thing too!"
No we don't.
The
solution…
We must teach Kenpo in the context of the real world.
We must get students real skill sets in their fist weeks
training. We must not pit Kenpo techniques against cage
fighting; we must define Kenpo as something different.
We must teach ground fighting as a skill all its own for
what it is. We must lose our ineptness on the ground.
We must "know our enemy" as Sun Tzu said a couple
thousand years ago. A Kenpoist who is familiar and somewhat
comfortable with ground fighting is extremely hard to
take to the ground. We must learn to trust experience,
application, and free play more than sequences and lists
and webs, and vocabulary. We must keep ever present in
mind that the "gee wiz" bits of information
describing Kenpo are not Kenpo. Experience, contact, work,
experimentation are the true crucibles of fighting knowledge.
A year of hard training and 10 street fights is worth
more than a lifetime at the master's feet memorizing quotes.
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DYNAMIC
NEW METHOD
After
decades of "traditional" Kenpo instruction, 2007 saw the
presentation of a new concept in training here at the Academy. Inspired
by one of my good Kenpo friends, Angelo Collado, I have decided
to completely revamp the presentation of Kenpo to all of my students.
Why
many would ask…
It is an evolved and savvier market place than it was 35 years ago
when Kenpo came into its own and defined itself. Today's prospective
student is far more exposed to martial arts and far more demanding
that they get information and techniques that can almost immediately
be useful to them. The truth is, we get 5 classes or less
to "sell" someone on the merits of our method. It is not
a style to me, but a method. Styles are stuck, sacrosanct,
unchanging and like dinosaurs, destined to go extinct. Methods work
because they hold process & results superior to dogma, myth
& the past. "Traditional" Kenpo is an athema. The
very notion that there is a "traditional" Kenpo is ludicrous
and contra to the tenants espoused by the late system founder, Ed
Parker. For many American Kenpo IS the very "classical mess"
we were trying to avoid in the first place.
Angelo's
Idea & how I'm using it…
Angelo Collado said to me, "what goes through your typical
Kenpoist's mind when they are attacked?" I thought about it
and the answer is that they recall things the way they learned them.
Think about technique lines you've seen over the years, if you are
a seasoned practitioner. Inevitably someone does the wrong attack
and instantly a 4th degree black-belt looks silly then says, "attack
with the other hand." For an onlooker or new person, this is
weird and the root of our loss of credibility with the modern student.
As instructors we all know the technique line is only a drill and
all drills have expectations, but to people in their first years
of training we look inept.
We must change the way we program our minds and the minds of students
when we access our Kenpo knowledge. I have consulted with 2 Psychologists
and this is akin to "talk therapy vs. behavior modification."
Learning techniques by name, attack and out of context greatly slows
the reaction time of the practitioner. Basically they access the
reaction verbally & intellectually, then finally physically.
Our challenge is to make the reaction nearly spontaneous and that
can only be reasonably achieved by our recall being straight to
the physical. Techniques must no longer be a list of things we memorize,
but a set of related responses to related attacks. There are many
ways to do this and my route is a bit more conservative than Mr.
Collado's. Basically I group all the techniques by attack from simplest
to most complex, I introduce new "Skill sets" at each
belt, and those sets are around a similar type of attack. Lower
belts get exposed to focused groups of related techniques that address
the most common types of attacks they might get exposed to. As students
advance they are exposed to ever more challenging attacks. Instead
of teaching a single technique from a wide variety of attack types
we teach multiple techniques against a single type of attack. By
the time a student gets their yellow belt they have a depth of punch
and push defense knowledge that is normally only seen by brown belts.
Less variety, more depth, and I could care less if they know the
name or attack associated with the technique. In very little time
students are just reacting with techniques. No thinking or stumbling
over memory. By the time they are pretty proficient with the moves
they know the names, but only as supporting knowledge, not as the
gateway to memory.
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