Best home study course Dvd's American kenpo

[Flying Crane]

It always frustrates me when people badmouth books and videos for training. Can you learn math from a book or video?

yes you can, but math is an intellectual exercise that doesn't need to translate into a physical skill that you may need to save your life. Intellectual knowledge can be learned from books and videos, and this can have a place in the martial arts as well. However in the martial arts, that knowledge needs to be translated into a very real physical skill. For that, books and video simply do not fit the bill. For that, you MUST have a good instructor who can show you where you are doing things wrong, and can help you put that intellectual knowledge into physical use and action.

Can you learn to play basebal from a book or video? Of course you can.

again, yes you can and after reading the book you can go outside and get someone to pitch a ball to you and you can swing and hack away at it for all you're worth. Eventually you will even hit the ball a few times, and you can figure out how to deal with fielding the ball and running the bases. Personally, my Dad and the older kids in the neighborhood taught me how to do it. I didn't learn this from a book either.

And again, even tho baseball is a set of physical skills, it isn't something that will translate into skills that might be needed to save your life. You can happily play baseball at a low skill level all your life, and there is nothing wrong with that. Martial arts are simply a different thing. You want higher level skills for that and you need a good teacher to develop that.

I agree that a live instructor is better, but what do you do when one is not available? Stop training? Stop trying to better yourself?

in the case of this person, he already has a teacher in Shaolin kenpo. He is best to stick with that.

People in California especialy seem to like to bad mouth all of the books and video programs out there because they have 20 dojos within driving distance.

there is simply a right way and a wrong way to go about it. Nobody said life was fair.

Personally, I drive over an hour each direction, twice a week, for my kenpo training. A good teacher isn't found in every streetcorner dojo. Sometimes you gotta search them out and be willing to make sacrifices to be able to train with them. And that means being smart enough to pass up the poor options that abound, including the book and video route.

 

[Twin Fist]

There IS such a thing as EPAK

he set the standards n the Infinite Insights books. he set in stone what his requirements for rank are.

Any school that doesnt follow that isnt teaching EPAK, but "so and so's version of EPAK".

And I think the Tatum videos are very, very good.

as far as videos being useless for training, i would say it depends.

no beginner can learn a system from videos

someone with considerable experience can learn a LOT from them.

 

[kempo]

There IS such a thing as EPAK

he set the standards n the Infinite Insights books. he set in stone what his requirements for rank are.

Any school that doesnt follow that isnt teaching EPAK, but "so and so's version of EPAK".

And I think the Tatum videos are very, very good.

as far as videos being useless for training, i would say it depends.

no beginner can learn a system from videos

someone with considerable experience can learn a LOT from them.

I have to agree with you here, even though aparently alot of people dont. Now what about the IKCA system, Karate Connection, they have hunreds of black belts and most of them not all of them learned from videos, and have done it under 2 years. Now there is a teacher that I talked with who lives about 20min from my house who got his black belt through video training with the IKCA system and is now a 4th degree black belt. I have not seen him in action but I am sure he is pretty good. Now I am not going to say that I am 100% all for training and earning your black belt through video training, but for someone like myself who is training with an instructor 2 times a wk in shaolin kempo and wants to learn some of the self defense techniques from american kenpo to add to my arsinault is not a bad Idea. Hell you can go on youtube and type in any of the american kenpo techniques such as delayed sword and learn it. Unlike Shaolin Kempo, there are alot of American Kenpo techniques on youtube..

 

[Flying Crane]

I have to agree with you here, even though aparently alot of people dont.

my comment was that there is no widely accepted standardization as to HOW things are to be done. Yes, Mr. Parker did document content of the "system" (which, it seems, was sort of constantly changing), but to my knowledge, the details about just HOW things are to be done was left very loose. So the list of techniques and kata may be the same under different lineages, but just exactly how they apply the information and put it to use can be fairly different. Again, dig thru the many threads on specific techniques, and you will see the variety that I am talking about. I think you will see more of these threads over on the sister site, Kenpotalk.com. But that is what i mean when I say that it is really just a bunch of different lineages under people who studied under Mr. Parker. They didn't all learn everything the same, and in that sense, there is no true or complete constistency from one Parker Lineage to another. In that sense, there is no standardized "EPAK".

Now what about the IKCA system, Karate Connection, they have hunreds of black belts and most of them not all of them learned from videos, and have done it under 2 years.

I have no experience with them so I cannot offer a concrete critique of what they do. I do know that Chuck Sullivan was with Mr. Parker for a very long time. That being said, I personally would never undertake to study strictly thru theirs or anybody else's video course. If I was looking for another kenpo teacher, and one of their people was nearby, I might choose to study with him if I felt he was good. But if I knew that HIS training was strictly, or predominantly thru video in his living room, that alone would make me look elsewhere. That's just my own personal view on it. Some people feel differently than I do, and you are of course welcome to use your own critical thinking and make your own decisions.

... but for someone like myself who is training with an instructor 2 times a wk in shaolin kempo and wants to learn some of the self defense techniques from american kenpo to add to my arsinault is not a bad Idea.

Do you feel your SK training is lacking or leaving dangerous gaps in your training? If so you might want to reconsider training with that instructor as well.

Hell you can go on youtube and type in any of the american kenpo techniques such as delayed sword and learn it. Unlike Shaolin Kempo, there are alot of American Kenpo techniques on youtube..

[/quote]

that's true, and again, from my own perspective, I don't understand why people do this. Personally, I like to keep my training held close. I don't post it out there for the world to gawk at. It's something very personal to me, I've worked for many years on it, and I'm not interested in turning it into performance art, nor am I interested in trying to impress the kenpo/martial arts community with what I can do. And neither am I interested in trying to teach the faceless masses of people who log onto Youtube. I just don't understand why people are so keen on posting everything there. But again, that's just me.

But getting back to the main point: what if you learn Delayed Sword from some random Youtube clip, and then you show up for a lesson with Mr. Cogliandro, and he tells you that what you learned from the video is all wrong, and it should be done THIS way instead? Now who do you believe? Which way do you want to do it? How much time did you waste, trying to learn it from Youtube?

 

[Flying Crane]

my comment was that there is no widely accepted standardization as to HOW things are to be done. Yes, Mr. Parker did document content of the "system" (which, it seems, was sort of constantly changing), but to my knowledge, the details about just HOW things are to be done was left very loose. So the list of techniques and kata may be the same under different lineages, but just exactly how they apply the information and put it to use can be fairly different. Again, dig thru the many threads on specific techniques, and you will see the variety that I am talking about.

Check out Post #3 in this thread, for a brief example of what I am talking about. This recent post by Dr. Dave hits the point I'm making pretty clearly.

http://martialtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=69543