Kembudo-Kai Kempoka
Senior Master
This subject came up on KenpoTalk, under another thread, then jumped to a thread under Mr. Seabrook. The topic was essentially..."What, if anything, would you delete from AK, and why?". Naturally, many say "delete nothing", while others say "delete selectively".
I opted for selective deletion, starting with the weapons techniques. In my own opinion, many of the underlying assumptions that drive the techniques are misinformed, causing the technique to reach a less-than-desirable destination in the end result. In one post, I recommended jettisoning all the Storm techs, and starting over. A couple of folks disagreed, asking for "WHY?". In response to "Why?", I wrote the following. I am posting it here to prompt discussion. I encourage you to disagree, but invite you to do so from a place of experimentation and speculation, rather than declared dogma. Yes, I am familiar with the core cirriculum of AK. Yes, I do think there are advantages to be found within the core cirriculum, and support passing it on intact to future generations so that each may find their own path of addition or deletion. And finally, Yes...I DO deviate from standard AK to include judo, boxing, and jujutsu in what I stress with students, when I happen to have them. Moreover, I have, in the last several years, become a big fan of Doc Chapel's SL4 kenpo, because it directly addresses what I have considered to be unreality-based fictions in kenpo. That ain't sayin' no one can make canonized AK work; it IS to say that I don't think the weapons defenses in AK will serve MOST of the people, MOST of the time.
So, here is my post from KenpoTalk. Flame away...
I’m the guy who said “dump the Storm techs.” There is a fishbowl that many kenpoists live in, and in the limited context of this fishbowl, the defenses against weapons in kenpo are technically sufficient. My beef is this: Do you want to trust your life, or the lives of your loved ones, to technically sufficient?
“Fishbowl reality” was a phrase I first heard in the late seventies and early eighties, as related to the martial arts. It’s the idea that, contained in your own shared universe, it’s easy to believe self-propagating fictions about possibility and probability when it comes to defense. That is, in the “Aikido fishbowl”, some bunch of aikidoka may have spent generations telling each other that some move X is a great escape from such and such an attack. Unchallenged by the rigors of combat, and generations removed from the founder (who, himself, was an accomplished combatant), they may have lost the context or experience that caused the founder to include that move in the system in the first place. For example, he may have only meant it to relate the nature of harmonious movement; but, without him around to personally guide the passing of information, it has become a “self-defense technique”, that anyone in the fishbowl will tell you “it works”. Enter a throwdown, or some similar event, or even an actual altercation. Someone NOT enculturated into the world of aikido expectations places a double wrist grab on the guy who’s been taught a “fool proof” counter for it; he attempts his escape, but it don’t work. Now what? Well, surely his wise masters could not be wrong…he must be doing it incorrectly. So he tries again. And again. And again. It still don’t work. Why not? Because someone forgot to tell his attacker that the escape is fool-proof. The attacker, coming from a different fishbowl, lacks preconceived notions about this particular escape, and just hangs on…dominating his poor victim through brute strength, while they try in vain to make their fishbowl wisdom work.
Long before Clyde started to get together with folks from other arts…before they had official names for it like “throwdown”, people from different systems used to get together to see how what they knew might work OUTSIDE their own fishbowl. I did a couple of these while still in high school, a junior black in kenpo, with a brown belt in judo and a black belt in “YMCA” jujutsu (I had no hobbies aside from MA, didn’t date, and avoided homework like the plague…put more hours per week into karate as a kid than most grown-ups do into work). First one I went to had some guys from Arnis, Sansoo, Thai kickboxing, other kenpo schools, Shotokan, Tae Kwon Do, kung-fu and JKD (I was the youngest person there; to make matters weirder, some of these guys were in the business of hurting people…literally; collectors for dealers, and the like). We spent a 10-hour day reviewing techniques we swore by. Some passed muster; some didn’t.
The Thai-boxer showed us kenpoists that our tippy-tap sparring didn’t prepare us for having a guy come at us with intelligent clock-cleaning intent; blew right through our guards, and kicked our legs out from underneath us. Us kenpo guys showed the Shotokan guy that he could not, in fact, move quickly from such a deep stance. The Arnis guy showed us all an ugly, ugly lesson. He used a felt marker for the timid, and marked us up as we attempted our techniques against knives. He used a rolled up newspaper for the timid as club. For the defenders who were a little more confident about their skills, or willing to step it up in intensity, he switched to a “wizzer stick” for the club. A lot of black ink and welts later, I realized, painfully, that I was not prepared to go toe-to-toe with a knife or club wielder. The thing that helped me most was the judo, and I still got more than my fair share of black ink marks and stick welts.
I went back to each of my 3 kenpo profs with these concerns (yes, I was committing a sin, and training at a couple of different schools). One said, “kenpo techniques are not meant to teach you specifics, but rather concepts that you can apply as the situation dictates”. I knew that; had it bopped into my head since my first lesson. I tried applying the principles. The only one that really worked was “distance”…the further away I stayed from the guy, the less I got “cut”. When I used the footwork from judo – typically used to set up for a throw with a couple of cheat steps – I did better at negotiating critical distance in striking/cutting range. Another prof said, “You must just be doing them wrong; practice them harder.” So I did…who knows, he might be right, eh? The third prof is the only one who actually said, “that’s a problem. The techs are supposed to give us the skills to survive the attack and neutralize the attacker. If they aren’t working, we need to look at the dynamics of the attacks, and formulate better skill sets for our students’ survival.” I learned more about kenpo in the following year by being the study-buddy of this guy while he formulated skill sets, then I had in many years prior. He “drafted” Phillipino and Chinese bladed fighting arts practitioners into our sessions, so he could formulate responses against their best attacks. Club, and knife (and sword…if you can avoid or intercept a sword, how much less problematic a baseball bat?).
Modifications looked like this: Who is theoretically better at not getting cut in a knife fight…a kenpoist with a half-dozen knife replies in his technique arsenal, who also divides his time among forms, sets, sparring, and the other techs of kenpo; or a Polynesian knife fighter who spends the vast majority of his time training to attack with – and defend against – knives and sticks. So, we isolated the “top twenty” blocks, checks, evasions, and destructions from Arnis/Escrima, and took a look at which of the Master Key Movements flowed best from each position one might find themselves in after each defense. After learning knife-fighting from a knife-fighter, club-fighting from a club fighter, and short-range pistolry from a psychotic Viet-Nam vet / Survivalist, you see all sorts of liabilities in the “official” kenpo Storm, Lance and Rod techniques.
Got together again, multiple times, at these mixers with practitioners from other arts (some regulars, some revolving members injecting new problems and perspectives). As I aged, and got a little thicker (I was a serious bean-pole in high school), I started participating in the greater intensity of the less well-balanced minds in our little group. Every art, it seems, teaches some sort of response for handgun threats. We would, at these get-togethers and in class (unofficial class in backyards and parks at night…studio liability would be way too high for this), practice disarms with loaded BB guns (head & face) and pellet guns (body, with bullet-proof vests…provided by the survivalists and bounty hunter). People fixin to shoot you are going to pop off a round as soon as they see you move. So, if they have a gun to your head, your action around getting your head off-line has to be faster than their reaction of squeezing the trigger. Your control and retention of the weapon has to be such that, if they continue to pull the trigger and wriggle the gun in an attempt to get you, they miss. Optimally, the rounds should be directed into the dirt, so by-standers don’t get shot. You also have to position for the contingency that he may decide to forget about fighting you for control of the weapon, and “change the subject” by just beating you silly with his unoccupied hand; bad guys can poke eyes and chop throats, too. Then what?
I’ve been in and out of mainstream kenpo society for more than 30 years, and it’s been interesting to see the splits in position taken by different members, and how background experience informs the positions of different seniors in this art. Almost to a ‘T”, kenpo oldsters who have actually seen action – either as vets, law enforcement, or “other” (yes, Dorothy, there is an old gangster element to the early days of kenpo) – radically modify their knife, gun and club techniques to accommodate for unpleasant possibilities. The folks who argue to keep the red book versions of the techniques, without any further specialization or exploration, haven’t had to use them. At least not often. You might get by and luck out with Evading the Storm one time against a drunk with a beer bottle at a party. But try being a bouncer at a punk concert where a gaggle of morons have decided that the best thing they can do as a group is to beat the crap out of you with beer bottles and the barbed chains they wore in as belts. At moments like that, you find yourself extremely grateful for having deviated from the standard curriculum.
But don’t take my word for it. See if Mr. Chap’el, a 40 year martial arts veteran and law enforcement dude, teaches the knife/club/gun techs the way they’re canonized; catch Mr. LaBounty – another LEO – off guard, and see if he trains with his own black belts using the techs the way they’re scripted for offering to the paying public. The list goes on. The guys who’ve been around for a long time either change them or dump them. The guys who have never pissed themselves trying not to get cut by a live blade in the hands of an angry opponent still swear by the efficacy of the unchanged content of the kenpo tech set.
But back to specifics for the Storm techniques…not enough is done to control the opponents’ ability to switch hands or step away from your response. Distance is required to use a club, and all the bad guy has to do is disengage, step back, and swing again. Other options include whacking you with the free hand; an option not fully accounted for in the height/width/depth zone cancellation schtuff in the club techs. But don’t take my word for it; get an uke who is unwilling to go along with your technique. Give him a length of Styrofoam swimming pool noodle, and tell him to go to town beating the crap out of you while you try to apply your kenpo defenses. He is NOT to stand there like a paralytic idiot and allow you to do what you will; he is expected to pull free frantically and whoop on you at will, as best he can. Watch what happens when you have a swinging nut on your hands, instead of a compliant training partner. Now get the Magic Marker and do the same with the knife techs. Next, save yourself the small facial scars from squeezing BB’s out of your face like a zit, and get an AirSof gun and some safety goggles. Try the gun techs.
Don’t just post mentalist replies about how I’m incorrect because the tech has a check inserted hither and ton; actually get the uncooperative partner, the props, and try this. It will open your eyes about the limitations and capacity of your skills faster than any Tuesday night sparring class. In 20 minutes of this, it will become painfully clear WHY so much emphasis is placed on control manipulation at the higher levels.
Regards,
Dave
I opted for selective deletion, starting with the weapons techniques. In my own opinion, many of the underlying assumptions that drive the techniques are misinformed, causing the technique to reach a less-than-desirable destination in the end result. In one post, I recommended jettisoning all the Storm techs, and starting over. A couple of folks disagreed, asking for "WHY?". In response to "Why?", I wrote the following. I am posting it here to prompt discussion. I encourage you to disagree, but invite you to do so from a place of experimentation and speculation, rather than declared dogma. Yes, I am familiar with the core cirriculum of AK. Yes, I do think there are advantages to be found within the core cirriculum, and support passing it on intact to future generations so that each may find their own path of addition or deletion. And finally, Yes...I DO deviate from standard AK to include judo, boxing, and jujutsu in what I stress with students, when I happen to have them. Moreover, I have, in the last several years, become a big fan of Doc Chapel's SL4 kenpo, because it directly addresses what I have considered to be unreality-based fictions in kenpo. That ain't sayin' no one can make canonized AK work; it IS to say that I don't think the weapons defenses in AK will serve MOST of the people, MOST of the time.
So, here is my post from KenpoTalk. Flame away...
I’m the guy who said “dump the Storm techs.” There is a fishbowl that many kenpoists live in, and in the limited context of this fishbowl, the defenses against weapons in kenpo are technically sufficient. My beef is this: Do you want to trust your life, or the lives of your loved ones, to technically sufficient?
“Fishbowl reality” was a phrase I first heard in the late seventies and early eighties, as related to the martial arts. It’s the idea that, contained in your own shared universe, it’s easy to believe self-propagating fictions about possibility and probability when it comes to defense. That is, in the “Aikido fishbowl”, some bunch of aikidoka may have spent generations telling each other that some move X is a great escape from such and such an attack. Unchallenged by the rigors of combat, and generations removed from the founder (who, himself, was an accomplished combatant), they may have lost the context or experience that caused the founder to include that move in the system in the first place. For example, he may have only meant it to relate the nature of harmonious movement; but, without him around to personally guide the passing of information, it has become a “self-defense technique”, that anyone in the fishbowl will tell you “it works”. Enter a throwdown, or some similar event, or even an actual altercation. Someone NOT enculturated into the world of aikido expectations places a double wrist grab on the guy who’s been taught a “fool proof” counter for it; he attempts his escape, but it don’t work. Now what? Well, surely his wise masters could not be wrong…he must be doing it incorrectly. So he tries again. And again. And again. It still don’t work. Why not? Because someone forgot to tell his attacker that the escape is fool-proof. The attacker, coming from a different fishbowl, lacks preconceived notions about this particular escape, and just hangs on…dominating his poor victim through brute strength, while they try in vain to make their fishbowl wisdom work.
Long before Clyde started to get together with folks from other arts…before they had official names for it like “throwdown”, people from different systems used to get together to see how what they knew might work OUTSIDE their own fishbowl. I did a couple of these while still in high school, a junior black in kenpo, with a brown belt in judo and a black belt in “YMCA” jujutsu (I had no hobbies aside from MA, didn’t date, and avoided homework like the plague…put more hours per week into karate as a kid than most grown-ups do into work). First one I went to had some guys from Arnis, Sansoo, Thai kickboxing, other kenpo schools, Shotokan, Tae Kwon Do, kung-fu and JKD (I was the youngest person there; to make matters weirder, some of these guys were in the business of hurting people…literally; collectors for dealers, and the like). We spent a 10-hour day reviewing techniques we swore by. Some passed muster; some didn’t.
The Thai-boxer showed us kenpoists that our tippy-tap sparring didn’t prepare us for having a guy come at us with intelligent clock-cleaning intent; blew right through our guards, and kicked our legs out from underneath us. Us kenpo guys showed the Shotokan guy that he could not, in fact, move quickly from such a deep stance. The Arnis guy showed us all an ugly, ugly lesson. He used a felt marker for the timid, and marked us up as we attempted our techniques against knives. He used a rolled up newspaper for the timid as club. For the defenders who were a little more confident about their skills, or willing to step it up in intensity, he switched to a “wizzer stick” for the club. A lot of black ink and welts later, I realized, painfully, that I was not prepared to go toe-to-toe with a knife or club wielder. The thing that helped me most was the judo, and I still got more than my fair share of black ink marks and stick welts.
I went back to each of my 3 kenpo profs with these concerns (yes, I was committing a sin, and training at a couple of different schools). One said, “kenpo techniques are not meant to teach you specifics, but rather concepts that you can apply as the situation dictates”. I knew that; had it bopped into my head since my first lesson. I tried applying the principles. The only one that really worked was “distance”…the further away I stayed from the guy, the less I got “cut”. When I used the footwork from judo – typically used to set up for a throw with a couple of cheat steps – I did better at negotiating critical distance in striking/cutting range. Another prof said, “You must just be doing them wrong; practice them harder.” So I did…who knows, he might be right, eh? The third prof is the only one who actually said, “that’s a problem. The techs are supposed to give us the skills to survive the attack and neutralize the attacker. If they aren’t working, we need to look at the dynamics of the attacks, and formulate better skill sets for our students’ survival.” I learned more about kenpo in the following year by being the study-buddy of this guy while he formulated skill sets, then I had in many years prior. He “drafted” Phillipino and Chinese bladed fighting arts practitioners into our sessions, so he could formulate responses against their best attacks. Club, and knife (and sword…if you can avoid or intercept a sword, how much less problematic a baseball bat?).
Modifications looked like this: Who is theoretically better at not getting cut in a knife fight…a kenpoist with a half-dozen knife replies in his technique arsenal, who also divides his time among forms, sets, sparring, and the other techs of kenpo; or a Polynesian knife fighter who spends the vast majority of his time training to attack with – and defend against – knives and sticks. So, we isolated the “top twenty” blocks, checks, evasions, and destructions from Arnis/Escrima, and took a look at which of the Master Key Movements flowed best from each position one might find themselves in after each defense. After learning knife-fighting from a knife-fighter, club-fighting from a club fighter, and short-range pistolry from a psychotic Viet-Nam vet / Survivalist, you see all sorts of liabilities in the “official” kenpo Storm, Lance and Rod techniques.
Got together again, multiple times, at these mixers with practitioners from other arts (some regulars, some revolving members injecting new problems and perspectives). As I aged, and got a little thicker (I was a serious bean-pole in high school), I started participating in the greater intensity of the less well-balanced minds in our little group. Every art, it seems, teaches some sort of response for handgun threats. We would, at these get-togethers and in class (unofficial class in backyards and parks at night…studio liability would be way too high for this), practice disarms with loaded BB guns (head & face) and pellet guns (body, with bullet-proof vests…provided by the survivalists and bounty hunter). People fixin to shoot you are going to pop off a round as soon as they see you move. So, if they have a gun to your head, your action around getting your head off-line has to be faster than their reaction of squeezing the trigger. Your control and retention of the weapon has to be such that, if they continue to pull the trigger and wriggle the gun in an attempt to get you, they miss. Optimally, the rounds should be directed into the dirt, so by-standers don’t get shot. You also have to position for the contingency that he may decide to forget about fighting you for control of the weapon, and “change the subject” by just beating you silly with his unoccupied hand; bad guys can poke eyes and chop throats, too. Then what?
I’ve been in and out of mainstream kenpo society for more than 30 years, and it’s been interesting to see the splits in position taken by different members, and how background experience informs the positions of different seniors in this art. Almost to a ‘T”, kenpo oldsters who have actually seen action – either as vets, law enforcement, or “other” (yes, Dorothy, there is an old gangster element to the early days of kenpo) – radically modify their knife, gun and club techniques to accommodate for unpleasant possibilities. The folks who argue to keep the red book versions of the techniques, without any further specialization or exploration, haven’t had to use them. At least not often. You might get by and luck out with Evading the Storm one time against a drunk with a beer bottle at a party. But try being a bouncer at a punk concert where a gaggle of morons have decided that the best thing they can do as a group is to beat the crap out of you with beer bottles and the barbed chains they wore in as belts. At moments like that, you find yourself extremely grateful for having deviated from the standard curriculum.
But don’t take my word for it. See if Mr. Chap’el, a 40 year martial arts veteran and law enforcement dude, teaches the knife/club/gun techs the way they’re canonized; catch Mr. LaBounty – another LEO – off guard, and see if he trains with his own black belts using the techs the way they’re scripted for offering to the paying public. The list goes on. The guys who’ve been around for a long time either change them or dump them. The guys who have never pissed themselves trying not to get cut by a live blade in the hands of an angry opponent still swear by the efficacy of the unchanged content of the kenpo tech set.
But back to specifics for the Storm techniques…not enough is done to control the opponents’ ability to switch hands or step away from your response. Distance is required to use a club, and all the bad guy has to do is disengage, step back, and swing again. Other options include whacking you with the free hand; an option not fully accounted for in the height/width/depth zone cancellation schtuff in the club techs. But don’t take my word for it; get an uke who is unwilling to go along with your technique. Give him a length of Styrofoam swimming pool noodle, and tell him to go to town beating the crap out of you while you try to apply your kenpo defenses. He is NOT to stand there like a paralytic idiot and allow you to do what you will; he is expected to pull free frantically and whoop on you at will, as best he can. Watch what happens when you have a swinging nut on your hands, instead of a compliant training partner. Now get the Magic Marker and do the same with the knife techs. Next, save yourself the small facial scars from squeezing BB’s out of your face like a zit, and get an AirSof gun and some safety goggles. Try the gun techs.
Don’t just post mentalist replies about how I’m incorrect because the tech has a check inserted hither and ton; actually get the uncooperative partner, the props, and try this. It will open your eyes about the limitations and capacity of your skills faster than any Tuesday night sparring class. In 20 minutes of this, it will become painfully clear WHY so much emphasis is placed on control manipulation at the higher levels.
Regards,
Dave
I train in Arnis and BJJ to supplement my training and because I happen to like those arts, but by no means, do I walk around thinking that because of that, I'm going to beat Rickson Gracie on the mat or disarm Leo Gaje. IMHO, I think it would be best to prepare for the worst than be under prepared and wish you had spent some extra time looking outside the fishbowl.
