Three Stooges or Charlie's Angels

Ok, the title might be a bit dramatic, but there are three areas of skill that every martial art I've dabbled in has focused on, at least to some extent. These are: Power, Speed, and Accuracy.  You need all three to be effective and most martial artists strive to build skill in these areas. It is also important to keep these three abilities in balance. Too much of one and neglect of another can cause problems. I'll dip into each of these briefly and you'll see why.

Power: This is what the board breaking in Tae Kwon Do and Karate are all about, right? What's the old saying? "If you can break a board, you can break a rib." True, though boards don't dodge and hit back. I would describe power in martial arts as the ability to generate force. Force enough to block an incoming strike, force to penetrate and damage a target, force to push or knock an opponent back, etc.

I was practicing a step-through punch on a padded shield in a rotating line of students a few years ago. The guy holding the shield said "I don't know what you're doing, but I can really feel your punches coming through the pad." What he felt was power. The target was large and did not require precise accuracy. It was stationary and did not require high speed. I was actually doing a combination of three things to generate the power my fellow student could feel.
1. I dropped my weight slightly when stepping forward and made contact with the punch at the moment my front foot began to stop and absorb my forward and downward momentum. Imagine bending your knees on a bathroom scale. The needle jumps, right? At that precise instant, if I weigh 160 pounds, I could hit as hard as a 200 pound person. There are disadvantages to dropping your weight, such as telegraphing, but that's another subject.
2. Mentally, I did not focus on the pad, I focused on the guy behind it. As a result, my brain didn't tell my fist to stop at the pad's surface, and it kept going. Visualization is important because the mental has a strong effect on the physical.
3. I was breathing out sharply at the moment of impact. Now I cannot completely explain how this works, but it does. When you breath in harmony with your strikes and kicks, you get a boost in power that is definitely noticeable. I've been kicked in the stomach and chest hard enough to knock me back several steps. When I breathed properly, it didn't even hurt. It's almost as if your body generates an energy shockwave which absorbs the incoming force. That's what it feels like to me.
So Visualization, proper breathing, and what Kenpo calls the "marriage of gravity" (dropping your weight) are some ways to generate power.

Speed: This is an interesting skill and one that can sabotage power and accuracy if you're not careful. I've seen over and over again how accuracy and precision begin to deteriorate if you speed up a technique combo too soon. Also, high speed often has the effect of reducing target penetration (you "pull the punch" in anticipation of the next move). It really is key to balance power, speed, and accuracy so they compliment each other instead of detracting from each other.

Speed is important because it allows you to reach a live target before it has a chance to move or block your strike. It's also important in Kenpo because of necessary timing. For example: if I don't follow my angled down block to an incoming kick with a groin kick of my own soon enough (Thrusting Salute), I lose the benefit of "borrowed force". In other words, when someone is trying to kick me and I suck them in by deflecting the leg off diagonally, they will step down forward. If I kick them while the their body is still moving forward, I add the force of their forward momentum to force of my kick. If I am too slow and wait until their kick plants down before kicking, then it's only my power because they are not longer moving toward me. This is a good example of power and speed complimenting each other. But speed must be controlled. A back hammerfist to the groin followed by a lightening fast upward elbow could send the strike right past the intended target (the jaw) before your attacker has a chance to react to the hammerfist. Timing is an important and needs to be used to control speed.

Accuracy: When I think of accuracy, I think of what I would call "placement accuracy" or the ability to hit precisely where you mean to. But when practicing with fellow students, what I would call "penetration accuracy" is required. You have to hit the target on a human body to be sure of your "placement accuracy", but you need "penetration accuracy" to hit them lightly so you don't cause undue pain or injury. I say "undue pain" because you cannot expect to train in martial arts without pain. But we should try to keep that pain to a minimum while staying honest with ourselves about realism. In a really fight, "penetration accuracy" becomes irrelevant. You just drive it home. But all the power in the world does abosolutely no good if you can't place it where it needs to go. And it's important to practice moves slowly at first to develop "articulate motion" before you start speeding things up. Fast looks cool, but without power and accuracy, it's useless flailing.

One concept I am still struggling with is that relaxing your muscles while you move can actually increase both speed and power (impact on the target). Ever tried power-braking a car? (Pushing the gas to spin the tires, but holding the car back with the brake) This is what happens when there is too much tension in the muscles, and I definitely flex when striking and blocking. I rely too much on the muscle tension for accuracy (I want intensity, but I don't want to kill my fellow students). There are some teens in my class who are very lose. They are quick, but they chop me in the ear or the shoulder sometimes when they are shooting for the neck. Being lose AND accurate takes practice. Being quick and accurate takes a LOT of practice.

Accuracy is much easier with straight punches and front snap kicks than with moves like a spinning back kick. Try having someone spin you around on a merry-go-round and toss a ball to someone standing stationary a short distance away. Now stop the merry-go-round and try it. Much easier! Turning the head first on spinning moves helps keep balance and improve accuracy. Kenpo doesn't use a lot of these because you are turning your back on the threat along with losing some important, solid structure (a grounded, planted stance). It does use looping back knuckles, windmill parries, and many other circular motions, which take some practice in slow motion before accuracy comes easily.

So yes, martial artists are on a quest to grow and develop from stooges to sexy fighting machines. Ok, I admit they probably don't think of it in these terms, and I probably should clarify that I don't really aspire to be a female spy. I just had to think of a highly skilled movie trio to contrast with the Three Stooges.

Kenpo Synonyms

My instructor often says "If you want terminology, Kenpo as a ton of it".  At first, learning all the terms to describe complex movements is intimidating, but once you get some of it down, it makes things much easier to understand.  When you don't know what a "front crossover to the rear" is you feel kind of silly in the dojo, looking around while everybody else moves as one unit. A little common sense and you can probably figure out what the basic idea is. A crossover may look like an opportunity to stumble over your own feet, but it allows you to adjust your distance without turning your vital organs towards a threat. Where it gets tricky is remembering that a "rear crossover to the rear" (2 Rs) means you move straight back, while a "front crossover to the rear" (one F, one R) means you move diagonally backward. Using the same logic, a "front crossover forward" (2 Fs) is straight forward and a "rear crossover forward" (one R, one F) is diagonal. This is necessary because you cannot maintain a neutral bow stance without getting your legs all twisted if you try to move your forward leg around the rear instead of simply crossing in front of it. So whether you cross behind or in front depends on where you need move.

But I wanted to discuss synonyms used in Kenpo. These are interesting and I'll just dive right in.
A "sword" means a knifehand position is used (fingers extended straight and squeezed together, thumb tucked in along side). There are many ways to use this hand position, but it's especially useful for chopping into places where a clenched fist or flat hand would be awkward or less effective. This is called the "Puzzle Principle" (weapon fits into the target) and yes, Kenpo has a long list of principles and concepts. You can bend the elbow by chopping into the inside of the joint. You can get better penetration for strikes to the throat or neck. You can use a scrapping thrust, cutting into the ribs, and down into the stomach to ground an opponent and set them up for a strike. Lots of options.  You can jab with your finger tips, but this requires some training on proper targets and delivery or you can get hurt. And never strike with the side of your pinky! Use the edge of your palm or the spot just in front of your wrist. You can use the other side of the hand (the area between the wrist and the base of your thumb) and this is called a "ridgehand" or "reverse knifehand".  It's far easier to swing a ridgehand up into someone's groin from a natural, relaxed position than to use a regular knifehand. Upward strikes (like attacking tendons behind the elbow joint) are easier with a ridgehand also.

Hammer = pinky side of the clenched fist. This is commonly used against the groin when someone is attacking your from behind. Hammers are also used against the ribs and the side of the face. A downward hammerfist can easily break a collarbone. In Kenpo, hammerfists (and all movements for that matter) are inserted into technique sequences in such a way that they "feed" the next move or the previous move "feeds" them. If I use an "extended outward block" to protect myself from a punch, it leaves my forearm in a mostly vertical position. It's a very natural movement to rotate your hand a quarter turn and drop the clenched fist, pinky-side first, onto the collarbone. If you just elbowed the attacker behind you in the stomach, swinging the fist down into the groin is natural. By the way, you could easily guess that the technique named "Sword and Hammer" would include a knifehand strike and a hammerfist.

Salute = palm strike. Just imagine a "heil Hitler" salute with the palm and fingers pointed more vertical than at a 45 degree angle. As with any hand strike, it's important that the area of your hand with "backup mass" takes the brunt of the force. With a palm strike, the base of your palm (not the bases of your fingers) have the most backup mass because it is closer to your wrist joint (which has the backup mass of your arm, which has the backup mass of your body). The orange belt level alone has "Triggered Salute", "Thrusting Salute", and "Glancing Salute" self-defense techniques, and each of them incorporate a palm strike somewhere in the squence of moves.

Here's a few more:
Wings = elbow or bent arm
Feathers = hair (as in hair grab)
Branch = leg (the technique "Buckling Branch" involves a kick to the back of the knee)
Mace = fist
Claw = attacking with the fingernails in addition to a palm strike
Twigs = arms ("Captured Twigs" is a defense for a rear bear hug with arms pinned)

It seems silly, but you can create some very kung-fu sounding names for techniques using analogies like this!  Mr. Parker had a sense of humor too, or else he wouldn't have placed a technique called "Squeezing the Peach" (grabbing the testicles) into the system.  I wonder if he imagined how many black belt instructors would struggle to keep a straight face while calling that one out on a test in front of parents and girlfriends!

One last comment: the guy in the picture looks cool, showing all his muscles, but he is in a VERY vulnerable position there! Everything from his front knee to his groin, the inside of his front thigh, all major organs, and his left ribs are all easy targets. His elbow joint is also fully extended, and punching with power like that can damage the joint. Simply dropping his rear fist and his front elbow would add a lot of protection. He should turn his front foot inward so that the knee provides some cover for the groin and it can bend if attacked. You gotta protect yourself! ;-)

Purple belt initial impressions

Studying martial arts has the effect on me that the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. I was just in awe of the concepts and techniques I learned as a yellow and orange belt in American Kenpo Karate. Keep in mind that I studied several other martial arts, so one would expect me to be hard to impress. I was ready to test for 3rd degree brown in an off-shoot Kenpo style before I moved away, and the things I learned there seem like nothing compared to "basics" I learned this past year. Don't get me wrong, I feel I did get something valuable from every martial art I've studied. It is only that Kenpo seems to offer so much more than traditional Tae Kwon Do and Karate. We also have to consider what happens when an art gets handed down from one teacher to the next and gets filtered and simplified instead of enhanced and improved.

While I'm at it, I know Ed Parker, the father of American Kenpo, admitted himself that his art was only ten percent of the Chinese Kempo he learned from his teacher.  The rest is from other martial arts or his own creativity.  Parker was both a street fighter in Hawaii and a student of Chinese and Japanese martial arts. He created American Kenpo to be a more modern and effective system of self-defense, drawing on both his street fighting experience and his classical martial arts training. While some students break off and found their own art/school/style by "dumbing down" the art and spoon feeding their students, Parker went the opposite direction. He honed and polished what he learned to perfection. He threw out the parts that did not work and added more that did. In my opinion, he was a genius. But I am only beginning to understand parts of this complex and fascinating system.

Now in the transition from orange to purple, I see a shift in focus.  Instead of firing strikes and blocks in a steady rhythm (1... 2... 3...), I am expected to use a broken rhythm now (1... 2/3... 4..5). It is easy to see why when you start sparring or static practice. People who strike at you with a steady rhythm are much easier to block or parry. You can anticipate their movement before they begin to move. This is nothing new - I learned about this from other martial arts, but I wasn't expected to perform it effectively at 6th kyu (6 promotions from 1st degree black, most Japanese martial arts have 9 ranks from white to whatever comes before black called kyu ranks).

Another shift I see is in some of the techniques. A theme that runs through yellow and orange is "alternating height zones". The human body bends easily and naturally at the waist. It's how we sit in a chair - how we put our socks on.  So mid-level strikes to the groin or bladder send the hips back and bring the head forward into your upper-level strikes to the head and neck. Chops to the neck immediately follow groin kicks in yellow belt techniques. Orange continues the theme with techniques using slight arm manipulations, when someone shoves or grabs you, to expose mid-level targets like floating ribs. High mid, or mid high. But even in yellow and orange, you get introduced to techniques that use leg checks and buckles while your hands are doing other things. I can't begin to sum up everything you learn about in these two ranks in a paragraph. I am just touching on highlights here.

When I first saw Thundering Hammers (a purple belt technique), I thought "Oh, that looks cool. Reverse hammerfist to solar plexus, hammerfist to kidney, hammerfist across back of neck... Nice flow." I didn't even notice that the knees where striking and checking attacker's right leg simultaneously with each strike. No wonder they stress hip rotation to beginners! You can't accomplish checks/strikes with both knees in the same technique without moving your feet unless you use hip rotation. Most people don't know that Elvis was one of Ed Parker's blackbelts. But when you start shifting stances quickly back and forth, or using both your knees to alternately hit one leg, you start thinking "so that's the funky thing he was doing on stage while he was singing!"

Back to the point, we're going from striking alternating height zones to simultaneous height zones. It definitely feels different when someone does the technique on me. When I am getting nailed in the stomach and knee (or knee and kidney, or knee and neck) at the same time, I am helpless! And when it happens with the speed Kenpo is famous for, it's over before you know what hit you! Whatever you were trying to do, it's completely cancelled.

But I should be honest, as cool as the technique is, I think it would take a LOT of application on a body before I could use it effectively if I got surprised on the street. It takes a lot of coordination and adapting to how your attacker reacts. The initial block and strike would be easy and that may be all you need. I practiced the sidestep-thrustingblock-reverse hammerfist on a heavy foam shield the other night. The power was enough to knock the big guy holding it back and gave me a "speckle bruise" on my hand as the impact forced blood up through the pores in my skin. But using both knees to check same leg would require a narrower, less stable "close kneel" stance. You could easily be knocked off balance by a thrashing, bucking opponent. I have no doubt that it could be pulled off by an advanced practioner, I'm just not at that level yet.

I mentioned "the speed Kenpo is famous for".  Some skilled Kenpoists can strike a person in ten places in less that a second. But I never thought I'd hear a Kenpo instructor say, "That's too fast, it won't work", and I heard it the other night. Kenpo is designed for one strike to feed you the target for the next. It operates based on the body's reactions to pain and impact. A back hammerfist to the groin brings the attacker's chin over your obscure upward elbow. But if your follow up strike is faster than your attacker's reaction, you could miss completely. As practitioners, we can move with blinding speed because we practice a sequence over and over, and we don't have to think about what comes next. The attacker, on the other hand, is simply reacting spontaneously to getting hit. He is caught off guard and doesn't know what he's supposed to do. To put it crudely, you have to give the guy a few microseconds to bend over (after you kick him in the groin) before you try to chop him in the neck! On the other hand, Kenpo is also an art full of plan B's, plan C's, even plan L's. It does not take for granted that the first strike or two will eliminate the threat. So there are times when your first strike or two is so effective, that the target is no longer around for the 5th or 14th. They either collapsed or retreated.

It's kind of funny: each belt level I have gone through has something in it that I taught myself from a book. A blocking set in yellow, a coordination set in orange, a kicking set in purple. So I spend a lot of time trying to re-program my brain and body to do these sequences properly. What was I doing wrong? Most of what needs changing is footwork for greater stability.  And my flashy, kung-fu style moves need to be sharpened and shrunk to reflect "economy of motion" and provide better protection. If I had a video of me doing this stuff on my own 8 years ago, it would look faster but sloppier. I may be slower and less interesting to watch now, but I am more stable, better protected, more accurate, and more powerful. The speed will come, but I have to be patient. Speed without accuracy and power is useless flailing.