american kenpo

[danfaggella]

what do you think about this art? (practical, flashy, interesting?)
what do you think of Ed Parker? (moron, genius, ect...?)

thanks!

[Kenpodog]

I like it, but i'm slightly biased.

SGM Ed Parker -- I have never met him, but IMHO he was:
Someone who never stopped improving or refining his art and teaching methods.

[aseepish]

American Kenpo (under Larry Tatum's branch), was the first martial art that I studied. I was in it for two and a half years before our school collapsed and our instructor left the city instead of refunding our money. I was a purple belt at the time.

The best thing about Kenpo is the self-defense technique aspect. The simple ones are the best, and even now, 10 years later, a lot of them are still ingrained in me.

What I didn't like about Kenpo was the sparring. It was light/medium contact point sparring, with a break at each point to acknowledge it. There were a few guys at the club who trained full contact (san shou rules), but that was not the typical sparring we did. 99% of the self-defense techniques that I had learned were not fully applicable in a sparring situation. When I moved on to JKD, I found that I had to unlearn a LOT of bad habits.

Kenpo stresses that you do not want to brawl with someone in a real situation, and that the self-defense techniques are what would naturally come into play. In an ideal situation this is true. A young woman from our class was attacked by two guys one night and she put them both in the hospital using the techniques she had learned. But she had been able to take advantage of surprise. If you screw up and lose that element of surprise, then you're in a brawl.

As far as the classes go, they were very traditional - standing in line and punching/kicking in unision. A lot of shouting. That's great for some people, but after the informal atmosphere I've experienced in JKD clubs and MT and BJJ gyms, I can't go back to that kind of class.

Ed Parker's contribution to martial arts in North America was huge. He brought the martial arts into the mainstream, not only through his schools and tournaments (Bruce Lee), but through his celebrity students. The down-side of this (not directly Parker's fault) is that his innovations in commercialization have culminated in today's proliferation of McDojos (of all styles).

Parker's books are very interesting. He was trying to cut out a lot of the mysticism surrounding the martial arts and make them scientific. He deserves a lot of credit for this. His theories of motion (cancellation of an opponent's height, width, and depth) are very interesting indeed.

I think I was very lucky to have started off in Kenpo. Had my school been a successful business I probably would have continued there. But my martial arts road took a different path.