Over the last while, I’ve been trying to focus my effort on streamlining my kempo practice to come up with the best nucleus of material. My beef with the ‘million and one is better’ school of kempo stems from several sources. First, despite what Hock Hockheim says, Hick’s law (and Fitts Law) are still robust predictors of the effect and the size of the effect of a preponderance of choices on reaction time.
The Air Force still seems to agree, and so do the authors of Motor Learning And Control: Concepts And Applications
. Can a 500 millisecond delay make a difference? Spar a friend, have a third party say go, and count one missis(leave out the -sippi) before doing anything. Sound good?Essentially, having a bunch of choices for a given situation increases your reaction time.
. Can a 500 millisecond delay make a difference? Spar a friend, have a third party say go, and count one missis(leave out the -sippi) before doing anything. Sound good?Essentially, having a bunch of choices for a given situation increases your reaction time. Second, practice time is finite. If your practice time is limited, practicing a large number of techniques will decrease the amount of time you can devote to any given technique. There are three stages of motor learning: cognitive, associative, and autonomous. It takes a large amount of practice to move from one stage to the next, and having a laundry list of techniques lengthens the amount of time before any given technique reaches the final stage. The autonomous stage, also known as ‘automaticity’, is that condition where you can perform a task without conscious effort. These are the types of actions less prone to the problems predicted with Hick’s law. Hockheim gives the example of typing – 26 choices, but really there are only a few choices for each finger, there are some that are further into automaticity (the common letters) and some that most typists still have to exert cognitive effort (and more time) to find. Where is that darn ampersand?
Third, there is a historical precedent for the success of systems with more limited curricula. The ‘movers and shakers’ from the Kempo lineages are from the days when there was less ‘stuff’ in the system. George Pesare, Nick Cerio, even Fred Villari had reputations as effective fighters. This changed for the black belts of those whose systems expanded exponentially as they went on. Adriano Emperado? He studied Karate, Kenpo, Judo and Boxing (as the story goes), that’s more, right? As they studied, the founders of Kajukenbo trimmed the arts they studied and created one cohesive whole. Much better than trying to learn five arts.
Fourth, my experience as an educator exposed me to research regarding the concept of generality in learning. Generality is the condition where you can apply what you’ve learned under a variety of conditions, not necessarily just the conditions under which it was taught. Starting in 1977, Stokes and Baer developed an implicit theory of generalization in which they studied a variety of ways to teach skills, and came up with several different methods to teach with the aim for ‘general usefulness’. The method I see Shaolin Kempo using is ‘Train Sufficient Exemplars’. You teach someone 108 different examples of how to respond to a right hand step through front punch in the hopes that during that process, the student will learn how to handle punches in general. Unfortunately, this method rarely works, as anything other than the trained stimulus doesn’t tend to trigger the desired response. Training to generalize, and ‘Loose Training’ in which the same response is trained against a variety of stimuli, tends to take a little longer in the short run, but provides a much more generally useful result. If you train a technique against all sorts of attacks, it will be triggered by all sorts of attacks. It is generally useful.
However, now that we’ve ditched a large pile of techniques, changed the attacks we train them against, we might find we have some gaps in our training we want to fill. Dare we add a few techniques? Perhaps not. Many people tell stories about William Chow in awe not only of his impressive effectiveness, but of his seemingly limitless repertoire of techniques. People would relate how they would see a technique, and then not see the same one again for months if ever. Did he have a thousand techniques? Doubt it. He most likely had a set of core principles and developed techniques on the fly as examples. People wrote down these examples and they became ‘Techniques’. Incorporate principle based training, and teach your students to apply the principles.
I received an email on this very topic, and among these issues, the writer brought up two very good questions. First, how far did he want to take it when making changes? He wanted answers to many of these problems, but wanted to recognize where he ended up based on where he began. Second, when was it still Shaoln Kempo? How much could be taken away or added without having to call it something new? When does it become something else?
When does it become something else? SKK is made up of a whole bunch of “Something Else” I Think it becomes something else when the person takes the leap of faith to go with what s/he thinks is right and make obvious changes. even better, they start from scratch and only the insightful ones can see where things came from. Most people today (me at this stage also) are making changes using the same techniques but applying them to where they see gaps in the system. It is not until we do something similiar (principle) to combination 16, but call it by a different name, will we have a different system then SKK (by name) It is the person with the brass and the fortitude to stick themselves out there and claim somthing new, but beware, the people who do this had better have the right intentions. They must do it for the love of the art and their students. If it is done just to be different or to stroke thier ego the system will fail. Catch me in the morning and i am sure i will have a different conclusion for all this. Great write up Matt.
Jesse
When does it become something else? Well if the system still has the numbered techniques it is SKK, right? How many times have we worked out with someone from a different teacher than ourselves and found a dozen differences in the techniques and forms? Doesn’t this change the system? If no and we say that the roots are still the same then shouldn’t we drop all the offshoots and just call it Kempo? When we study other systems of Kempo/Kenpo and look with eyes wide open we see the similarities as well as the differences, but when the differences can vary so far between two schools just down the street then whats in the name. As Jesse stated it’s no longer SKK if you have the brass to change it and (hopefully) the principles to go along with it. But then again it’s just a name. Does my school of SKK have all the same techniques as yours? Probably not, through seminars and “inivation” we make subtle changes, add, subtract. Even through different understandings of form application we make changes. Some would say this changes the art, personally its a name we hang over the door that people might recognize if they have studied. New people walking through the door have no idea that Kempo may or may not be different then Kenpo. As for the less is more, I’m in the more is better stage. Not to say who is right or who is wrong, this is just my preference at the moment. I may come to some realization someday in my training that I can cut the “fat”, who knows. I suppose as long as we are comfortable with the name on our logo, the belt around our waiste, and the knowledge in our head then we are on the right path.
I still belive the combo’s and forms are training tools,what is fat and what is meat depends on what I am trying to develop at the time.I don’t believe that 27 or 12 or any other technique are perfect ,however I find movements in all of them that are usefull tools.now here is the catch. I have to work them,experiment with them,revisit them.I work them right and left handed,I work them off kicks,off grabs,and try to apply them in realistic sparring.I used to box some, and in boxing there are a limited amount of techniques,but there are also rules.the goal of boxing is to win the bout,the goal of kempo for me is to survive.maybe master a taught master b a certain set of techniques,and master b felt he could alter them to be more effective,and they were for HIM.Well along comes master c and he changes a few things,maybe adds a few things .my point is , all these guys learned the basics,then made it work for them.so what is fat?anything that hampers my personal growth in the art
I’d like to thank all three of you for your well thought out comments. I sure don’t have the answers for this, and I’m just happy that this discussion is even happening.
Jason,
You are hoping that all these guys learned the basics as stated in your second to last statement. Learning the basics is just the beginning (and we can only hope that the black belt actually learned the basics-nuff said) Being able to understand what is truly taught is a totally different conversation. Instructor B, and C, may of never learned the reasoning behind the movements from instructor A, because either they quit to soon and did their own thing to early, or instructor A, never new the material thorough enough to teach it in the first place. I am not calling you out personally Jason, it is just an on-going theme that Matt and I have talked about many times and you have touch on personal themes that get me going. It is great conversation and the beginning of the quest for many SKK practitioners of the 2000’s to find out what their teachers – teachers discarded as irrelevant because they themselves did not understand at the time. The Internet is our greatest adversary if your willing to except the truth and also our greatest adversary if we are not willing to except our faults.
In Peace,
Jesse
Jesse,
Your last post brings up an interesting point about what our teachers knew or did not know. I hope that this is getting bettter but I know when I was coming up through the ranks a lot of questions were answered with “thats just the way we do it”. I thought when I became a black belt I would be let into the “secrets club” only to realize that the secrets left with an instructor before mine. This realization opened my eyes and allowed me to broaden my horizons. What I learned about the material after that came from all different sources including other arts. I think the archives are a great tool to have this material mapped out. I also think the next step is to get the applications of the forms, or atleast our understanding of the applications out there as well. Hopefully we will all gain a little more understanding then “oh thats just a guard”. I know personally it always puts a smile on my face when someone shows me something about a form I never thought of before.
Jesse-You have a very valid point.Let me clarify something.When I speak of some one learning the basics,I don’t mean a three year black belt who has only memorised some movement.I do however belive that after a period of years of serious training most of us will alter our technique to work for us.I certainly don’t see any thing wrong with taking an honest look at our instructer,or their instructer.I personaly enjoy watching my teachers teacher.the way he approaches technique,and application is very different.this doesn’t mean better,just different.You are very correct,we have to be open to our own faults,that is why I am always looking for new and more efficient ways to apply my material.If I see some one doing something better than me I will ask to pick their brain.one of the reasons I love this sight,is because many of the combo’s are slightly differnt than mine.I practice the different versions to learn a different approach.I will never be able to practice with Nick cerio,or Fred villarie,or Prof. Emparado.I can only hope that dedication and honesty in my training will give me what I need.One other minor note if I seem to digress,or don’t come across clear at times,I have dyslexia.Sometimes my thoughts get lost in translation.THANK YOU for the insight jesse
I believe if you train for long enough you will eventually alter certain techniques to suit yourself. I do Kempo Ju Jitsu and it’s a style that contains an awful lot of techniques; you couldn’t hope to master them all in one lifetime. However, over the years I have found myself gravitating towards certain techniques, ones that suit me better to perform than others. Although I practice other techniques, and indeed add to the curriculum other techniques that I pick up elsewhere, I have found I have built up a core set of techniques that I will always react with first. In a sense I have formed by own curriculum. So I believe that because each individual is different, each individual should therefore have their own personalized curriculum. This is not to say you shouldn’t learn new ones. You should. But embrace the techniques that feel most natural to you and give more time over to perfecting those ones.
The fighting systems years ago were not so stuffed with techniques and I think there is some merit to this. There are so many techniques around now, and so many systems that pick and choose freely from them, building up large stores of techniques, that it can all be quite overwhelming at times trying to learn them all. In a way this can have a detrimental effect on ones training. You run the risk of becoming a jack of all trades and a master of none.
I think you should personalize your training to suit you, but do so within the confines of the existing system in which you train. Boundaries are still needed to prevent things getting too convoluted and out of control. There has to be a limit to such personalization otherwise you just end up damaging the integrity of the original system.
What you said about mastering the principles of a system and learning how to apply those principles is good advice. That way you keep the integrity of the original system.
Good article. Good blog. I’ll be coming back for more!