During my various rants about sparring, I sometimes imagine the effects of WTF style fighting if applied in the real world. I stumbled across a posting suggested by ethesis in the comments section of 24fightingchickens.com. It was a page simply entitled, “How to spar a Tae Kwon Do Black belt.” It reminded me of a friend who spent a month at his local WTF TKD school. He had moved to a new area and was looking to continue his training. When he tried out the TKD school, he found the sparring really puzzling. They would get ready in their stance with their hands down, and he’d stroll up and punch them. He said, “I don’t mean it’s like I could walk up and punch them, I mean I literally walked up and punched them.” That aspect was so alien, the instructor (6th Dan) decided to spar my friend (Sankyu), to demonstrate how to deal with such an ‘unorthodox’ style. Apparently, once you beat the 6th dan, you don’t get to go there anymore. He’s moved on, and now he’s back at a Kenpo school and much happier. There was nothing wrong with the punches or kicks at that TKD school, they just were practicing for a different game than he was playing. He wasn’t even going outside of the rules, he was just doing things they didn’t see as valuable to address. You’ll never see my friend in the Olympic TKD finals though. He doesn’t have the kicks for it.
Name that Kempo!
Once again on Youtube, I found another demo:
It was put together by a couple of folks at The Martial Way, a kempo school in Vermont. The description was:
Two Kempo / Kenpo practitioner-instructors from the Martial Way Self Defense Center in Vermont demonstrate the crushing power and speed of Kempo Karate. Both are full-time Police Officers and instruct Kempo part-time. The Martial Way offers many different fighting disciplines in addition to a rock solid and long standing Kempo program.
What I found interesting about the demo was that I couldn’t immediately peg the style / lineage of the folks involved. It looked to me like one fellow had more of a Shaolin Kempo background, and one had more of a EPAK background. Each seemed to mostly stay within one of those genres, as opposed to an even mix. They appear to call what they do ‘Chinese Kenpo’, but that could mean a whole bunch of things. I’m going to drop them a line to find out more. What do you see in the demo?
Combination 16 off of what attack?
There’s a thread going on over at martialtalk addressing the point raised (in various places) that the combinations don’t necessarily need to be trained off of only a step through right hand front punch. Many of us already address the problem in a variety of ways, but the point was raised that perhaps there are ‘ideal’ attacks that the combinations are designed to address. In this youtube video, Joe Rebelo applies his experience and some critical thinking to combination 16:
“Kenpo Joe” Rebelo,Massachusetts Co-Vice President of the Karazenpo Goshinjutsu Black Belt Society,Demonstrates the combination/defensive Manuver #16. Karazenpo Goshinjutsu is the parent art for New England Based Kenpo/kempo styles as well as Shaolin Kempo. KGS was founded by Victor “Sonny” Gascon. For more info, go to www.karazenpogoshinjutsu.com
NOTE:I inadvertedly state that Adriano Emperado is from Karazenpo, when in fact he is one of the founders of the Kajukenbo system.Please accept my apologies for the “verbal faux pas”.
So, first, is this the correct approach, and second, did he draw the correct conclusion? There are a lot of variations on 16 out there. Does your version apply here, or do you have a different answer? I’m saving my opinion for later as not to bias any comments.
