kempoinfo.com

I rescued an article that had been lingering on my palm pilot recounting my process of exploring the bunkai of the Shaolin Kempo 1-5 kata series. It’s not really done yet, and the technical aspects have been left out for the moment, but give me your thoughts on it. Do you have parts of these forms that you have no idea about why you are doing the movement you are doing?

Over the course of sharing some techniques, the question ‘What is a Kempo’ cropped up in regards to kempo techniques. Most folks in Shaolin Kempo have combinations and ‘kempos’, along with weapons defenses, grabs, etc.

Some however aren’t as familiar with ‘kempos’ as we often term them, so I took a moment to give an explanation as to why we might have a bunch of front punch defenses called combinations, and then have another set of front punch defenses called ‘kempos’. As soon as I sent the email containing the explanation, I thought that I might need to explain this again sometime, so I figured I would post it. It is over in the articles section.

I’ve been (in the spare time between doing three websites, doing my job, teaching at CCMAA, going to graduate school and maintaining some semblance of family life) searching out my notes and finding kempos that I have accumulated. I found some that I had been sent, and they are already typed in, so I’ve pasted them into their own pages. They are going to be in groups by source, as for now, I don’t have time to analyze, compare, contrast and so on. The source for one set is Carl Heinzl, who was kind enough to send me some techniques from the (no longer in existence) New Hampshire MSDC schools ages ago, and the other came from someone in New Jersey whose name I lost ages ago. The New Jersey ones, however seem to reflect the kempos I learned at the first school I attended in Connecticut.