New Martial Arts Styles

Interesting. Can you tell me more about Ron Lee’s lineage? With whom did he study Kenpo, and during what time period?

I trained in the Tracy lineage of Kenpo.

Interesting what you say about altering your Kenpo techniques (self-defense combinations, I am assuming) to work with the CLF principles. I have often felt that the Kenpo I learned would be improved if I began reworking the techniques to function on a Tibetan White Crane foundation and principles. The problem with that approach however, is that I feel doing so would ultimately just clutter my White Crane with a bunch of stuff I don’t need. While I feel TWC would improve Kenpo, I also feel that the Tracy lineage holds a huge number of techniques, many of which are unworkable and not worth keeping, and makes the system as a whole very cumbersome to practice. Again, this is my opinion, I know that others will disagree. At any rate, I still toy with the idea of working a very very limited number of the Tracy techs and working them into my personal TWC practice. They could be useful as direct application and in teaching, helping a student see directly useful ways of applying the TWC principles, vs the forms where it can be a bit more abstract. Forms would still have their proper place in training. It’s just that a much smaller list of Kenpo techs could form the basis of a bridging method to better understand the forms.

Returning to what I said in my earlier post, Tracy Kenpo kept the Tiger and Crane form that was adopted from Hung Ga system. In my opinion it was poorly adopted, without training in the Hung Ga foundation that makes the form useful and functional. So it ends up just being movement, without much meaning beyond what is blatantly obvious. In my opinion, the Tracy version of Tiger/Crane is atrocious. If you compare the Tracy version with the Hung Ga version, it is just painful to watch. Tracy Kenpo was my first martial art, and even back then, before I had any other experience to cloud my views, I always felt that something was amiss with our Tiger and Crane. And I do not believe that there is solid evidence that Hung Ga was an ancestor or contributing method to what became Americanized Kenpo. So I don’t buy into that as a reason to bring in Hung Ga material as a way of reconnecting to the method’s roots.

 

Given that you are on the West Coast, it is likely your Kenpo lineage traces to Parker. East Coast Kenpo lineages i think are more likely to not trace to Parker.

My experience tells me that my TWC has a better methodology than the Kenpo I trained, for systematically training power and striking mechanics. Integrating that into the Kenpo is what I feel could be a huge benefit to Kenpo. I would expect something similar with CLF.

Adapting the TWC principles and methodology to the Kenpo becomes problematic with a lot of the self defense scenario techniques, because of how many of them are choreographed. In short, a lot of them don’t make a lot of sense. They aren’t possible to generate real power, in the sense of how we do it in TWC. So that’s what I mean by re-writing them and such, rearranging them to make them work better within the framework, and just jettisoning a whole lot of them.

Anyways, that’s my take on it and I realize I’ve taken the thread off topic.

 

Ok, I found the website for your schools, I have to assume Ron Lee is perhaps the brother of Richard Lee? They both use Bok Fu to describe their methods, both in the Bay Area.

 

Fair enough, that’s understandable.

 

Are you in Nathan fisher’s group?

 

I was a little confused but I figured it out once I found Nathan's Bio page. I appreciate the clarification though.

I lived in and near San Francisco for a long time, I used to pass by Doc Fai Wong’s school all the time on Taraval. I never studied there but I definitely knew who he is. One of his students has a school in Folsom where I live now. I stopped in to say hi, the owner wasn’t there but I met one of the instructors, nice kid.

 

Because some aren't anything new,just an individual's preferences in relation to their system.Kenpo practitioners seem to lead the way in this.(I notice at least 7 of the systems you note are Kenpo). And in claiming to be CMAs,such as Shaolin Kenpo.(Or see below).

Some are based on fraudulent claims,such as Moore's Kenpo claiming it's a secret Chinese system.So secret no Chinese folks ever heard of it. Same way no Chinese folks got the word that Do Soshin had been appointed the Grandmaster of Shaolin,thereby validating his Shorinji Kempo.

Does it matter?How many of the founders of new systems in the last 60 years have added anything of note to the body of martial knowledge? A few. Not to pick on Kenpo but as they lend themselves so readily as examples of this "founding a new system" -with all the exalted ranks and titles-how many of their systems are that different from their lineage cousins,even with addition of some other things?

It's a lot easier to found a new system,whether it really is new or not,in the US than in Okinawa,for example.Even if it's nothing new all you need is a bunch of other "masters" to "recognize" your new system.

Sad to say,the US also has a legacy of serviceman who trained for a year or so and then opened schools or new systems upon their return to the US-and this includes some well known names in the history of "traditional" Karate in the US-who didn't return to their teachers for more teachings but built big empires here.But their actual knowledge of the systems they studied was fairly sparse,even if they could beat ya up.

Not so easy to found a supposedly new system in the East-it had better not be a rehash but a true workable synthesis,such as what Feng did with his training system combining Chen T'ai Chi,Hsing I,and ch'i gungs. Peer recognition doesn't come easily in Beijing.

BTW,Tang Soo Do is old (pre WWII) Shotokan w/Korean kicking.Not exactly new,but a different flavor than it's parent.

As regards the physicality of things,isn't this what non-weapon systems are-striking and/or grappling?

What is your definition of "traditional" MAs?

 

But HOW they each did that, and WHY are vitally important questions. How evolutionary or revolutionary they were is really a case-by-case thing. I can think of a few different reasons to create a new style. I find some of those compelling and others not.

Some people create their own style simply as a way of avoiding accountability. If you created a style, you're presumably doing it properly. Because the person who defines "properly" is you. That is unless you're prepared to attach it to some impartial metric, like MMA. You get to decide all the stylistic nuances, the history, the forms, the curriculum, etc. You get to decide who's mastered what (including yourself). Etc. Now, if the metric for excellence is proficient performance of a style, and you've designed the style, then you are the measure of proficient performance.

Again, unless you apply a metric of some sort to it. Competition being the most obvious metric. And that's where you're getting the idea of MMA wrong. MMA isn't a style. It's a metric. A choy li fut practitioner COULD go into MMA with big, looping punches. Nothing in the rule set against it. No stylistic prohibition against it. A wing chun fighter could go in and his range (close) would be honoured. It's in there. But it would provide a metric for that practitioner to 1) close range on someone who didn't want to be at that range (e.g., a proficient kicker) or 2) keep someone standing if they wanted to take it to the ground (e.g., Brazilian jiujutsu).

MMA is not just jiujitsu with kickboxing attached to it. You used the word "evolutionary." MMA is truly evolutionary because it exposes things to a stressor and sees whether those things flourish or perish. Is it real life, battlefield conditions, or any of that? Of course not. But it's a fairly permissive ruleset that accounts for all ranges and a wide array of technical approaches. It would be easy to say, based on its early days, that it could be distilled down to basic boxing and groundfighting. But that didn't ultimately prove to be the case. High kicks gradually went from anathema to staples in someone's arsenal as people learned the timing, angles, and combinations required to make it work against a well-conditioned, determined opponent with different plans than theirs. And the result is that high kicks have found their place in MMA. That's evolution.

Because some are rubbish and others are not. Just because you spend your time in more than one art and decide to combine them doesn't mean you have the technical expertise to make any of them work in any objective sense, never mind synthesizing them.

I don't understand this question. There's plenty of blending and progressing of older arts. That boxing and wrestling you're quick to dismiss in MMA dates back to classical Rome and Greece. It looks different today, but that's the progression you mentioned. Brazilian jiujitsu has its roots in older grappling styles, which have theirs in still older styles, etc. It's a gradual distillation, where a lot of the things you're citing were high-profile "look at what I'm doing!" campaigns.

What is it you WANT to see? That's usually a good place to start.

Mercy does not exist in this internet post, does it? NO SENSEI!

 

Pretty much the dominant factor in mma is wrestling not kickboxing or bjj (although the meta is changing all the time). The best wrestler can generally dictate where the fight is taking place and so exploit relative stengths and weaknesses.

 

American Kenpo is not Ryuku/Shorinji Kempo

 

I've just checked this out now. I know very little about Kenpo, so I won't comment on the efficacy of the training described in the book, but some of the stories were pure wushu. Also I didn't know that Parker had a small part as the Assassin Mr Chong in the Return of the Pink Panther which I watched a couple of weeks ago, where he played the uber assassin Mr Chong:



Who nonetheless is no match for Inspector Clouseau's own idiosyncratic close quarter/kinetic domestic-ambush type of Karate training.

 

Pressure fighting is always best but bullying is not preferable. I like aggression in boxing to give hard gestures to your opponents and pressurize them.

 

No implication it is. Shorinji was mentioned as regards made up claims,that's all.

If you were simply clarifying for our readers ignore the above.Sorry.
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Parker-
Parker has many,many appearances in films & TV. He was the Karate Killer guy in an episode of the old "Untouchables"! It was always fun to spot him in things,usually as a thug of some stripe.


I bought that book in '76,have kept it for "historical" collection purposes I guess. Parker was always looking for Chinese roots to his Kenpo but whatever influence/s there may have been there's nothing identifiable.

Certainly that 3 Star Pattern in the book is way too wimpy for a Hung man.