Three Kenpo Techniques for a Street Fight

Kenpo Techniques for Survival

These three kenpo techniques-and you can develop them as taekwondo techniques, or karate techniques, or whatever–will help you survive any attempted mugging. They are quick, they are nasty, and the are built so that you can be the one that walks away. Just don’t use them unless there is a real threat to your life!

Be the winner!

How to Analyze Kenpo Techniques for Real Fighting

To be sure, I developed these self defense techniques in karate tournaments a few decades ago. They can be used in the ring, but only with proper control. Use them on the street however, and you must use them without holding back.

The first technique is to break the fingers right at the beginning of the fight. Many people will have open hands, not always, but enough to where this technique will really work. So when you close the distance, assuming you are not kicking first, you must strike down on his fingers with a good, quick fist.

If you can break his fingers he will have second thoughts about attacking you–injuries do that to a person. In his head he will be going, ‘you mean I’m going to get hurt?’ And if he does continue to fight he will have one hand that isn’t worth much.

Second thing, goes right along with breaking the other fellow’s fingers, is to push his arms down. Force them down, trap them so he can’t use them, and you are going to have a heck of an advantage. This is what Bruce Lee used to do with his ‘Straight Blast.’

Third, you want him to blink. This fits right in with the shooting motion of the hands as you move into him and break his fingers and trap his hands. If you can shoot the fingers all the way to the eyes, and actually strike the eyes, then you are going to be fighting a fellow who can’t see. That is going to be a definite advantage, eh?

But even if you don’t manage to blind the attacker, if he blinks and thinks backward in his mind, then he will already be halfway to losing the fight. He will have gone from attacking you to defending himself. A mugger going backwards is not nearly the threat as one who is aggressively moving forward.

To summarize, the points in this article are break things on the way in, push his arms down, and make him blink or blind him. These three strategies should be the start and heart of any good defense if you want to save your life. So if you practice these karate techniques and I certainly don’t mind if you call them taekwondo techniques or Kenpo Techniques-you won’t be the loser in a street fight!

Ed Parker Finally Speaks on ‘Too Many’ Kenpo Techniques

Does Kenpo Have Too Many Techniques?

This was forwarded to me  by the erudite Tom Jackson. It backs up matrixing, and really says the truth about Parker and the many techniques of Kenpo, and in PArker’s own quote!

The most thorough scientific analysis of Kenpo. Click on the cover to find out more….

You’ll have to search for The Kenpo Journal on your own, but it sounds like a good bet.

Here’s Tom’s email to me on this…

Interesting Quote I found in The Kenpo Journal:

Ed Parker on Techniques:
I teach Kenpo, not for the sake of teaching the techniques, but for the principles involved in them. And even then, these principles must be altered to fit the individual.

The reason I give my techniques names is because there are certain sequences associated with these terms. If I told a student tomorrow that I was going to teach him a counter version to a double hand grab, it’s not as meaningful as when I say I’m going to teach him ‘Parting Wings.’

You’ve got to know how to vary things. A lot of the techniques I’ve worked with, they’re ideas, they’re not rules. At any given time, any of my moves can change from defense to offense, of-fense to defense.

Martial artists, and Kenpo people especially, become so involved in doing the techniques exactly right in such and such amount of time, that they get caught in a pattern that they can’t break. That’s not what they’re for. Specific moves, specific techniques are based, like the ABC’s in the English language or standard football plays.

You have to have a point of reference and from there the combinations are endless and limited only by universal laws, laws that you can’t change.

With respect to the late Mr Parker, after watching those two videos of his “Sophisticated Basics”
his attempt at organizing his material is not easy to grasp. Your matrixing is much better!

He’s got the mandala of circles-inside-circles, which is interesting, and then he’s labels both
blocks and strikes A, B, C, D, E, etcetera, and his main point is that one of the letters can be
replaced with something else. It is kind of interesting to see how physical moves fit into that mandala.

Gotta run bye for now, hope you don’t mind me rambling on a bit.

End of email…and if this is rambling, we need more.

Thanks, Tom…

and to all,

Have you checked out the matrixing viewpoint of Kenpo? This is a complete analysis and matrixing of 150 kenpo techniques.