When it comes to Martial Arts Fighting, the times have changed, and changed again.

Training for a martial arts tournament in 1974

When I first began Chinese Kenpo, back in 1967, you were expected to have control. Develop your power, but have respect for your karate opponent. We were all very careful, and we learned what hurt and what didn’t.

I remember whent he first full contact matches came about. People started wearing protective gear, started neglecting control (hey! They were protected…what did they care?), and the first full contact tournaments appeared.

Full contact didn’t work very well. A good boxer would go in and clean up. He had superior training methods for that specific form of fighting, and he had better conditioning. The karate tournament fighters didn’t really understand about this type of impact.

I remember watching some of the early fighters, and to hurt their opponent they would hit with ridge hands…on the wrist above the glove. No padding, and it worked better. Nobody figured out elbows.

To be honest, the change from no contact to full contact was not good. Pads and gloves changed focus points, and people with years in no contact were usually better than fellows trying to make the change to full contact. Think about it, people studying no contact could do more damage than people who were studying full contact.

But such factors didn’t matter. People want instant gratification, and full contact answered the call. A knock out, you see, is like a home run; people want to come to see the knock out.

So full contact had arrived, but its progress was slow and spotty. There were fights over rules, fighters tried to skew the rules so they would have an an advantage, and nobody really knew what was happening.

Then MMA arrived. Mixed Martial Arts. And the world changed. Training methods sharpened up, rules became more set in stone, and the real art was re-introduced. The thing became not a downgrade of bad karate, but a side step from good jujitsu.

The odd thing is that, for all the blood and teeth spilled in the ring, people much prefer no contact training methods, or at least very limited contact.

Yes, they want reality, but they don’t want to get mugged on the way to it.

And, one very interesting fact: people are finding out that there is more to learn when doing the older less contact artforms.

When you get into it with an opponent in many mixed martial arts schools, the contest tends to degrade, turn into a fight, a controlled fight, but still a matter of who is better.

This is in opposition to one perfecting one’s technique, which is what the true martial art is really all about.

Still, this last manifestation of lessened martial art is but one more signpost on a constantly evolving facet of martial arts training. From Martial Arts Tournament to Full Contact Fighting to MMA to…beyond, this is a sport that is evolving, growing, adapting…and getting better.

I hear people, every once in a while, speak derogatorily of ‘slow martial arts’ like Tai Chi Chuan, Pa Kua, and that type of art. It’s not often, mostly just Beavis and Butthead types on youtube or etc.

The fact of the matter is that it takes a lot of muscle to hold the limb up, or the body in a tai chi pose. This creates a unique type of strength I call ‘suspended strength,’ or ‘suspended energy.’

Of course, the Chinese masters of Tai Chi tend to call it all Chi, and they wouldn’t be wrong, but Chi tends to be a catchbasket phrase that describes too much stuff.

Even if I am slightly off in my definition, at least it separates the data into recognizable pieces.

The real kick on this slow martial arts thing is that after you have practiced long enough, you turn into a real fast martial arts practitioner. All that suspended energy becomes real usable.

It’s interesting, the explosive energy, the fahjing stuff, is incredibly fast and efficient. I think Karate has more fast, but the Chinese are more efficient, and the training methods are more body friendly.

Two peoples, two different methods, how fun.

And, not to change subject, just to slide off a bit, the Tai Chi Chuan does seem to elongate life span, make for better health. I think the Okinawans have a longer life span, but they likely have a better diet than the Chinese. It’s an interesting thing comparing and contrasting the various martial arts and martial artists and styles.

If you really want to compare and contrast, however, you need to matrix things. It’s the only martial science in the world that teaches you how to combine martial arts.

Karate and Tai Chi are basically the same, but the confusion over terms, jealous instructors, small minded students, they make it difficult.

Look, algebra is mathematics, and there are ways to combine them. The same holds true for the various martial arts. Unless you have opposing concepts, like the linear stances of shotokan karate and the circular hands of Chinese kenpo, almost everything can be made to fit together. It’s just a matter of knowing how, of knowing the devious little, hard to figure out tricks. But those are all in the first matrixing course, Matrix Karate.

Anyway, I have gone too far afield, this has been a page about about slow martial arts and fast martial arts students, and you have a great day.

I love the idea of getting caught in a flash mob and having to use Karate.
A flash mob is basically a bunch of people who decide, apparently spur of the moment, that everything in the store is free. So fifty kids all start grabbing stuff and run out the door.

Do you think Bruce Lee would have stood for Flash Mobs?

Well, when the kid runs by, holding a bunch of candy in his gluttonous arms, you stick out a foot and trip him. With all the commotion, and the cameras generally being up high, there is little chance that your foot will be seen.

Then, you act like somebody tripped you, and you fall on him. And make sure you do a breakfall, with your elbow point. Okay, maybe that is a little vicious. But you could breakfall with the forearm and give him an extra strength headache.

Mind you, I am not talking permanent damage.

THere is something I want you to think about, however. These kids are breaking the law, and if a few of them show up at school with their nose all bent, or two puffed and shut eyeballs, they are going to think twice.

What, we’re supposed to wait for the police?

Look, at the first sign of cops the kids all drop everything and say they didn’t do anything. The cops don’t want to bother with the arrest, the parents are at the station house screaming, and the merchant ends up going out of business.

So don’t beat somebody up, don’t commit a crime, just let your feet get accidentally tangled, and then make sure you breakfall when you hit the ground. Oops. Sorry, sonny. I’ll watch out better next time I fall down on a thief.

Remember, don’t deliberately hurt anybody, you don’t want to become the criminal. But, a little flash mob karate at the right time and place and you’ll be doing the world a favor.

Interesting question, eh? But I often wonder if learning the martial arts would make a difference in people’s lives. Tayvon, of course, is supposed to have punched George Zimmerman in the face, jumped on him when he was down, and bashed his skull against the concrete.

Martial Arts Knowledge is the Key!

Did he? I don’t know, but the pics I have seen of Zimmerman’s head seems to indicate yes.

So, would Tayvon Martin have jumped George if he knew Karate, or Kung Fu? Probably not. Kids get their anxieties taken care of on the mat, they don’t take them to the street. This is not a guarantee, of course, merely an opinion.

The other side of this question is whether George Zimmerman would have shot Tayvon Martin dead if he knew Kenpo or Taekwondo, or something like that?

Again, opinion, but probably not. He would have been more alert, would have kept more distance. Heck, if Tayvon did do the jumping, he would have seent he look in George’s eyes that he was ready.

There is one thing that happens in the martial arts, in a Karate dojo or a kung fu kwoon, and that is a look that comes into the eyes. ‘I know about fighting, so I don’t want to fight.’

Bad guys see this. And if Tayvon was the bad guy, then he would have passed on george and moved on to other prey.

Well, it is all conjecture at this point, except for one thing. The practice and discipline, the respect and mental health that come from a study of the martial arts is real, and kids everywhere learn lessons that George Zimmerman and Tayvon Martin never learned.

This has been a page about learned martial arts.

I bet that if I started a zombie kung fu school I would get fabulously wealthy. I could teach all the secret martial arts techniques that the undead use to rip the living heart out of some fool who can’t run very fast. I could teach people the secret monster karate techniques that…maybe I better get to the point?

You Think You Know Crazy?

My wife was sure that I was destroying my sons’ fragile, eggshell minds. We would sit for hours and watch monster movies. And then I would teach them martial arts.

What she didn’t know was that we were studying several key points which were crucial to understanding the martial arts. The main point was the use of wires and make up. Understand these two things and it will change the way you think about the martial arts, and it will even undo the harmful effects of Hollywood scripting.

First, we would spend hours analyzing how Hollywood did its effects. How did that zombie jump from one roof to the next? The answer, we would find, would be a crane with a wire, or a blue screen and a ramp pasted onto the background.

This led to attempts to duplicate certain feats, with me holding onto the belt, placing a hand under the back, or otherwise seeing if something could be done. Interestingly, this led to the boys appreciating the need for spotters and proper instruction before attempting those things they do on TV and warn you not to do.

The second thing was makeup, and while we didn’t start roaming the neighborhood in monster drag, we did get in severe analysis of how make up could be used to enhance slaughter. If you bent the head a certain way, put a metal plate against the throat, you could explode a small charge and make it look like a throat was blowing out. Wild.

And, the method for inserting arrows, knives, bullets, or whatever the projectile of your choice into the body part of your choice was interesting. This led to analysis of whether the body would react the way it did under impact. Interesting, to say the least.

I know this is an odd article, and I know that people will not like me for the way I raised my kids. But my kids are not fooled by Hollywood, don’t get upset by fake blood, appreciate good film making, know that no actors were harmed in the filming of this movie, and understand better how reality works. So I think you better learn a little Zombie Kung Fu, that way maybe you’ll survive when the zombies come for you.

Can you Use Light Kung Fu to Float?

Basic directions for learning light kung fu, and being able to do martial arts techniques like leaping six feet straight up, are usually childish, or esoteric. The childish instructions are things like, ‘dig a hole and leap out of it one thousand times. Take one cup of dirt out of the earth every evening, and in ten years you will be able to jump out of a twelve foot pit.

Let’s look at this: one inch a day, 365 days times ten years, 3650 inches divided by twelve…guy should be able to  leap over 300 feet. Maybe he was supposed to take out a cup of dirt every week? But he would still be able to jump near 30 feet vertical.

The more esoteric directions said things like one must breath to the tan tien while you do the Leopard gives birth move. The third chakra must be engaged on year two, and the seventh chakra will ignite on year six. Burn incense to Jesus constantly while you do this.

Leaving the childish and the esoteric aside, more confusion is often injected by scientists. I happened across the following directions for light kung fu on a martial arts forum. Gigong is just the ability of transition of body weight between the two feet in such a manner that the body weight never fully rests on any of the legs in any period of time…and the paragraph goes on to describe how to shorten the cycle of stepping.

This last description is most fascinating, but there is always a problem when somebody tries to describe something that is beyond science with…science. What I mean by this is that science describes how the universe works, but it doesn’t really tell you how to use your mind to move it around. I know people trained in science will argue with what I have just said, and try to inflict their reasoning on the phenomena, but science can’t account for supernatural phenomena such as light kung fu, raising the dead, or, say, walking on water.

One of my students could walk on water. His particular trick was to run across the corner of a swimming pool. He would get a running start, do something interesting with his mind, and run over the surface of the water without sinking under the waves.

The key here is what he was doing with his mind. Gravity can be measured; it can be described by science, but it is still an idea that must be believed in. We are raised up to make physics work (trained by schools geared towards scientific reasoning), but the secret of light kung fu is to untrain your mind, to get over the idea of gravity, and that is something that takes a lot of kung fu discipline.

A Kung Fu punch can be a poweerful thing. Proper Kung Fu training and you can shatter slabs of ice, stacks of boards and bricks, and even mutilate half ton bulls. You can also make bad errors, such as I will illustrate in this martial arts article.

I had been training for over two decades, pounding on the makiwara (punching board), practicingfreestyle with friends, and even writing martial arts books on what I had discovered in the martial arts. Interestingly, I had never actually used my martial arts on another human being. I knew I had a powerful punch, I had just never put it to the test.

I was in charge of a hotel in Los Angeles in one of the shabbier parts of town. One day I leased a room to a pleasant appearing fellow, and quickly learned that I had made a deal with the devil. This guy had a second business of selling illegal drugs. Now, aside from actual medical marijuana instances, because of my martial arts training I won’t put up with for drugs.

One sunny day I climbed the stairs and confronted the guy, and told him that he had to stop selling drugs. At first he wiggled around a it, tried to change the subject, but I kept after him. Finally, he just laughed at me, “The police don’t care what I do, there’s nothing you can do about it, so mind your own business.”

Shocked, I blurted, “I want you gone…now!” He just kept laughing at me. “It’ll take you a half a year to get me out of this apartment.”

The world suddenly went calm, and that is not a good thing, for it meant that I had been pushed too far. I dropped my body into an hourglass stance, power surged up my body and pulsed out my arms, and I hit him in the chest with two Kung Fu trained fists. What happened then blew me away.

Having never struck another person I had no clue what it would feel like, or about the back effects. First, I felt this enormous weight traveling back along my arms and through my body and down to the ground…it was much more mass and resistance than I had considered. Second, a long second later–that’s right, there was actually a delay before the effects of my Kung Fu strike were realized–he began to lift up and sail through the air.

He flew up and over the bed and smacked against the wall, and he slowly rose to a standing position, rubbing his chest his hands, his eyes wide open, “You can’t do that!” That just made me even more angry, and I started to cross the room towards him, then realized that he had told me something that I should be listening to, “Why not?” “Because I’ve got a friend in the closet!

I went to the closet door, opened it, and a nude man stood there shivering in terror. That’s right, the drug dealer was a homosexual, and his boyfriend had come to see him, and…what the heck had I just done? In using my Kung Fu punch I had abused my martial arts training, I had struck another human being, and was left with a very sick feeling in the pit of my stomache.

I began to understand that having gone to a Kung Fu School, I was not the same as other people. I don’t think I realized how much martial arts had made me unique until the day I ran a social experiment where I had a Kung Fu student deliberately fart on people’s food. Just so you know, no food was actually harmed in the conducting of this social experiment…grin.

Learn Kung Fu...or Be a Politically Correct Idiot!

I knew I wasn’t the same as other people because I don’t follow the rules of society. I was always being in trouble, always said the wrong thing, and always being the only person having a good time. The truth is that breaking the rules and having a good time are two sides of the same coin.

And, I noticed that people around me were getting older, especially in the way they behaved. They started thinking that politicians and other fools and liars were important, and they grew frown lines on their faces. Me, I just kept studying and training and having a good time in Kung Fu and other martial arts.

One day I bought this fart machine on the internet. You click a button and it makes the wonderful sound of a ‘spider barking,’ or whatever you want to call the nether sound,  and most people are easily fooled. Then I had one of my Kung Fu students slide it in his rear pocket, and had him back up to a table at a nearby cafe.

I expected to have to save him when somebody got enraged over his behavior, but I was wrong. It was a sidewalk cafe, people eating along the walk, and he would back his fanny right over the table, and click the button. People stopped conversing, looked down at their tea and toast, and kept right on munching.

I was in shock, farts are actually airborne fecal matter, and every person we did this to just looked down and kept eating. I would have gotten loud and violent if anybody ever tried that on me. So why wasn’t anybody getting outraged?

I would have gotten angry because I learned Kung Fu, and I am trained to stand up to fools who act like that. Simply, I am not afraid of some durned idiot who lets out a puffer. And all those people whose ham and taters we were farting over had not learned martial arts.

The people of this great nation, you see, have gone to school, watched too many soap operas and sitcoms, and had the gumption socially acclimated right out of them. Political correctness has now taken the place of the desire to survive, and people just sit around and be victims…they are afraid to stand up and say: get out of here and don’t you ever pull that stuff again! So go ahead and continue the way you are going, encourage your kids to go to school and learn how to be good repubs or demos, don’t go to a Kung Fu school or take a martial art like Kenpo or Taekwondo or something, and the next time you sit down and hear a strange sound blowing out the back of somebodys shorts…just look down and keep eating.

Toss out political correctness, click to Monster Martial Arts, learn real Kung Fu from a real kung fu school…right off the net…and start undoing what has been done to you.

Karate Kiai is a Japanese idea meaning ‘spirit shout,’ and it is the deadly yell that karate practitioners scream when chopping an opponent’s head off. Well, maybe I went overboard with that description a bit, grin, but there is a truth to the karate yell that is unarguable and leads to some rather mysterious knowledge. I am referring to subject of Kotodama, or ‘Word spirit.’

The notion behind a Karate kiai is to commit all  of ones energies into one moment, one karate technique, and thus to enhance the power of the strike. The idea of scaring a somebody is somewhat secondary, but not to be discounted. Both of these concepts lead to rather interesting belief systems and mysterious realities.

Kotodama is the practice of creating soothing sounds, which sounds can engender a more spiritual feeling in a person. There is, of course, the flip side, the bad word phenomena, in which a sound is used to hurt another person. Either way, kotodama results in the practice of kotomuke (soothing speech to bring peace), and kotoage, which is producing magic.

My first experience with kotodama came from a decades long study of karate, kung fu, and various internal martial arts. This gave direct experience with the power of screaming at an attacker and rendering him impotent. In one case I drew upon the karate kiai to vanguish a would be mugger…he turned around shambled down the street, his body shaking and shivering.

Experiences like this, which were brought about by the faithful repetition of karate patterns with correct attention to Karate kiai, brought me to a profound appreciation of the subject. Of interest in this is the way of speaking of salesmen and mentalists, and other individuals of that type. Watching how such people conducted themselves, the tones they employed, the pitch of sound they utilized, brought me to the notion that we are talking about vibration.

Vibration is generally understood to be the source of the universe. Between the notion of an Eternal Spirit and the solid life of objects (of which the universe is made), is vibration. This concept holds true on the atomic level of protons and electrons, and on the gigantic scale of spinning galaxies and whole universes.

What we are more interested in, however, are the vibrations we can make in our day to day lives. Is it possible to cause a vibration which can move the universe? The answer to this is as simple as the phenomena of an opera singer projecting a tone that cracks a glass.

The way of achieving this ability is just as simple. First, one has to realize, through the projection of virtue into their lives, that they are spiritual in nature, and that they can create vibrations which not only break glass, but which can shiver other objects, and, more easily, cause comfort or discomfort to their fellow humans. Second, one has to discover and follow exactly the disciplines which bring one to this ability…then the result is that a simple Karate kiai can translate into Kotodama can morph into a mystical spell or chant which has the power to harm or heal as one sees fit.

The wins students get from true Shaolin Kung Fu training are absolutely unbelievable. The key to these wins is to train correctly. After all, you could have the nicest cut of ribs in the world, but cook it incorrectly and you’ll have a charcoal mess.

When one is studying Kung Fu one should always move the body as a single unit. Six Harmonies Boxing preaches that one should move the hand at the same time as the foot, the knee with the elbow, and the hips with the shoulders. This is a technical viewpoint, which tends to separate body parts even as it unifies them.

With the hands and feet, one should step or twist into a posture in unison with the starting and stopping of the hand movement. For the knees and elbows, move them in a  manner which results in proper body alignment. For the hips and shoulders, move them in unison and commit your entire body weight into whatever movement you are doing.

The second of the three secrets of Shaolin Kung Fu training is to use the waist to initiate body motion. This is something that people begin to learn naturally after coming to grips with the points about moving the body as one single unit.  Simply, one should use the waist to make the body turn, don’t turn the arms first.

If you move the arms to initiate an action the body weight is going to be trying to catch up, instead of projecting weight and energy, and this tends to take weight out of a movement. Taking weight out of motion will take real power out of a move. If one studies this principle they will end up building the true chi power inherent in Shaolin Kung Fu.

Last secret, one must focus on the right way to breath. There is a commonly held idea that one should breath inward when the body contracts, and outward when the body expands, but there is more to this idea than just that. One must use breath to guide awareness through the body.

To make this occur one should ‘swim with awareness’ when doing the motions of kung fu forms. One should push the hands through the air as if they are moving great weights, this can give one the appearance of swimming through molasses. This tends to be truer in the internal forms and styles of Shaolin Kung Fu training, but that is fine.

To finish up, what you have just read are three significant points that many people neglect, or simply just don’t fully grasp. Yet they are key to good martial arts practices. Make the body parts work as a single unit, move with the whole body, and put breath awareness into your movements, that is the easy and plain secret of true Shaolin Kung Fu Training.