Block. Lead Side Counter.

I like to think of Fallen Sword as the first "real" kenpo technique you learn. Now, don't hear this as me in any way denigrating the techniques before it. Entrapping Circle, Entrapping Elbow, and Concealing Strikes are all solid, important techniques that begin your study of motion. But when I learned Fallen Sword I felt like I was really doing karate. And in part that's because Fallen Sword teaches you a fundamental series of movements that make up a huge chunk of what you will practice in kenpo.

Block. Lead Side Counter.

This basic combination of movements encompasses core principles about The Ten Considerations of Combat which are elemental to self defense. Environment. Range. Positions. Maneuvers. It's all contained within Fallen Sword, and everything you learn after this will be built on this structure. That's why it's taught so early in the system. Not because of it's simplicity, but because of it's ever deeper complexities.

Block. Lead Side Counter.

This pattern repeats itself again and again. Destructive Twins? Sword of Destruction? Snapping Elbow? Ghost of the Dragon? Again and again. Block. Lead Side Counter.

It's as fundamental as the forward and reverse arm motions taught in Entrapping Circle and Entrapping Elbow. Each technique has lessons to teach, beyond merely defending against a Right Step Thru Punch. That's the least important part of what you're learning. That's just the template for the purpose of facilitating instruction. It's the lessons you should be learning, not just the movements.

Take a basic sparring scenario. Closed faced. Student A executes a Lead Hand Jab. Student B defends with an inward block and counters with an Outward Backknuckle Strike. That's Fallen Sword.

Or a knife scenario. Attacker lunges with a Forward Thrusting Knife Strike. Defender takes a Half Step Back and Up the Circle (in reverse) with a Slapping Check to the attacker's weapon arm, and follows with a Lead Leg Side Snap Kick to the inside of the attacker's Lead Knee. That's Fallen Sword.

How about a grappling scenario? The opponent grabs you from the front with a Two Handed Lapel Grab (Pulling) and you respond by grabbing their hands and then striking the opponent with a Lead Hand Inward Downward Raking Hammerfist Strike followed by an Inward Elbow Strike. Altered Momentum? If it's a Single Lapel Grab the technique is Conquering Shield. But Conquering Shield is just Fallen Sword to the outside of the arm followed by Entrapping Elbow. It's the same pattern again and again.

Block. Lead Side Counter.

But don't mistake this repetition for busy work. There's a reason you learn Lead Side Counter against a push, a punch, a choke, a grab, weapons, throws, holds and more. There's a reason you practice this Right forward and Left forward, striking and grappling. You're learning the letters. You're learning the words. And the more fluent in kenpo you become, the more capable you are of talking the talk, and walking the walk.

Fallen Sword is a key technique. It's simple. It's basic. And you could spend a lifetime learning it's lessons. But for now, practice the Lead Side Counter. Practice Fallen Sword. And see what lessons it holds for you.

Drills -
Beginner: While practicing Fallen Sword pay special attention to body mechanics. Step back WITH the Inward Block. Land from the Front Kick WITH the Handsword. Every movement, every strike, is with the entire body.

Intermediate: While sparring use only lead hand weapons against your opponent. Use stance transitions to change your position and continue striking with the opposite side forward. Pay attention to combinations and re-orbiting strikes.

Advanced: Practice the basic pattern of Fallen Sword, but alter the weapons and targets. Instead of a Handsword, work a Jab, Backknuckle Strike, or Outward Claw or Outward Backhand Strike. Instead of a Front Snap Kick, try Side Snap Kick, Wheel Kick, or In Place Pulling Sweep. Choose targets appropriate to your weapons.

Sumimasen. Daijobu desu ka?

From Wikipedia:

"Dave Lowry is an American writer best known for his articles, manuals and novels based on Japanese martial arts.

A student of Japanese martial arts since 1968, when he began studying Yagyū Shinkage-ryū kenjutsu [the same art taught by Yagyū Munenori, see Hit, Hit, and Hit Again] under Ryokichi Kotaro of the Nara Prefecture of Japan, he has also studied Shintō Musō-ryū, as well as karate, aikido, and Kodokan judo.

He has a degree in English, and has written about a variety of topics related to budō, the Japanese concept of the "martial way." He has written training manuals on use of weapons such as the bokken and jo, a few novels centered on the lifestyle of the budōka (one who follows the martial way), and countless articles on martial practices and traditional Japanese philosophy. He has been a regular columnist for Black Belt magazine since 1986, where he writes on the traditional arts."

In his 2002 book, Traditions, Lowry tells us a story about training with a friend of his instructor and an important lesson he learned from the experience.

"...He was short and thick and powerful. At my sensei's suggestion, after dinner our visitor took me into our dojo to work with me on basics. Against my oi-zuki (stepping-in punch), he shifted like he was on ball bearings and countered with various techniques. We'd been at this for about an hour, gradually increasing our pace. I was still not posing any great threat to him, but Yanagi-san was having to move just a bit faster to avoid my attack. That is when he miscalculated, just fractionally. He pivoted and snapped out his fist as I moved in-and caught me squarely on my nose with the back of his knuckles. There was no kime, no focus, to the blow. If there had been, my head would have come off. The strike was more just a kind of slap. But Mr. Yanagi's timing was perfect, even if there was no force behind it.

Even though he barely grazed my nose, tears squirted into my eyes. My feet and legs, still driving forward, were way ahead of the rest of me. I went down like I'd been sledghammered. The back of my head smacked against the wooden floor. I laid there a second. I knew nothing was seriously hurt, and that I should be leaping back up quickly so as not to put myself at risk of a follow-up attack. But I wasn't sure where "up" was. All I could see were starbursts.

"Sumimasen," Yanagi-san said, "Daijobu desu ka?" "My fault. You okay?"

I'm not sure how I expected Mr. Yanagi to react to the accident. Over the years of my training that have followed, however, I have heard that phrase many more times. I have, due to my own clumsiness and ineptitude, had occasion to use it myself. Ask anyone has who practiced with me much at all. And I have come to realize since that afternoon in the dojo, that what Yanagi-san said to me is really all one can say in a situation like that. More importantly, it is all one should say.

It is quite an awful feeling to hurt someone under almost any circumstances, obviously. This is especially so in the dojo where one's accidental victim is likely to be a friend or a training partner and one feels towards that person almost as if they were a brother or sister. If it is a senior that you have clobbered, you feel terrible because you've repaid the kindness of his instructing you by battering him. If it is a junior, you feel worse; a junior in the dojo is dependent upon you for his progress, not for abuse. The initial response to causing such an accident in the dojo-the unconditioned response of the untrained budoka-is to abandon instantly whatever exercise it is, to rush forward, apologizing profusely and checking for damage.

The dojo, however, is not a place for unconditioned responses. The budoka who go there to practice must be willing to give a great deal of their lives over to the crafting and shaping of very highly conditioned responses. They are seeking to respond correctly to every contingency, in a wide variety of situations. Among these contingencies is the possibility of an accident. The budoka must realize there is a chance, a risk involved, every time he trains. When you allow me, for the purposes of our learning, to uncork punches at your face, or to twist your wrists to nearly the point of injury, or strike at you with a weapon, you are accepting the possibility I might miss, go a bit too far. I assume the same; that I may injure you. We have voluntarily accepted what insurance companies call "assumed risk." Like mountain climbers, big wave surfers, and ski racers, budoka would be fools if they thought the martial Ways were risk-free. That is simply not the nature of these ways.

If we have trained properly and we exercise care for our partner, we can (and absolutely must) cut the odds of an accident or injury. But we can never entirely eliminate risk. So when in the dojo an accident does happen, we should not be too surprised. We should not indulge in a lot of pointless blather then. We should admit it if it was our fault, and inquire if the injury is serious enough to warrant attention. If it is serious, we'd better be calling an ambulance or rendering first aid. These require coolness and a presence of mind. There is no time, and no reason to engage in excessive apologizing which, while it may make us feel better, won't do a lot of good for our injured friend.

This attitude may seem heartless. But remember, Yanagi-sans's first words to me were, "my fault." He accepted the blame for the accident, simply and honestly. Then he asked if I was all right, in a way that was straightforward yet not condescending, respectful of my dignity.

Simply and honestly; straightforward and respectful. This is the best way for the budoka to behave when he has been responsible for an accident in the dojo. He will also find that it is an excellent way of meeting a number of other situations as well."

Lowry's experience here is not unique. You will have an opportunity to say these words many times over the course of your journey in martial arts. And you will hear them as well. When you hit one of your friends or training partners too hard, when you make the mistakes that are an inevitable and essential part of the learning process, the only thing to say is this,

"I'm sorry. My fault. Are you okay?"

There is no shame in this. This is right and honorable conduct. Remember this when you accidentally hurt your training partners, and when you are accidentally hurt by them.

American Freestyle Karate and the Power of Confrontation

Dan Anderson is one of the most accomplished American martial artists. On the website for his school, his bio reads,

“Professor Anderson is the director and chief instructor of Dan Anderson Karate and has a 7th Degree Black Belt in Karate, a 6th Degree Black Belt (Senior Master) in Filipino Modern Arnis, and an 8th Degree Black Belt in MA-80. He is a 4 time national karate champion, having won over 70 Grand Titles! He is the founder of American Freestyle Karate, a uniquely American martial art as well as the author of the best selling book, "American Freestyle Karate: A Guide To Sparring" which has been in print for 30 years. He has been honored by inclusion into the Karate Living Legends, a lifetime achievement honor, being one of the 50 most influential martial artists in the 40 year history of tournament karate. Prof. Anderson's school has been continually teaching martial arts to the residents of East County for 25 years, making it the oldest Karate school in this area.”

The book mentioned above, American Freestyle Karate: A Guide to Sparring is widely recognized as one of the seminal and most authoritative written works on the subject of karate style point sparring. It's topics span stance and posture, body movement with and without footwork, developing power, kicking, punching, and blocking, and monitoring the opponent. It contains both technical information, including step by step breakdown of techniques and combinations, and strategic and conceptual instruction which informs the practitioner in his approach to both sports combat and self defense.

One particularly valuable section discusses the concept of confrontation, so crucial to success in freestyle sparring,

The Ability to Confront

“To confront – verb transitive – Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary 2.a. “to cause to meet: bring face to face.”

Psychologically, everything in karate boils right down to the idea of confrontation, to face up to something. Sparring, approaches, technical information, everything.

A person's ability to confront things comes with familiarization and gradient stages of the ability to confront itself.

When you have trouble with any face of karate, it comes from a failure to confront that particular area. Example: a person is a strong technician and is tough but does not think when sparring. The thing to do is to have them confront thinking during sparring in gradient stages. 1) Plan out each attack and carry out the plan; 2) spot circuits (habit patterns) in your opponent's sparring, etc. Take him through each step until he is up to sparring and thinking.

The ability to confront is such a great part of everything. Anything you can do well is because you can confront it, meet it face to face, nose to nose with a big grin. Karate has always felt easy to me, but acceptance of getting hit in the head has never been easy. My ability to confront things is up on karate and down on getting hit in the head.

Things that you cannot confront easily will have to be worked through, but if you take any one particular thing and work it out in easily handled steps, pretty soon the punch in the head (or whatever) will not seem so awful to you.

This is how I break my students into sparring. Thanks to movies and television, beginners come in with preconceived notions of karate, ranging anywhere from macho brutality to the idea that the studio is a monastic retreat for pacifistic martial monks. But, they have one thing in common; they sit back and tense up when watching somebody else spar. Here it is so close to them, violence, punching faces, kicking groins, struggling. A sparring match can be a fearsome sight to a lot of beginners. So, I start them off easy with a punch, a stance, a kick, a block, until they are comfortable with it. Then slowly, easily in a line drill, they see that attack come at them and block it. Great. That attack was handled. Then after a while, they get into slow and easy, unstructured blocks and attacks with a partner, the same thing that bugged their eyes out in the first place, sparring. The only difference is that through a series of gradient steps, they reached a point where what was once foreign to them was now recognizable and comfortable. That is what the ability to confront is about. Anything you have trouble with, work on in easy steps until it becomes comfortable.

Professor Anderson's advice transcends the art of kicking and punching. Take it with you in your training, practice your least favorite techniques. Do ten more kicks when you're already tired. But apply the lesson to the other facets of your life as well.  Confront, persevere, have indomitable spirit.

Everything in karate boils right down to the idea of confrontation. Karate no shugyo wa issho.

From the Monk to the Master

The Mysterious Record of Immovable Wisdom (不動智神妙録, fudōchishinmyōroku) was a letter written to Yagyū Munenori by the Japanese Buddhist monk Takuan Sōhō. In it, Takuan attempts to adapt Zen teachings to the art of the sword. According to the modern translator William Scott Wilson, “one could say that fudōchishinmyōroku deals not only with technique, but with how the self is related to the Self during confrontation and how an individual may become a unified whole.”

“Takuan Sōhō was a Zen monk, calligrapher, painter, poet, gardener, tea master and, perhaps, inventor of the pickle that even today retains his name. His writings were prodigious (the collected works fill six volumes), and are a source of guidance and inspiration to the Japanese people today, as they have been for three and a half centuries.”

Takuan influenced both Munenori and Musashi, and his teachings are reflected in both Book of Family Traditions and Book of Five Rings. In The Mysterious Record of Immovable Wisdom, Takuan begins by explaining the importance of No-Mind-No-Thought. Per Wilson,

“Again, we speak with reference to your own martial art. As the beginner knows nothing about either his body posture or the positioning of his sword, neither does his mind stop anywhere within him. If a man strikes at him with the sword, he simply meets the attack without anything in mind.

As he studies various things and is taught the diverse ways of how to take a stance, the manner of grasping his sword and where to put his mind, his mind stops in many places. Now if he wants to strike at an opponent, he is extraordinarily discomforted. Later, as days pass and time piles up, in accordance with his practice, neither the postures of his body, nor the ways of grasping the sword are weighed in his mind. His mind simply becomes as it was in the beginning when he knew nothing and had yet to be taught anything at all.

In this one sees the sense of the beginning being the same as the end, as when one counts from one to ten, and the first and last numbers become adjacent.

In other things – musical pitch, for example, when one moves from the beginning lowest pitch to the final highest pitch – the lowest and highest become adjacent.

We say that the highest and the lowest come to resemble each other. Buddhism, when you reach its very depths, is like the man who knows nothing of Buddha or the Buddhist law. It has neither adornment nor anything else which would draw men's attention to it.

The ignorance and afflictions of the beginning, abiding place and the immovable wisdom that comes later becomes one. The function of the intellect disappears, and one ends in a state of No-Mind-No-Thought. If one reaches the deepest point, arms, legs, and body remember what to do, but the mind does not enter into this at all.

The Buddhist priest Bukkoku wrote:

Although it does not

mindfully keep guard,

in the small mountain fields

the scarecrow

does not stand in vain.

Everything is like this.”

Takuan believed that only by keeping the mind from stopping in any one place could the swordsman act with the spontaneity and freedom of the beginner. But he also emphasized the importance of rigorous training, saying, "If you do not train in technique, but only fill your breast with principle, your body and your hands will not function."

Train the techniques. Repetition is the mother of skill. But in your training, seek what Takuan called No-Mind-No-Thought.

"If one reaches the deepest point, arms, legs, and body remember what to do, but the mind does not enter into this at all."

The Importance of Visualization

Mental focus, concentration and visualization are some of the most important parts of your training. Most people are familiar with the saying that sports is 90% mental and 10% physical. Despite that, many people fail to spend as much time practicing in their heads as they do practicing on the floor. Yet again and again, top level athletes and performers in every field credit their success to mental preparation.

Jerry West, former Guard for the Los Angeles Lakers, had such a penchant for hitting buzzer beaters he was nicknamed ‘Mr. Clutch’. In one memorable game in which his team was trailing the Knicks with a few seconds left in an NBA Finals game, West took an inbound pass and shot from 60 feet at the buzzer. Knicks guard Walt Clyde Frazier recalls thinking: “The man’s crazy. He looks determined. He thinks it’s really going in!”. Of course, it did go in, sending the crowd reeling and the game to overtime. One time, when asked about his ability to frequently hit the big shot, West revealed the root of that confidence Frazier witnessed. West explained that he had already made those shots time after time in his mind. Jerry West, like so many other legends such as Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Phil Jackson, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky and countless others, realized the power of visualization.

What is Visualization?

Visualization is a form of guided mental imagery, where the performer imagines himself succeeding at his physical tasks. A popular visualization for athletes is the mental rehearsal of sporting events while ‘intending’ a desired outcome. Amazingly, research has revealed that visualization can actually enhance performance to nearly the same extent as physical practice. A study conducted by Dr. Blaslotto at the University Of Chicago is an intriguing example.

The goal of Dr. Blaslotto‘s study was to determine the effects of visualization on sports performance. As a performance measure for this experiment, the researchers chose the free throw percentage of a group of basketball players. First, to establish a basis for the study, the current free-throw success rate of each of the subjects was tested and recorded. Three groups were then established, and the athletes were assigned to one of the groups at random. After 30 days of testing and retesting, the results were as follows:

The third group, who neither physically practiced or visualized shooting free-throws, showed no increase in percentage.

The first group which physically shot free-throws for an hour daily, collectively improved thier free-throw shooting by 24%.

The second group, which practiced daily by visualizing shooting and making free-throws, collectively improved their free-throw shooting by a shocking 23% without having physically shot a basketball!

Another similar study was done by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation exploring the effects of visualization on muscle strength. The results of that study also astonishingly revealed increases to muscle strength through visualization, further reinforcing the fact that mental training is actually as impactful a tool in performance enhancement as physical training. In one of the most well-known studies on Creative Visualization in sports, Russian scientists compared four groups of Olympic athletes in terms of their training schedules:

Group 1 - 100% physical training;
Group 2 - 75% physical training with 25% mental training;
Group 3 - 50% physical training with 50% mental training;
Group 4 - 25% physical training with 75% mental training.

Group 4, with 75% of their time devoted to mental training, performed the best. In explaining the results the Soviet scientists involved concluded that, "mental images can act as a prelude to muscular impulses."

With each imagined repetition, a neural pathway is formed. Neural pathways in short, are clusters of neurons in the brain that work together to create a memory or a learned behavior. Dr. Blaslotto explained, “As your brain conceives of an act, it generates impulses that prompt neurons to ‘perform’ the movement being imagined by transmitting those impulses from the brain to the muscles.” This in turn creates a habit, or neural pathway in the brain, programming your body’s actions as if you physically performed the activity.

Studies show that the human mind has difficulty separating reality from imagined reality. If you’ve ever had a dream that felt “so real,” you understand. This happens because much of the brain is unable to differentiate between "real" events and "imagined" ones, and so treats them both the same in terms of chemical and physiological response. That's why when a person reads a sad story they cry, even though no actual sad events have occurred, or when they watch an action movie their temperature, heart rate, and adrenaline levels will increase, even though they are sitting perfectly still in a safe, dark movie theater.

We can use this to our advantage in our training. Visualization can help us to rehearse combative, dangerous, and challenging situations in order to prepare us for a violent encounter. It can also help us to improve our technique performance. The basketball study above showed almost the same improvement in groups that imagined practicing as in groups that actually hit the floor. If we combine both aspects of our training, we can see massive advances in our skill level.

It is also important to visualize an opponent when we perform our techniques. Any time you are practicing your kenpo in the air, imagine an opponent who you are intimidated by. See yourself hitting that opponent in the face, in the body. Put the situation into a context where you might be forced to defend yourself. You are safe in the school, but imagine you are having to do your kenpo in a dark, rain slicked alley late at night in a bad part of town. You will find that your mindset and your performance will be drastically affected by this kind of visualization.

When I am focusing on learning the proper anatomy of targets and weapons, I visualize a solid blue human body form, like this,

It helps me to visualize exactly what I am hitting, what effect it will have on my opponent, and how the surrounding anatomy will be affected.

But when I am practicing my techniques for self defense performance, I visualize a big, bad, scary looking man who intends to do terrible, terrible things to us all. It helps me to use the face of actor Danny Trejo.

You can use whatever images you like. Maybe someone from your past, maybe someone you saw on television. Maybe it helps you to see the image of something you find frightening like a monster from your childhood. The key is to select images which cause a visceral reaction for you, and then to train against that imagery and within that chosen context.

Everything that you experience takes place within your mind. Everything you perceive to be real, the things you touch, taste, see, smell, and hear, is actually just a highly detailed projected environment created by the computer in your head. It receives input from all the sensory organs and then compiles that into a hologram so real you never question it. But much of what you think you see is actually just the brain filling in holes in the information its receiving from one source with information it's receiving from another.

A particular blind spot known as the punctum caecum in medical literature is the place in the visual field that corresponds to the lack of light-detecting photoreceptor cells on the optic disc of the retina where the optic nerve passes through it. Since there are no cells to detect light on the optic disc, a part of the field of vision is not perceived. The brain fills in with surrounding detail and with information from the other eye, so the blind spot is not normally perceived. Even though you know it's there, and you can “see” it, it's actually just your brain telling you what it expects to be there. We can take advantage of this. Since our reality is only happening in our minds, we can create alternate realities, practice a number of scenarios within them, and benefit from that training. The brain can't tell the difference, and neither can the body.

So train hard. And think hard. Kenpo is a mental pursuit as much as a physical one. And the student who focuses on his performance and visualizes his success will find his reality matching what his brain expects to see.

Drills -
Beginner: During every technique repetition in the air, imagine a real, aggressing opponent. See your strikes hit real, vulnerable targets.

Intermediate: Perform a technique on the body. Close your eyes, and visualize yourself performing the technique perfectly, from start to finish, ten times against a real opponent. Now open your eyes and perform the technique on the body again. Pay attention to anatomical repositioning and accurate targeting.

Advanced: Imagine an attacker at 12 o'clock. When the opponent attacks, defend the original attack and then begin a counter offensive striking combination. Continue that action to a takedown and then a finishing move. Begin again with a standing opponent.