Welcome to KenpoCoach.com
A Parker - Planas - Doyle Kenpo Karate linage website
Larry Splain’s Kenpo JuJutsu
Welcome to the KenpoCoach.com website. My website is designed to promote Ed Parker’s American Kenpo Karate, Senior Master of the Art Richard “Huk” Planas and Professor Joseph P. Doyle out of Mentor Ohio (near Cleveland), as well as the Ohio Instructors College also out of Mentor as I continually search for new students to train at my facility in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Call me at 740-390-0465 if I can be of service to you.
American Kenpo is in my opinion the deadliest most effective form of self defense training ever devised by man. It is so very easy to learn and to practice that it can be taught to a child. Any mobile person can do the martial art, young or old, male or female and you can get quite good at it in very short order. The system is designed to keep the Kenpoist upright. We do not practice rolling around on the ground. The programming includes defensive training against sticks, knives and guns as well as providing a good cardio vascular workout. Students are encouraged to add weight resistance training if possible to their own programs as we award different colored belt rankings to people who advance in the art. The final goal of the original American Kenpo system is to achieve black belt status.
The goals of American Kenpo have always been to teach the self defense aspects of empty handed fighting, provide a training program that anyone can use to teach others, and to help anyone that wants to start their own training business to do so. Along the way the student buys a uniform, maybe has some identifying patches sewn on to the uniform, and attends some workshops or seminars away from home as kind of a mini vacation with a goal of learning some additional material while your away.
I am also a supporting member of the Ohio Instructors College out of Mentor, Ohio. The OIC is set up to give continual review and quality control checks to all black belted instructors and advanced Kenpo practitioners on a monthly basis. Mr. Doyle is the head instructor eight months out of the year with Mr. Planas coming in to instruct - on the floor and in person - four times a year. Business development and operations are also discussed through the OIC location.
If after looking over my website you wish to call me I can be reached at 740-390-0465.
Email me at Coach@KenpoCoach.com
My Promise to you:
I, Larry Splain, will to the best of my ability, faithfully instructed members of KenpoCoach.com, students under my direct supervision at Larry Splain’s Kenpo JuJutsu school in Mount Vernon, Ohio and while attending American Kenpo seminars and other American Kenpo events around the world will instruct the self defense karate material of Ed Parker’s American Kenpo as I understands it to be and as it is taught to me through the continual guidance and supervision of SMA Mr. Richard Planas and Professor Joseph P. Doyle.
Why I make this promise to you:
The Senior Grand Master of the Art of American Kenpo; Edmund K. Parker passed away in December of 1990. Since that time American Kenpo has been changed or evolved in many locations to a point that if Mr. Parker could visit those schools today he would not be able to recognize the systems that they teach as being his own.
I am as sure as I can be, that many schools operating today who use the American Kenpo name in full or in part either in their business name or just as a way of identifying the type of self defense that they teach, would be prosecuted by Mr. Parker for false advertising and for misleading the public under the American Kenpo trademark. I really think Mr. Parker would sue to shut them down if he were alive to do it.
Many modern American Kenpo school owners and instructors say Mr. Parker would have wanted his art to evolve. And as I understand it, Mr. Parker did once say that the art needed to continue to evolve. But I do not believe when he said those words he ever intended for his entire body of work to be chopped up, rearranged and for the overall system to be replaced with a severely shortened curriculum. Which is what many schools are doing in the name of “evolution” these days. These schools are using the continued evolution argument or concept to shorten the full American Kenpo training system, rearrange it, while they teach it in such a disconnected way that no one can really use the information for anything more then exercises.
If the system is so good, why did they change it?
The schools are doing these changes so they can make more money training people in “American Kenpo” over a much shorter time period. To these schools the word “evolution” is a good thing. It gives them the excuse they need to alter the system to make money. They use the good name of American Kenpo to get a client in the door and then they tell them they are teaching some new or improved version of this great martial art. Then they award belt rankings fast and furious to make the client feel like they're really good and advancing much faster then anyone else ever did before…
But in truth, these so called instructors have actually made the art very difficult to learn by taking out key parts of the training system. They take the parts out so they can shorten the time on the floor with the student. In this way they can rotate the student through the system quickly and make more money per hour of instruction. Like pigs running through the slaughter house. These schools want to move more students through the system so they can make more money on a larger volume of sales. It has gotten to the point that executing the American Kenpo material in some schools is more often then not just a glorified training program on how to use martial art knowledge to get physically fit. Truthfully they cannot even get that right. Then, to make matters worse, they give out black belts to people who’s only skill is knowing how to exercise using the basic movements of American Kenpo…
Now we got black belts running around thinking they are just as good as the old timers... I tell you truthfully if these black belt holders ever do have to use their Kenpo for self defense I hope when they get out of the hospital they sue the school who did this to them. The students not at fault. He trusted the instructor con man to take care of him. If I was the con man I would start watching my back. As this economy gets worse- more and more crimes are going to be committed. I think it likely that some black belt will not take to kindly to being beaten up in some ally because his kenpo wasn't worth a damn.
Ed Parker’s American Kenpo is a great fighting system. But there is no-one around to protect the system from being usurped and corrupted by con men who present themselves to the public as authentic American Kenpo instructors. Shoot, some of these con men actually knew Mr. Parker, trained with him, received certification from him, claimed to follow him forever and now since their in their twilight years, getting ready to retire, and they know Mr. Parker is not around to stop them; they burn the American Kenpo reputation and Mr. Parker's good name to make money for themselves.
Well if there is any justice in the world; these people will meet up with Mr. Parker again one day. I personally think it very likely that they will… I wonder what they will say to him? I wonder what he will do?
So what I am promising you is this:
Because I was originally trained at the Steve Hatfield’s Panther Kenpo Karate studio in Mount Vernon, Ohio and received my black belt in 2006 through a testing with Mr. Lee Wedlake. (Who was and may still be a student of Mr. Planas.) And because I own many instructional materials which were produced by a large variety of American Kenpo instructors and as I have attended many seminars to learn information from other instructors, which may from time to time slip into my instruction. I am making a conscious decision and have as my goal to instructed new students of American Kenpo in the way SMA Planas would want the information known and I am promising to do so under the watchful eye, direct guidance and supervision of Professor Joe P. Doyle who is both my friend and my instructor who instructs me when Mr. Planas is not in town. In effect, I am using my continued interactions with both Mr. Planas and Mr. Doyle for quality control purposes with regard to my American Kenpo instruction to you
I don‘t think I can make a promise to teach you self defense and American Kenpo in particular that can be any stronger then that...
I am making you this promise in a very public way so that you may be assured that I will do whatever I can - so that you - will learn your American Kenpo self defense material as much as is possible the way SMA Richard Planas understands it and as he has tried to teach it to me. SMA Planas of course is teaching the system as he understands it from information given directly to him from the founder of American Kenpo system - Mr. Edmund K. Parker. SMA Planas, for those who do not understand, is a first generation American Kenpoist directly under Mr. Parker.
The information, products and services you may receive from me will function for you as SGMA Parker had intended. Your money will go for training that you can depend on to be as close to the original American Kenpo way as was understood by Mr. Planas from Mr. Parker and as I have come to understand from Mr. Planas.
Why train under SMA Planas:
Mr. Parker and Mr. Tom Kelly and a young Mr. Richard Planas got together and wrote out the original training manuals for American Kenpo. Mr. Planas was the one who actually wrote out the original material either in long hand or on an old manual typewriter. Later editions to the manuals were written using a word processor. A history buff can see in the earliest surviving “Big Red” training manuals where corrections or additions were simply tacked on to the original material. No attempt to clean up the manuals was done for a long, long time.
Perhaps 10 years after the original manuscripts were written and published a new edition of the manuscript was made and published. The newest edition was a complete rewrite of the American Kenpo material. Mr. Planas has said to me that; “…the original information from the original Big Red training manual was altered and rewritten by people who were not there during the original discussions with Mr. Parker and Mr. Kelly and they didn‘t know what they were doing…”. He went on to tell me that “…these people put things in the manuals that simply would not work… They made no sense…” and “…they added a lot of synonyms to the system’s vocabulary to make it more complicated then it really is…”.
As I understand it, parts of the original material of Big Red was left in the new edition and parts were taken out. The result was a manual which contained only half truths and in some cases out and out fraudulent material. Fraudulent because the new information would not work logically and certainly would not work with the original general rules of motion as had been taught up to that time.
The new material was written by well meaning people who thought they knew the system and thought they were doing good work on behalf of American Kenpo. But I believe that in Mr. Planas’s mind, the resultant manuscript work showed clearly that these people did not know or understand the system they adulterated. And the damage done to new students was and is - unacceptable to Mr. Planas even to this day.
These later editions of Big Red caused a great deal of problems back then and continue to do so. Add to this information that many schools continue to edit the original adulterated training manual with new adulterated material of their own and you get a recipe for disaster for new students coming into American Kenpo.
My Opinion of SMA Planas:
SMA Planas, in my opinion, has remained as true to the original Parker American Kenpo way as he understands it to be and as it was taught to him so many years ago. I have studied under Mr. Planas and I have seen first hand the accuracy, power, logic and completeness of his training methods. I have never met another man in American Kenpo who can beat Mr. Planas’s understanding and logic when it comes to this particular art. Many other American Kenpo instructors are perhaps close to being equal to him with regards to knowledge or skill - but none can surpass him as the top master instructor of American Kenpo. None.
By my saying this in print I am not trying to insult any other instructor who knows me and who have helped train me and who have given me direction. Every one of the people I have met have been wonderful. This includes my original instructor; Mr. Steve Hatfield and his head instructor Mr. Terry Ward and the guidance I have received from my friend Chris Morgan. But the purpose of my researching American Kenpo in the first place has always been to learn and to practice the complete American Kenpo system as close as is possible to the way Mr. Parker created it. Now Mr. Parker is dead, there is no way I can learn it from him. So I had to find someone that I could trust that would show me what I wanted to know. I just could never be satisfied with learning just part of the system - it had to be the whole system as was and is available to me. I cannot explain it any other way except to say that something deep down in side of me would not let me rest until I uncovered all I wanted to know about the system.
Now I have finished my 4+ years of research and have found my solutions and made my decisions. It is my opinion that Mr. Planas has the deepest, most complete and accurate understanding of the American Kenpo Karate system that I have come to know. Since I am in charge of my life and since I have finished my research, I am stating to you, the reader, that it is my decision to follow Mr. Planas with Professor Doyle’s help and it is with great pleasure that I bring their teachings into my website and that I am able to share a little bit of both of them with you.
Dealing with the fallout:
The new manuals were inconsistent with the original training material Mr. Parker wanted instructed. But for financial and expediency reasons the new manuals were allowed and published even though they “taught” new students information that did not make sense and was not logical using the rules of motion and the principles of the original Kenpo Karate as Mr. Planas knew them to be and as were taught to him by Mr. Parker; the founder of the system.
It is my personal belief that one of the ways used by the International Kenpo Karate Association (now defunct) to cool the arguments between the old line American Kenpoist training system students and the new American Kenpoist training manuals was by putting out the argument that Mr. Parker wanted to confuse his competition. That he did not want his competition to take his best ideas and use them for themselves. Mr. Parker himself recognized the problems the new manuals were giving him and it is reported that he actually said “…that the only way anyone would ever know the true ways of American Kenpo was if the person got on the mat with a qualified American Kenpo instructor…”.
Today, the only instructor that I personally know of who was around when Mr. Parker was creating his system and who learned his craft from Mr. Parker directly and who is still teaching American Kenpo the way he learned it from Mr. Parker is Mr. Richard “Huk” Planas.
So tell me more about the training:
American Kenpo uses the general rules of self defense and is based on several sciences. Primarily the branch of science physics is used. The American Kenpo use of the knowledge of physics has been modified to fit the constructs of the human body. American Kenpoist study how the body is put together and how it moves in general and then we study how the laws of physics can be used to enhance our own ability to move about as we learn to use these same natural laws of physics to take the untrained opponent out of the fight.
A little bit of History from my point of view:
Martial art study has been going on for many years. Over these years a lot of methods have been created for fighting another human being. Some of these methods of fighting are excellent and they now form the basis for many of the foreign fighting styles in use in the world today. But some of the methods were and are really borderline and not that good. Some methods of fighting could actually be improved when taking modern day physics into account. What the founder of our art did was take the martial art training methods he was taught and look at them against his modern understandings of physics. What he learned from this study convinced him to discard many of the established training methods of his personal trainer Professor William K.S. Chow and Mr. Chow's Kenpo Karate system. Mr. Parker then proceeded to study all the commonly used training methods of a number of outside martial art styles he came to know. He then combined, over a large number of years, the great fighting methods he had learned as he adjusted them to the same physics rules as he had used against his own primary martial art. After awhile Mr. Parker began to see patterns emerging as he assembled his qualified fighting methods. So he began to systematically group these fighting methods together so that the student could easily flow from one great idea to another. From there he added in a little bit of newly advanced physical training information as well as some newly understood psychology information and with the help of running an 8 mm camera in reverse created a whole new way of self defense thinking and training He eventually called American Kenpo.
Mr. Parker was doing nothing in the martial art field that had not done before. He was looking for a better way of fighting another human being just as had been done before him. However this time the results of his new method of fighting, using the powers of physics, physical training, psychology, and motivational seminars he and his top students shared with the world created the greatest method of fighting empty handed the world has ever seen - when executed by a well trained American Kenpoist…
Basics, Techniques and Forms training. The system begins to take shape:
What SGMA Ed Parker then did was break the fighting system down into it's smallest components which he called Basics. When he grouped 2 or more Basics together he called the material a Technique. When he grouped 9 or more basics together he called the motion a Form. By the time Mr. Parker completed his arrangement of all the fight methods he approved of and set that information up in an easily learned fashion, he found what he had actually created was a whole new self defense training system and not just a collection of random fight methods.
SGMA Ed Parker named his art American Kenpo because it was and still is the first American martial art designed in America by an American and for American's.
The next time you see a sign or tell someone to buy American… Well, now you know what to do when it comes to studying a self defense system of martial art…
The general rules of self defense is a fascinating study and one that most Kenpoist cannot seem to get enough of. SGMA Parker further qualified his material as the “General Rules of the human anatomy”, “The General Rules of Motion” and the “General Rules of American Kenpo”. For the purpose of learning, I believe the anatomy rules and the motion rules were rolled into one another and have become known as simply the “General Rules of Motion” with the “General Rules of American Kenpo becoming the sum total of what we do, why we do it and when we do it.
The “General Rules of Motion” course of American Kenpo is the study of the human anatomy. We apply the lessons of this study to both ourselves and our opponents. The study includes 1) How the human thinks and how to disrupt his thinking ability. 2) How he sees and what we can do to blind him. 3) How he keeps his balance and what we can do to take him out of balance. 4) How he reacts to loud sounds and how to use this information to distract him. 5) The bone structure and how bones can be broken. 6) The muscled structure and how to disable or destroy muscle tissue. 7) How nerves course through the body and how to use these nerves to incapacitate your opponent. 8) How to distract him using his emotions. 9) How the human body reacts to pain. Either superficial pain such as bruises, cuts and abrasions or the deep pains caused by damage being done to nerves, muscles, joints, broken bones or damage to internal organs. This includes emotional damage to the opponent as well 10) How the body moves and how we can disrupt that movement and use the energy developed in motion over time to stop (called blocking) the opponents travel, trap the opponent, slow him down, trip him, knocking him down or out, damaging him mentally and or physically and which will cause him leave us alone, to tap out, or be killed.
It is not our goal to over kill our opponent but it is our goal to learn our studies well enough that we will be able to over skill the opponent on the field of battle.
Our studies also include some legal discussions so the Kenpoist knows what he can and cannot do to defend himself according to general law principles.
Empty handed fighting, which is the fighting of another individual without the use weapons, is a very dangerous thing because humans can think and they can reason and they can change their attacks very quickly. American Kenpo teaches us how to control our opponent in such a way that the opponent has little choice but to do what the American Kenpoist forces him to do. In this way we take away from our opponent the ability to strike us and the ability to mortally wound us. It is a great feeling to be so in charge of another individual that the individual cannot harm us.
Controlling our opponent is what self defense actually means to an American Kenpoist.
In American Kenpo the rules governing how we interact with and control our opponent are called “The General Rules of American Kenpo“. We call these rules general because no one rule will work in all situations. We teach the Kenpoist how to recognize when a general rule will not work in a particular situation by running the Kenpoist through workouts with a training partner. Sometimes the workouts fail and it is through this failure that the Kenpoist learns for himself what will work and what will not work in any given situation.
Our training partner in our school settings is always to be thought of as a model. They are never to be treated as a live opponent. When we are practicing our movements, timing, and the accuracy of our strikes it is helpful to have a model standing in front of you to use as a guide in your training. We do not strike the model! It is preferred that we touch or bump the model when executing our material so that we are queuing the model as to when to move and how to move as we learn to control their movements. But we never actually strike the model.
Another aspect of American Kenpo is the pulling, pushing, whipping, twisting, throwing, locking and otherwise securing our opponent for a long enough time that the opponent cools down and gives up or we can turn the opponent over to the proper authorities. This aspect of American Kenpo is called “Contact Manipulation” and it helps to know these kinds of things because there are times when it is more appropriate to handle a human being then it is to kill him.
Through the study of motion and with instruction from our qualified instructor we learn how the body is assembled, which way the joints articulate, how the muscles are arranged and how power is developed either directly through the usage of strikes with motion or indirectly through the usage of leverage as when muscles move bones around our joints or against other types of fulcrums. Through dedicated study and practice and using the system as laid our by our founder SGMA Edmund K. Parker Sr. the American Kenpoist becomes relaxed and in complete control of himself and his surroundings.
American Kenpo instructors look at how people are physically built and then we design the Kenpo system to fit their body type. We do not teach the student how to fight one universal way. Instead we teach the student how to “see” what their opponent is planning to do to them and to think - using the lessons we teach in our Basics classes, Technique classes and Forms classes about how to interact with the opponent in a free styled way. Our goal is not to turn people into robots - all trained in exactly the same way and moving in exactly the same way. Instead we teach the student how to understand their own strengths and weaknesses and how to analyze the opponents strengths and weaknesses and to choose a course of action that is correct for the situation at hand.
More soon; 6-24-2010
740-390-0465
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