Background Of Kempo Karate

Series Summary

American Kempo Karate is a martial art that involves striking the opponent with a swift combination of numerous punches, kicks, and knife hand blows to completely incapacitate an opponent. It was developed by Ed Parker over the years between 1950 and 1990. Parker first learned Kenpo in Hawaii and over the years included many aspects of Chinese martial arts and jiu jitsu, exchanged Asian terminologies for American. Today karate is one of the most popular forms of martial arts because of how easily adaptable the moves are to each individual student.

In this great video clip series our second degree black belt expert, William Joseph Hill, will show you all the basics of Kempo style karate as well as several advanced moves and kicks. Each move is broken into it's most simple components and studied. He even ventures into weapons training with sais, nunchucks, tumfas and kamas. All of which have their strengths and weaknesses that he clearly points out in his instruction. Whether you are an experienced martial artist or just thinking about beginning this video series is perfect to keep you practicing!

Video Transcript

"Hi, I am William Joseph Hill with Expert Village .com. I am here to talk about Okinawan Kenpo Karate, I am a second degree black belt from Honolulu, HI, that is where I got all my training. I am going to go over the history of karate which applies to not just Okinawan Kenpo but all Okinawan styles and even Japanese styles. I'll some demonstrations of some basic techniques and an overview of katas, sparring all the different facets of the martial art and I will also so a bit of weapons or "kobudo". So now I want to talk about the history of karate, now there are alot of different theories as to where to martial arts came from. All of them are probably equally valid but the one theory is that martial arts actually originated in ancient Greece. There is this form if greek wrestling called, pankration, and it included, punching, kicking, grappling, it looked like today's UFC fights or ultimate fighting. From there the ancient greek sailors traveled around the world, they became in contact with the Asians, Chinese, and the Indonesians and the Thai's and that's where the Chinese picked it up. From there the Chinese really evolved marital arts into this advanced system that people called, Kung Fu. But there is actually literally hundreds maybe even thousands of different variations of Kung Fu or Wu Shu, as they call it in China martial arts. The Chinese sailors they started to do trade with the Okinawa, the small island that is south of Japan, and that is where they came in contact with the Okinawans. Now there was one chinese sailor, he was a military leader that actually traveled to Okinawa, his name was Ko soku, and he came and did alot of trade with the Okinawans, and showed them alot of techinques or what they called, tru anfa,or long fist boxing, or as like Kenpo, law of the fist was the literal translation for that. The Okinawans saw these real advanced Chinese techniques, and the thing is with Chinese techniques, if you have ever seen Kung fu its very long stances, very extended flowery circular motions, and stuff like that. The Okinawans they are kind of like very simple minded, they lived in kind of beach terrain they didn't want to try that kind of stuff because it's dangerous for your footwork you might slip. So they adapted it to their own localized fighting style, which was just wrestling and throwing eachother around and stuff. "