The Problem with Memorization
By Rich Hale
The problem with memorization is that, in itself, it has very little value as it relates to Kenpo. I’ve seen practitioners who have memorized our entire curriculum, but lack everything Kenpo – making them about as dangerous as a butterfly. I often ask this question when I’m teaching seminars, “What’s the least important thing about a form or a technique?” The answers form the students vary, but my answer always remains the same. “Remembering them.” I know this may sound crazy at first, but bear with me just a moment.
Let’s say I wanted to run a mountain marathon. As part of my training I’ll be training on a series of trails that my coach has laid out in a local mountain range. All the trails start from the same point, but split into a multitude of directions within the fist mile. One trail goes up a series of steep (but short) hills designed to build strength. Another trail goes out on a long easy course with long rolling hills, in order to build stamina. Yet another trail goes out slow and easy, for a couple of miles, and then goes up and down some killer hills interspaced with quarter mile flats in between. This trail will build both stamina and strength. In all, the training course has dozens of specific trail combinations that’ll provide me with all the training I need to eventually run a mountain marathon. To make the trail system a little more interesting and each trail more identifiable, my coach has given each trail a unique name. One trail is called LSD, which strands for the Long Slow Distance, then we have one called Cardiac, for obvious reasons, and another called the Warp Speed, because it’s a point to point trail and downhill all the way. All I have to do is follow the program, running each trail on the scheduled day and eventually I’ll be ready to run a mountain marathon.
Now, let’s take another look at memorization. What value is there in memorizing each of these individual trails? I can sit on the couch and memorize the trail system, but that’ll do nothing for my physical conditioning. What I need to do is memorize the trail system so that I can actually go out and run these trails – without getting lost. Eventually, long after the memorization phase is past, I’ll become comfortable enough with these trails that I may start out on one trail, but decide it’s not quite doing it for me today, so I may switch onto another trail in order to get in some extra hills or to add a few more miles. On another day I may switch trails in order to shorten the course or just to run on a different surface. Eventually, I’ll know the trail system well enough that I start my run with no predetermined course in mind at all. Instead I just start running and let my legs take me where they may, switching from one trail to another, always knowing where I am and where I’m going.
Kenpo is the same way – there’s very little value in memorization alone. The value is in practicing and studying that material that you’ve memorized. Just like running a mountain trail, your physical performance will be enhanced each time you perform the (memorized) material correctly and eventually memorization will give way to internalization. At that point you will no longer care if you can remember each and every technique, set or form, because you’ll know Kenpo.
So, where has all this emphasis on memorization come from anyway? Mostly it came from the Karate boom of the sixties and seventies. Prior to that karate was a relatively obscure in the United States. Then, in 1964, Mr. Parker held the 1st International Karate Championships in Long Beach, California – it was attended by an unprecedented crowd of 5,000 spectators. The following year, the International’s sold out for a second year in a row and by 1970 the International’s had around 2,000 competitors and 10,000 spectators. With all this attention the karate business in general, and Ed Parker’s Kenpo specifically, was booming.
With the karate boom in full progress, new schools were opening left and right but the number of truly qualified Kenpo instructors was still very limited. As a result many of the early Kenpo schools didn’t even have Kenpo instructors. What many of the schools had were black belt instructors, from other systems who were given a set of manuals to teach from. But unlike our manuals of today, Mr. Parker’s early manuals were relatively short on detail. By that I mean an early technique would outline the blocks and strikes, but didn’t include many references to the principles of Kenpo that would make the blocking and striking most effective and uniquely Kenpo. Therefore many of the newly converted instructors would simply teach the Kenpo techniques as if they were elongated versions of the more traditional one and two-step sparing techniques - placing no more emphasis on principles than they did in their original system. And how could you blame them? Like I said, many of these instructors had never studied Kenpo in their life, but Kenpo was selling and the last thing you want to do when your product is selling is to put your sales people through a five year training program before they hit the streets.
By the end of the original karate boom we had hundreds of instructors teaching Kenpo across the country, but only a fraction of these instructors actually understood that Kenpo was a unique system based on principles and not just another martial art with lots of techniques. Therefore instead of teaching their students Kenpo as a principle based system, they just kept teaching their students to memorize one technique after another until they memorized themselves all the way to black belt. They were teaching Kenpo because Kenpo was popular, but because they didn’t really know Kenpo, they couldn’t truly understand or appreciate its intricacies.
Now that we had a fairly large number of well-meaning, but uneducated, instructors teaching Kenpo, the quality of the art naturally started to decline. (This, of course, isn’t unique to Kenpo; the decline of the martial arts is epidemic in our modern society, but that depressing subject is an article, if not a book, all on its own.) What I’m really trying to clarify here is that, due to the rapid spread of Kenpo across the country and around the world, the principles of the art, in fact the very essence of the art, were becoming lost in the shuffle.
Although I hate to go down this road, let me take it a step further and say that not only did we have a fairly large number of – well meaning – but uneducated instructors teaching Kenpo, we also had an even larger number outright frauds teaching something to the public that they called Kenpo.
When I left Alaska in 1984, and moved back to California, I left my students with AC Rainey, who was actually our head instructor at the time anyway. I owned the school, but AC had shown up at my door about four years earlier and within the hour had become our head instructor, which is another story unto itself. Anyway, after I had been gone for about a year, I came back up to visit, only to discover that a yellow belt, from my own school, had decided not to go with AC, but instead went off and opened his own school – as a black belt. I just kept saying no way, no way! Finally they took me to this guys school, which was really nothing more than a room on the second floor of a small office building and there it was. Fortunately (for both of us) the school wasn’t open and I didn’t have to opportunity to personally express my . . . disappointment to this gentleman.
Anyway, so now we now have some well-meaning but uneducated instructors, along with some totally idiots, teaching “Ed Parker’s Kenpo” all over the country. It should be of no surprise that they would now start to, unwittingly, mess with the system. After all if you don’t know that a specific technique was designed to both introduce and reinforce specific principles, it’s easy to misinterpret the techniques as being ineffective.
Take the self-defense technique Thundering Hammers, for example. It defends against a right step-through punch with your first defensive maneuver being a left inward block against your opponent’s right punch followed by shuffling forward as you deliver a right inward horizontal forearm across your opponent’s stomach. But almost before the technique is committed to memory, many instructors started changing the forearm strike to a punch or a heel palm and they changed the target from the stomach to the solar plexus or groin. What they didn’t do (because they didn’t know it themselves) was explain to the students that through the tailoring principle of Kenpo you can change the weapon, the target and the timing at will, but what you shouldn’t do is overlook the power generating principles that make the technique effective in the first place. In this case it’s the forward momentum, rotational force and marriage of gravity that give power to the initial strike – be it a forearm strike, a punch or a heel palm. What’s worse is the number of instructors who not only neglected the power generating principles, but also the checks, covers and footwork. Fully half the schools I visit don’t remember buckle their opponent’s forward leg, in unison, with their first strike. On top of that many people’s Thundering Hammers don’t Thunder. Instead they use little flipping hammer-fists that look like a vain attempt to keep their offensive moves within their outer rim instead of taking advantage of their outer perimeter.
What all of this means is don’t let the memorization of Kenpo replace the understanding of Kenpo. As a student of the art you will eventually memorize a lot of material, but do so as a byproduct of your study, not as the purpose of your study. For a martial artist to simply memorize Kenpo and then perform it without the knowledge and use of its principles is like a body builder going to the gym and lifting weights, day after day, with no knowledge of body building principles or nutrition. They will progress, to some degree, but they too will never reach their full potential.
