Why Does Kenpo Have So Many Techniques? - Part Two

In Part One, I looked at the conventional reasons why Kenpo contains 154 named self-defence techniques. The curriculum covers a broad range of attacks, and each technique teaches lessons that go well beyond the attack it begins with.

Those explanations are true. I just do not think they are the whole story.

The problem with 154 answers

If Kenpo really expected us to memorise 154 separate responses and consciously select the correct one during an assault, it would be a deeply flawed system.

Psychologists have understood for decades that increasing the number of choices generally increases the time needed to make a decision. Hick's Law, first published in 1952, describes this relationship between the number of possible choices and reaction time.

That should immediately raise a question.

Why would Ed Parker create a system containing 154 techniques if more conscious choices make us slower?

I have never found a passage where Parker specifically discusses Hick's Law, so I would not claim he deliberately designed the curriculum around it. However, Parker was an intelligent and widely read martial artist who devoted considerable effort to understanding and explaining the principles behind Kenpo.

Whether he knew Hick's Law by name is almost beside the point. The curriculum itself suggests that students were never intended to carry 154 competing responses into an assault.

The techniques are not the destination - they are the teaching method.

The techniques are not 154 separate choices

Across the curriculum, the student repeatedly encounters related movements, positions and methods of responding. Those patterns appear against different attacks, at different ranges and from different starting points.

At first, every technique seems separate. Each has its own name, attack and sequence. As your understanding develops, however, you begin to see how often the same movements and ideas recur.

A movement used against a wrist grab may reappear against a push or punch. A particular method of controlling an arm may occur after several different attacks. Techniques that begin very differently may arrive at the same position after their first or second movements.

What initially looked like dozens of different responses begins to reduce to a much smaller number of familiar patterns.

Many attacks, common reference points

This changes the way we should think about the curriculum.

An assault can begin in hundreds of different ways. Someone may grab, push, punch, tackle or attempt to choke you. They may attack from the front, side or rear.

But once you instinctively react, those hundreds of possibilities begin to narrow.

Your first movement creates a reference point between you and the assailant. You may now be inside their arms, outside them, controlling one limb, standing shoulder-to-shoulder or recovering your balance after being pushed.

Many completely different attacks can produce very similar reference points.

Once you recognise that, you stop asking, "What attack did they start with?" and begin asking, "Where are we now?"

That question is usually much more important.

Because from those common reference points, the same recurring patterns often become available.

Why 154 techniques make sense

This is why I do not think the curriculum contradicts Hick's Law.

If Parker had genuinely expected students to consciously choose between 154 different responses during an assault, the system would almost certainly fail. The more conscious choices we have, the slower our decision-making becomes.

Instead, I think the curriculum does exactly the opposite.

It uses 154 techniques to expose students to the same underlying patterns over and over again. Different attacks, different angles and different starting positions repeatedly lead towards a relatively small number of dependable responses.

As you begin to study the curriculum more deeply, you also begin to see that there are far fewer underlying patterns than there are named techniques. Whether someone identifies twenty, two dozen or a slightly different number is less important than the principle. The apparent complexity of the curriculum gradually reduces to a much smaller number of recurring movements, positions and responses.

The goal is not to carry 154 responses into an assault.

The goal is to have trained a small number of reliable patterns so thoroughly that they emerge instinctively whenever the circumstances make them appropriate.

Parker's Family Groupings

I also think this is consistent with Parker's own writings on Family Groupings.

Parker explained that the purpose of Family Groupings was to create "spontaneous action through association and familiarity", to "help free you from a series of prearranged ideas", and to unite techniques into "one single idea with associated variations."

He also made it clear that Family Groupings were never intended to be an all-encompassing model for the system.

To me, that reinforces the point. The objective is not to memorise an ever-growing collection of isolated techniques. It is to recognise the relationships between them so that familiar responses become increasingly spontaneous.

As your understanding grows, you stop seeing isolated techniques and start recognising relationships. The named techniques become examples of a much smaller number of recurring ideas, movements and patterns.

The Equation Formula

The same applies to Parker's Equation Formula.

He described ways in which techniques could be analysed and adapted by prefixing, suffixing, inserting, rearranging, altering, adjusting, regulating and deleting movements.

That is an excellent analytical framework for studying Kenpo.

But I do not believe it was intended to become a mental checklist during an assault. You are not expected to think, "I'll delete this movement, change the target, adjust the angle and graft on the end of another technique."

That analysis takes place during training.

The purpose of studying those possibilities is not to make conscious decision-making more complicated. It is to make your eventual response more natural.

Making the complex simple

This brings us back to the technique chart on the wall.

When you first see it, Kenpo looks overwhelmingly complicated. One hundred and fifty-four techniques, extensions, forms, sets, principles, Family Groupings and the Equation Formula can seem like an impossible amount to remember.

But that complexity is the training method, not the end result.

A real assault produces stress. Your perception changes, your decision-making is affected and you fall back on what you have practised often enough to become familiar and instinctive. A response that depends on careful thought or intricate choreography is unlikely to become more reliable when the pressure increases.

The purpose of training is therefore not to remember more and more techniques.

It is to understand them well enough that they become fewer and fewer responses.

The experienced Kenpo practitioner no longer sees 154 unrelated techniques. They see recurring positions, recurring principles and a much smaller number of familiar patterns that appear again and again throughout the curriculum.

The purpose of the 154 techniques is not to leave us with 154 different answers.

It is to expose us to those recurring patterns so often, and from so many different starting points, that our responses become increasingly instinctive.

The art begins with complexity.

It should end in simplicity.