What is BTG Kenpo, or more precisely, what in the heck does BTG mean? Originally it didn't mean anything, it was simply an acronym for the Blackbird Training Group, a placeholder until I could come up with something cool, something like "dynamic kenpo," or "action kenpo," or "quantum kenpo," or somesuch. After much googling, I found that not only were all of those names taken, but they were getting more boring to the ear with each repetition. Then I started thinking about other acronyms, :Break, Trap, Ground," or "Blitz, Trap, Grasp," but none of those really rolled of the tongue. Somewhere along the line I came up with "Bridging the Gap," and things fell rapidly into place.
The Gap is that distance between you and your opponent(s). As an attacker, you must leave yourself open as you attack, your ability to enter into the opponent's space without that opening being exploited is the key to dictating the engagement. As a defender, your ability to recognize and then to break down an opponents attempt to close is the single most critical defensive skill to develop. So that ïs why it is in the name, I consider it fundamental to physical self-protection, but there is another side to this simple acronym.
Another gap I saw in training was a dichotomy fairly common to kenpo systems. If you watch judoka practice their art, and then spar the connection is obvious. This continues throughout the martial sports, boxing, kickboxing, wrestling, fencing, they practice what they do, and it looks like what they do. If you watch kenpoists practice, doing forms and doing self-defense techniques, it doesn't look anything like their sparring. Why is that? Some argue that due to the nature of the self-defense techniques, we can't replicate it in sparring practice, otherwise there would be eyeballs, testicles and still beating hearts littering the mat. I didn't buy it then, but it was vaguely reasonable, so I continued to be a kickboxer on Tuesday and a kenpoist every other night I was training. We were turning out good fighters and good kenpoists, so things couldn't be that bad.
My acceptance of this dichotomy in training lasted until I started studying Pekiti Tirsia Kali. Here is another art that cannot fully do what they train to do, but their sparring looks like what they practice, why was kenpo the odd man out? Fundamentally it has to do with the training methodology, kenpoists start beating up unresisting opponents from an early day, and many never get beyond it. Sport practitioners naturally want to win and train how to defeat each of the moves they learn. The PTK guys that I was seeing were doing something similar, they taught the attack and counter an early point in training, and shortly thereafter you do everything against an opponent trying to stop you from succeeding. So now for every technique that I teach, I show how and when to counter it. It is this training method that I am incorporating into the curriculum, it is still kenpo, but simply using a slightly different curriculum format than I learned it.
