The breaching of personal boundaries has to be addressed individually. Some people like yourself have long range weapons. Someone like me has short range weapons. Do you carry pepper sprays? Should you? Once a personal boundary has been established, then a teacher must place some kind of external pressure, like a simulated attack. Having taught this, I’d have several different types of attacks that the student must react to. And much like playing an RPG on Playstation or an XBox 360, it can raise the student’s heart rate and anxiety level. I’ll even have non-threatening stimuluses so the student must choose whether I’m a real threat or not. I’ll internalize an emotion to attack to help the student’s awareness to it.

Can this truly substitute for the real thing? No. But it’ll come close. This with medium to heavy contact sparring is close.

If someone comes in the inside, where it seems to severely limit your options, then a student must train that. As you know, no matter how good yur defence is, once a person attacks, an opening is created. That is true in close quarters.

Something I’ve been pondering lately is the fact that a real street attack is likely to happen with very little warning, certainly before you get a chance to hit your Fighting Stance ™. So in addition to practicing with a minimum of preset patterns (a whole other subject), it would be sensible to practice from various positions of “readiness”, or lack thereof.

For example, if you feel threatened, at what point to you put up your “guards”? Is that an invitation to attack? Or just prudent? And at what point has the potential assailant breached the Go Zone ™, inside of which you severely limit your ability to adequately react to an attack, and at which point the only sensible reaction is to act, that is, preemptively attack?

These, to me, are the crucial questions, and they’re virtually never addressed at a Traditional Martial Arts School (pat pend).

What thinkest thou?

But to practice it in never-ending patterns, and you know what I mean when I say this, is meaningless. It’s meaningless because the patterns itself don’t teach you what’s really missing from kenpo. Reactionary exercises are missing. The patterns don’t teach people how to react to a punch.

Worse. It doesn’t teach you how to react to the intense stress environment of an attack.

Yes, Kenpo does have full contact sparring. But in our school it’s severely limited to the instructors. And it’s the general population who needs it as well.

Sports fighting is the closest thing to a real life situation because of the stress factor. Not only do you have to be ready to react, but to do so effectively you must be cool.

Yes, I agree, that if we were to train at a truly real level, the number of students would die down pretty quick. But not many schools train anywhere near this level. The school where I came from definitely did not.