Kenpo Karate

[Christian_]

Has anyone taken/know anything/ about Kenpo/Kenpo Karate? I've been taking it for about a month now and it's great. Does anyone here take Karate, or know how Kenpo and Karate are related at all? I've read everything on wikipedia.

[Hiroyuki kun]

I do Goju Ryu karate. It's from Okinawa which is the largest of the Ryukyu islands, south of the Japanese mainland.

Goju Ryu, like Kenpo, also has Chinese routes. I can't go into a lot of detail here but the paths of Kenpo and Goju Ryu do cross somewhere in history. You can read about all this stuff from various sources on the internet. Just do some searches. You can get a lot of information but everything is not reliable so good luck.

Ganbatte!

[Christian_]

Ok thanks, its nice to know other people take martial arts. I read that Kenpo is a lot like southern shaolin kung fu, but uses karate for basics.

[Sakana]

Well, you might say that...

I took Goju for a few years awhile back. Since then, I have shifted over to the chinese martial arts, and one of those is a style of southern shaolin, Hung Gar. Comparing the two, they are slightly similar, but not much. Goju seems to use the basic punching and kicking basics of it, but not much beyond that. But, that alone is still pretty darn good. It seems like the chinese martial arts are way more confusing, if anyone here has done/does xing yi quan, baguazhang, or taijiquan, you probably know what I mean.

As far as Kempo goes, most of what i have seen of it looks like karate to me, but with sort of a different flavor.Can't say much though, I have never done kempo before.

[Christian_]

I read the reason Kenpo Karate uses Karate for basics is because you can be black belted in 3-5 years, but kung fu can take 10-20 years.