IKKA 7th Dan 

After a long and arduous journey, I have passed the requirements for 7th Dan in EPAK Kenpo Karate.

If you’ve been wondering where the updates and additional lessons have been, it’s because I was working towards the test above. I’m going to start updating the rest of the site and continue creating the lesson materials. For those waiting for the online lesson updates, continue to reach out to me for the individual lessons, and I will continue to process your testing and rank advancement as I have been.

Good Morning Kenpoists and thank you for all your patience. Going forward I will be adding at least one new text lesson per day, and hopefully one new video lesson per week. There is a ton of content I still need to transcribe, but now that the old year is over, I hope to have a lot more time to get the rest of the materials up there.

As always, if you have questions or concerns feel free to reach out to me at any time.

With the summer behind us, and the upcoming workshop season fast approaching, I just wanted to update all the students on where the site is. Most of the resources have been diverted to in person and skype teaching over the past several months, but we look to start ramping back up our effort for the rest of the material in the coming months. We will be teaching a seminar in Detroit this coming Weekend and look forward to seeing many of you in person over the next week.

Keep up the training, and remember that daily practice is better than any short cram session.

So the video camera died and the recordings for the initial 9 Kyuu lessons were deleted. We have a new camera coming this week, so we should have some of the 9 kyuu lessons starting to be produced for next week. We hope to get the finalized text content for the white belt lessons by the end of the week. We finally got all the American Kenpo techniques uploaded (both Tracy and Ed Parker). So right not, we have all Goju Ryu forms and techniques, ITF Taekwondo Forms, and American Kenpo Karate forms and techniques listed on the website.

Everything is slowly getting there, but we are making progress with the material on the site. If you need more information about a specific lesson, or want to train before the material is up on the website, feel free to contact us directly so we can work with you wile we get the rest of the material and lessons uploaded and ready for everyone.

We’ve added the lesson upload tracker to the CMATOS Lesson main page as well as the individual rank page so you can check the status of the lessons at any time. Look at the top of the page to see which lessons are still incomplete and how much further each rank has to go.

24 of the 25 White belt video lessons are completed – just need to figure out where I am going to record the lessons as I need to include a chair in the frame, but most places don’t use chairs, or the one’s which do won’t allow me to use the chair on the dojo floor. I’ll see if I can get something done at home or at the office. I’ve also got to get the lessons’ 10-23 text material up to the website, but converting all the notes and teaching material into proper instructions that work well in the online format is proving to be pretty difficult. Each lesson article should stand on its own and cover everything in the video in more minutia and details. The curriculum is finalized, it’s just a matter of converting everything I’ve been doing as a remote lesson now into a recorded format.

I am also so looking forward to creating the 9 kyuu lesson videos – once the students have finished of the fundamentals and basics as white belt, it becomes a lot easier when we start talking about the rest of the materials. The challenge with white belt students is that everything is new and they understand relatively little. By the time the make the next rank (9 kyuu), they have enough of the basics behind them so that they can really start focusing on learning the material and getting to that theoretical level of proficiency.

Although there are a lot of kenpoists out there who would love to see a Long Form 8 Instructional video, I haven’t gotten much feedback from the students. Since we are getting a lot of new students into the mix, I think it’s best to focus the efforts on getting the material for the under belts up and away before circling back for the black belt material. I’ve got a lot more under belts than black belts currently in the system. I’m also looking to get a better camera with a wider lens so I can get more movable area into the shot, right now I’m pretty constrained to what I can and can not do in the videos, and it’s going to become pretty limiting here very shortly. Once I get to Short 3 I need a lot bigger area for the form than the small space currently used in the current video framing.