Ken Gullette's Internal Fighting Arts

Nancy and I were invited to our friend John Morrow's house last night to have dinner with Bill "Superfoot" Wallace -- undefeated world full contact karate champion and trainer of both Elvis and John Belushi. I didn't realize until last night that Wallace is the person who found John Belushi dead, when he showed up at Belushi's room at an L.A. hotel for a morning workout.

Today, John hosted Wallace for a workshop at his Moline kung-fu school. It was a great workout -- stretching, kicking, punching, and combinations. I've gone over all this material with Wallace before, but refreshers are always a good idea.

Almost two months ago, I attended a Bill Wallace workshop in Las Vegas. It was the third or fourth time I've trained with him (if you Google Bill Superfoot Wallace, and click on the link that shows photos, the photo above of me and him in 2001 is among the photos that are shown). After discussing his stretching exercises on the online school, I was looking forward to asking him a q...

There is a letter to the editor in the most recent T'ai Chi magazine that points out one reason there is so much bad and weak Tai Chi in America.

A guy wrote a letter in response to an earlier article that talked about how Tai Chi has been "dumbed down" for a lot of people.

It's true. It has been dumbed down. The article was correct.

So this fellow writes a letter in response to the article saying that if you truly lead "a Tai Chi life," you don't judge people or put them down in any way. If someone is doing bad Tai Chi that's okay because it is "his" Tai Chi. There is no right. There is no wrong.

The letter states that even if someone is doing bad Tai Chi, "In their eye, it is Tai Chi, so it is."

Let's apply this logic to other human endeavors:

** You should never criticize a play or piece, a work of art or a piece of music. Whoever created it thinks it is art, and so it is. All works of art should be treated the same. My granddaughter's drawings are the same as Picasso. The mus...

You can practice techniques and forms for decades, but that doesn't mean you're ready to defend yourself if suddenly attacked.

I love to learn fighting applications. I love to look deep into a movement and unlock its potential. There are always fighting applications you don't see -- even in what might appear at first to be just a "transition" from one movement to the next.

Last night, we did some real-world drills, aimed at using two Hsing-I techniques -- peng chuan and pi chuan (crushing fist and splitting palm) against an attack.

Students strapped on their protective gear and paired off. One would throw an attack and I coached (along with black sash Chris Miller) them in an effective way to respond -- a flurry of peng chuan and pi chuan -- rapid fire -- at the stomach, ribs, solar plexus and face.

Students had to throw at least 5 strikes -- using peng and pi -- back to back -- FAST!!

Some students will hesitate after throwing one technique. I pushed them to respond faster and wi...

As I wandered through the Exhibit Hall at the Martial Arts Supershow 2010 in Las Vegas, I was disappointed that there was nothing that related to the internal arts.

Even the seminars were focused on kickboxing, karate (the modern version), TKD (the modern version) and MMA or MMA-related things (like "Cage Fitness").

Except for one booth, and it was completely embarrassing.

It was called Quantum Science -- BioTech Optimum Energy Program. The people at the booth should have been arrested for false advertising.

They were selling pendants. If you wear these pendants, they improve your chi and can even kill cancer cells -- that's exactly what a woman behind the booth told me.

It isn't just a pendant. They also will take your hard-earned cash for a bracelet or a watch that will do the same thing.

You see, their stuff "promotes positive flow of energy and helps to maintain energy balance. It helps to restore energy that has become weak in the body." That quote is from their brochure....

I attended the Martial Arts Supershow this week in Las Vegas. I would never have believed that I would completely feel like a fish out of water.

I believe every good martial arts teacher should make a profit. I believe in making money. Every good instructor should make enough money to live a good lifestyle and save for a secure future. I try to make money at my arts, and I do, but not enough.

It's sad to see good martial arts schools struggle. The image of the kung-fu or karate teacher living a meager existence, taking little for lessons but teaching a pure art is becoming a memory.

Even Chinese masters have learned that they can make big bucks, and they want the money. Chen Xiaowang, I heard, is a millionaire. He deserves it. He has worked hard and has a legacy.

And yet, it's disappointing to me to attend a Martial Arts Supershow like the one in Las Vegas this week and see that it's so geared to the business side of the arts. They taught things such as: How do you squeeze more ...

Bruce Lee said, "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once. I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."

This is a profound statement, but I don't know very many Americans who practice the principle behind it. I see it in my students, and I've seen it in myself -- the quest to learn more forms, thinking that it means we're good at what we do.

But learning more forms doesn't make you good.

Oh sure, we can win trophies at tournaments. We can put our art up against our peers and bring home some hardware. And tournaments are good for marketing, but you take a first place performance at most American tournaments to the Chen Village and you'd be considered a rank beginner. Let's not kid ourselves.

In the Chen Village, it is said that students may spend 10 years practicing only Laojia Yilu. Ten years before they are allowed to practice another empty hand or weapons form.

How well do you think they can perform Laojia Yilu at the end of that time?

A little over a ...

 Each time I train with a member of the Chen family, it's like trying to go one-on-one with Michael Jordan. You experience people who are at the top of their profession.

Chen Ziqiang is around 30 years old and is a tough tai chi fighter. He's the son of Grandmaster Chen Xiaoxing and the nephew of Grandmaster Chen Xiaowang. His cousin is Chen Bing.

I got up at 2 a.m. and got to Master Han's school in Skokie, Illinois, a little after 5:00 a.m. Master Han arrived with Chen Ziqiang around 5:45 and at 6, he did a 2-hour workshop on the Chen fan form. This isn't the same form that Zhu Tiancai does on his DVD. This is the original Chen Village form. I've never studied the fan before, so it was an opportunity to add a new weapon to my list. I've always considered the fan to be more of a woman's weapon, but the form is more challenging than I expected, and I rubbed a hole in my right index finger opening and closing my steel-pronged fan.

The photo here is cropped -- in the back row from left...

I practiced 10 forms this evening, as the sun was going down and the shade began to deepen in our backyard.

I've been practicing some of these forms for 23 years, but had to occasionally stop and practice a movement a few times until it felt right. Once or twice, I would skip a movement, realize it a few seconds later, and have to go back and start again until I got it right. Then I would repeat the form to make sure the part that I had skipped was firmly in my mind again.

As a child -- around age 7 -- my mother had me take piano lessons. My teacher told me that concert pianists who have practiced all their lives can feel it if they skip one day without practicing. The best artists practice every single day.

Five decades later, I understand that the same is true for martial artists. We express our art with our bodies, creating beautiful movement that has specific body mechanics at their core, and a potentially deadly meaning hidden inside circular and sometimes flowery movements.

F...

Two years ago, I felt palpitations in my chest. For a few months, I attributed it to stress (I was in a very stressful job). Then I visited a doctor, who became alarmed and told me I had atrial fibrillation -- my heart had developed extra electrical pathways and the heartbeat was all screwed up.

I had two choices -- take blood thinners the rest of my life to avoid a stroke or clot, or undergo "laser ablation," where they go into veins in your groin, send lasers and a camera up into your heart, and burn spots to stop the extra electrical activity.

I wanted to be back to normal, so I opted for the laser ablation.

It was a surreal experience after being healthy and fit my entire life. After the procedure, it was clear within a day or two that it hadn't worked. My heart was still beating strangely -- part of it was fluttering instead of beating normally.

I returned to see the cardiologist, Dr. Bengt Herweg, a week later. He came into the room and looked at my charts.

"What dose of cou...

Caution - this story contains an image that might be disturbing.

On November 2nd, I was lying in a hospital bed with tubes down my throat -- on a respirator -- and watching TV through a haze of sedation that relaxed me so that I wouldn't gag and choke on the tubes. I had entered the hospital on October 19th, thinking I was having a 2-hour procedure that would fix a bleeding airway. I had been coughing up blood since February and the residual blood in the lungs made breathing a real challenge.

My kung-fu practice had been seriously affected throughout 2009, but I had no idea -- and neither did my doctors -- that I was losing the function of my left lung because the pulmonary veins going to the heart were closing down. They discovered this at the Cleveland Clinic, but when they tried to open the veins, they accidentally pierced my heart. They led Nancy to believe a couple of times that there was a good possibility I wouldn't make it out alive.

On November 2, I discovered that I was un...