Ken Gullette's Internal Fighting Arts

I was very sorry to read in the New York Times about the death of Charles Neville, one of the Neville Brothers, one of the greatest bands to come out of New Orleans. Aaron Neville is one of his brothers.

Charles bought several of my DVDs and joined my website when it launched, 10 years ago this July. Each month, I would get a notice that he had paid his monthly fee, but I never really connected his name to Aaron Neville and the Neville Brothers. He remained a member until less than two years ago, and I wondered if he was in poor health. I knew he was in his 70s.

He called me on the phone a couple of times over the years, before I realized who he was. I talked to him like I do all of my website members.

The last time he called, he had forgotten his password to the website, so I created a new one for him. He said, "I haven't been on the website in a couple of months because I've been traveling, playing music."

It is strange to be on the other side of the microphone. I am accustomed to doing interviews for my podcast, so it was a different feeling to be interviewed by Jeremy Lesniak for his Whistlekick Martial Arts Radio podcast. I was honored to be asked.

Here is a link to the show. I almost postponed it because I had been battling a lung issue for almost two weeks, and with only one lung, I could hardly speak without coughing for several days. The heavy breathing is very obvious, and the microphone picks up every bit of it!

Here is a link to the show:

https://player.fm/series/whistlekick-martial-arts-radio-podcast-shifu-ken-gullette

He was 17 years old; taller, heavier and stronger.

And he wanted to beat me up.

I was 14, a skinny, friendly kid with glasses who was a magnet for bullies back in the days when boys settled arguments by fighting. Yeah, that's my picture at the top of the page. Doesn't that look like the face of a martial artist? At the time, none of us knew what martial arts were.

He was the son of the sheriff of Jessamine County, Kentucky, and he had a couple of young toadies who followed him around.

A couple of my cousins were with me, leaving the drugstore in downtown Wilmore where we had been drinking Cokes, looking at comics and lusting after Helen, the pretty girl who worked there.

Back in the 1950s and '60s, dogs and boys ran free through the streets and farms around Wilmore because, by God, that's how the good Lord made us. We walked on the train tracks, explored the graveyard, went swimming at local creeks, and even walked across High Bridge, a dangerous feat especially when trains were...

Last October, I offered a free tai chi class for people aged 40 and over. I stopped teaching older students a decade ago because I wanted to focus on the martial-oriented side of the internal arts. But we used to have a lot of fun with the older friends we made, so I started this new, free class to make new friends, have fun, and teach the Chen 19 form. Some of the students were nearly 80 years old. The oldest student was 83.

When you have practiced a form for 20 years, it seems easy. It was clear the very first night that even a beginning, short form like the Chen 19 appears like a deep, yawning abyss in front of someone who has not studied it before. The idea of actually getting through the thing seems impossible when you are learning the first movement.

As we went through the opening movement, I began coaching them through the simple stepping out and raising the arms, then dropping the energy while lowering the arms.

We practiced it a few times and then I said, "Okay, practice th...

My neighbor Earl is one of my best friends. He is also 96 years old. A couple of weeks ago, I realized that he could benefit from the practice of Zhan Zhuang -- "Standing Stake" or "Standing Pole."

If you do Zhan Zhuang as part of your practice (I call it "Standing Stake"), you can teach it to elderly people in your life.

We moved into our current home almost four years ago and Earl, who was 92 at the time, walked across the street to introduce himself to us. His mind was sharp and he had a great sense of humor. His wife had died two years before. He fought in the Philippines during World War II, came home with PTSD, but got help and lived a happy and successful life. His three sons all live within a mile.

During the first year we lived here, I was friendly with Earl and would sometimes cross the street when he was outside to talk to him.

But during the last three years, Earl and I have developed a close friendship. My home office looks out toward his house. We sit out during warm ...

You are in a situation where you cannot escape a fight. Someone your size or larger lunges at you, grabs you in a clinch, and tries to take you to the ground.

Can you use your Tai Chi skills to take HIM to the ground instead?

I have been working on this since 2006, when I was practicing push hands with Chen Xiaoxing in my basement and he kept putting me on the ground -- over and over again -- and he did it so easily, I could not understand what he was doing until about the tenth time I found myself on my back.

He was breaking my structure and controlling my center.

The insights from that training have driven me for the past dozen years to explore how to use the "energies" of Tai Chi (Taiji) for close-up self-defense.

How do you use ward-off, roll back, press, push, split, pluck, bump, elbow, empty, advance, withdraw in a real fight? How do you use these methods of dealing with force to take your opponent to the ground without using muscular force or "wrestling?"

My new DVD answer...

On April 7, 2008, a vice president at the university where I worked as the director of media relations walked into my office with a Human Resources manager and closed the door.

Oh, crap, this is not good, I thought.

It was not good. After almost a year on the job, I was being let go. A month before, I went to lunch with the VP and he said, "Ken, you have been set up. I don't know if it was intentional, but you have been set up."

So I had an idea that this would happen, but it is still a shock when you lose a good job, even a very political and public job where you are placed in front of news cameras to hold news conferences on sensitive university issues, then you walk away from the news conference and realize there are arrows in your back, fired from within the university. It was a very interesting, intense job. I loved it, but I was, as the VP said, "set up" for a fall.

After the VP and the HR person left my office, I quickly cleared out my stuff and within a couple of hours, I w...

I went in to the hospital yesterday for a cardiac stress test. After a freak side-effect from a medical procedure nine years ago this month, my left pulmonary veins shut down, meaning my left lung is virtually useless. Doctors at Cleveland Clinic tried to stent one of the pulmonary veins, tore the vein and accidentally pierced my heart with the wire.

That set off complications that I have survived, barely it sometimes seems. But my chi is strong, right? Still, I sometimes have to get tests to make sure nothing is getting clogged up.

Cardiac stress tests have changed. They used to hook you up to electrodes and put you on a treadmill.

It's All in Vein

Now, they stick an IV in your arm, hook you up to electrodes and slide you into a tube, as if you're getting an MRI or something.

They pump radioactive crap into your vein and then take pictures. The new pictures are supposed to be a lot better than even the ones they took during my last cardiac stress test three or four years ago.

"A...

William C.C. Chen's daughter Tiffany called me arrogant the other day. She also mentioned "gossip," and implied that I do not understand what I was reading.

At first, I couldn't believe it. Then, I thought it was funny. But the more I thought about it, the more bizarre and creepy it became.

Here is what happened.

I pulled a book from my martial arts library this weekend: "Body Mechanics of Tai Chi Chuan," by William C.C. Chen.

Since body mechanics is something I am very interested in, and somewhat knowledgeable about, I wanted to read his take on it. 

I respect all teachers, unless they claim supernatural powers. I have always heard very good things about William C.C. Chen. His name is among the most famous of American tai chi teachers. You have to admire someone who has done so much to spread tai chi in America.

On the back of the book, he writes, "My book.....deals with the human body under the action of given forces and is based on practical physics such as body leverage and t...

A little old man kicked my butt at a tournament in Keokuk, Iowa in 2000, and it is one of my favorite memories from my years competing in martial arts tournaments.

It was a hot, August day in a gymnasium that was not air-conditioned. I had been out-pointed by a black belt from Georgia in a match for first place, so I was next paired with a nice old guy to fight for the third place trophy.

My opponent was short, feeble, very slow, left himself open, had slow reaction time, and could hardly get a kick above his own waist. He wore hearing aids in both ears.

I had seen him perform at the tournament at least two other times, but he never went home with a trophy. He didn't even come close. It was a fluke that we were put in the ring to fight for some hardware.

The center ref told us to bow to each other, then bow to him. He signaled us to begin.

In that moment, I felt a connection to my aging opponent. In other tournaments, I had encouraged him to stay with it, even though he competed a...