Ken Gullette's Internal Fighting Arts

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...

A philosopher asked the Buddha, "What is your method? What do you practice every day?"

"We walk, we eat, we wash ourselves, we sit down," the Buddha explained.

"What is so special about that? Everyone walks, eats, washes, sits down," the philosopher said.

"Sir," replied the Buddha, "when we walk, we are aware we are walking; when we eat, we are aware we are eating. When others walk, eat, wash, or sit down, they are generally not aware of what they are doing."

In Buddhism, mindfulness is the key. -- from Zen Keys by Thich Nhat Hanh

Are you mindful when you practice your gongfu?

Are you mindful when you are at work? Does your mind wander when talking to other employees or when sitting through meetings?

When in public, are you on a cell phone instead of being engaged in the world around you?

When your significant other is talking, do you zone out or are you mentally engaged in what they are saying?

Are you constantly multi-tasking? 

Psychology Today reported that we lose 40% of...

Something happens when you start getting older, when your health begins to go South and the hair turns gray.

Suddenly, you feel differently about the old people you see in the store or on the road. You suddenly develop empathy.

Oh, I get it. That old man still thinks of himself as the strong 25-year old that he was just a few minutes ago. Wasn't it just a few minutes ago?

No, it was 40 years ago, before the losses started piling up; before his parents died, before his friends started dying, before his earning power began dropping, and before his heart began beating like a bad carburetor.

Now, when I see a healthy 25-year old, I think to myself, "It seems like just yesterday." When I was 25, life seemed endless and everything seemed to come easily.

As the years passed, I lost a daughter, I lost jobs, marriages, and eventually, my perfect health declined. There were some gains along the way, too, but the losses pile up.

As we get older, it becomes even more important to maintain ou...

The Holy Grail of Tai Chi self-defense -- in my opinion -- is when you can "feel" an opponent's energy when you are in a clinch and you can break his structure and use Tai Chi "energies" to take him down.

On Saturday, about a dozen martial artists of different styles gathered at Morrow's Academy of Martial Arts in Moline, Illinois and we practiced some of the basic concepts and energies. We recorded the workshop and the video is already going up on my website -- www.internalfightingarts.com -- and I am putting it together for a DVD.

Anyone can use muscular force to pick someone up and throw them to the ground.

But can you use Tai Chi energies to unbalance, uproot, and control your opponent's center so you can take them down?

You have to be able to do a few things:

** Determine how your opponent's center is turning

** Break his structure to unbalance him

** Have your hands and legs in place to help his center turn

** Then turn his center and take it where it wants to go.

The te...

My wife, Nancy is my videographer. She is usually behind the camera as we record lessons for DVDs and the website.

Yesterday, as we were recording some tuishou instruction about using tai chi "energies" and methods to do takedowns, we pulled her out in front of the camera to learn how to do a takedown using "shoulder" energy.

I enjoy teasing Nancy. She has a great sense of humor. One of the reasons I started in martial arts was because I thought it was fun. I still do, so I often include outtakes and jokes in my DVDs and video for the website.

This is a short video showing Nancy learning a good technique. The Chinese term for the technique is at the end.

20 years ago this summer, I got canned from my last job in TV news.

It wasn't a total shock. In fact, it was a relief. Despite award-winning work, I was the manager of a newsroom, and it was a fate worse than death.

Anchors acting like prima donnas, reporters angry because they wanted to be anchors, videographers dinging news cars, inexperienced kids on the air and me having to answer for their screw-ups.

I got into news to be a writer, reporter, and to be creative. I found myself in a living hell as the top decision-maker in the newsroom.

Suddenly, I was canned. It happens in the news business. The life expectancy of a news director is 18 months. I had been there three-and-a-half years.

Two days after losing my job, I had an idea. I was 44 years old and I had been one test away from black sash since 1991, but I had moved away from Omaha, where my teacher was, I was working more than full-time, I was a single (divorced) father with two teenage daughters living at home, and was al...