Kenpo Karate

Kenpo Karate is a striking art with Japanese and Chinese roots, and the branch usually meant by the name in the United States is American Kenpo, the system Ed Parker taught and kept revising until his death in 1990. It is built for close range, favoring fast combinations of hand strikes over one decisive blow. Its curriculum is a vocabulary of named self-defense techniques rather than a loose collection of drills, and each belt carries an explicit requirement list of techniques and forms, so the whole ladder is visible from the bottom of it. The part worth noticing as a system is what happens after a technique is learned in its clean form: training moves to variations that ask what changes when the attack arrives differently, so one motion gets rehearsed under many conditions instead of many motions getting rehearsed once. The distance from white belt to black is normally counted in years, and the requirement lists are why there is no way to skip the middle.