July 10, 2018 Kajukenbo ( no, that's not a typo)

One of our residents here asked a friend of hers to come and give us a self defense class.  About seven of us met in the community room to listen, watch and learn techniques from this man.


Our instructor is a sixth degree black belt in Kajukenbo martial arts. It's a mixed martial arts system developed in the 1940's in Hawaii.  It's used all over the world now.  This instructor learned it in the Marine Corps, thirty years ago.

He said as a young Marine they were always told to run for their PT and Marines in his unit were always 'blowing out' knees from running and stepping in holes or tripping on branches, etc.  keeping their readiness level 'unsat' as my daughter would say.  He said their CO told them "I don't care if you play badminton for PT, but increase your readiness!!"  Anyway, they started this discipline of martial arts.

Here's a link to a Wikipedia page about Kajukenbo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajukenbo


He began like I expected him to: always be aware of your surroundings, notice what other vehicles are around you when you park, park under lights, check all the way around you when you get out of the car, etc.  which I already do.  The one thing I need to remember is: When leaving somewhere to get to your car, don't unlock your car when you're still at a distance from it.  Unlock the car when you get to the car to avoid someone getting into your car ahead of you.  And, don't stand in the middle of your trunk to load your things.  Stand to the side to load the trunk.  Or, you just might be in the trunk!!!

Today he taught us how to defend from a "punch" attack and also from a knife attack.  Since all of us here are over 55, he stressed that learning these defenses can work no matter how old you are or how weak or strong you are.  

One male resident in a wheelchair also learned what he could do from his position to defend himself from these same kind of attacks.  He recently had an episode where he felt threatened out on the street at night, so he needed this today as well.

Since I can't demonstrate the techniques for you (ha ha), you'll just have to look it up for yourself.  He may come back and do more classes in the future.  It was an interesting morning!  

There's lots of youtube videos showing Kajukenbo techniques if you're interested.