Kenpo X

I am nearing the end of week three on the P90X lean program. I did Kenpo today, stretch tomorrow, and then will be heading into the first recovery week. As someone who has been in martial arts for most of my life, in my case taekwondo, I just wanted to share a few thoughts on the Kenpo workout.

On one hand I am glad they included some form of martial arts into the overall program. On the other hand it is the hardest thing to pick up off a DVD without any kind of prior experience. I have helped teach taekwondo at a local community college for about 10 years and have seen a lot of people with no martial arts experience try to learn it from scratch. Needless to say people tend to run the gamut from having potential to be very good, to not being able to do the proverbial walk and chew gum at the same time thing.

Most of the moves in the Kenpo DVD are fairly basic. The first half of the workout focuses on punches, then the second half focuses on kicks and a few blocks. I think they were smart not trying to combine a lot of punching, kicking and blocking as connected movements. While the workout could have been more intense had they done so, those combinations are the hardest things to pick up for novices.

The only real critique I have of the workout is that the form of people in the video tend to get bad on some of the kicks. I think that has to do with the fact that they were doing the workout in regular shoes as opposed to bare feet or martial arts shoes. They also eliminated any pivoting from the kicks, which again may have lessened the intensity of the workout, but if it is done incorrectly can lead to serious injury.