my new fighting technique
is (almost) unstoppable!
When you first enter its door, the Pow! Martial Arts Center hits you square in the eye. While not named for a Batman sound effect, the center trades on much of the allure given martial arts by the comic book, television, and film worlds. An abundance of colorful media fills the place. Posters of half-forgotten chop-socky flicks collide with boxing memorabilia. A big-screen television stands nearby to show videotapes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Jackie Chan flicks; and even an episode of the old Green Hornet series—Bruce Lee's first brush with American media fame. Bruce Lee makes more appearances in POW! than the Blessed Virgin in a Mexican church. So many, you expect his image to weep spontaneously, or more appropriately, bleed from the cat scratch cuts covering his chiseled torso. At first blush, POW! is obviously not a traditional martial arts dojo.Since American servicemen first brought judo back from the Pacific Theater after WWII, Asian martial arts have steadily grown in popularity, not coincidentally in sync with the appearance of martial arts avatars like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li. A search through the white pages brings up 215 places where you can receive karate, martial arts, and other self-defense instruction in Chicago alone—and that's not including park district programs, college courses, and seminars. It's not hard to figure out why. Martial arts, unlike most exercise programs, is a holistic package of fitness and its application. In troubled times too, the ability to defend oneself is appealing. That's pretty much how POW!'s operational owner and head instructor Sifu Katalin Rodriguez Zamiar (sifu means master, in a nod toward the traditional form of address for a wushu teacher) seems to see it.
A demitasse of a woman: Katalin is diminuitive and boundlessly energetic. Disquietingly healthy, she looks every inch the physical fitness instructor she's been for many years. What she doesn't first strike you as is an accomplished boxer and black belt in tae kwon do, wushu kung-fu, and karate. She seems less like a death-dealing martial arts valkyrie and more like that cool gym coach you had back in high school. She's equally as happy to talk about the subject of physical fitness and the way POW! promotes it.
"We are a mixed martial arts and fitness facility. Our goal is to provide people with the ability to learn martial arts in a fitness-focussed environment that helps them set goals. Most people are not able to stick with training and working out because they lack the motivation or the skills to keep their specific program organized and goal-oriented. Unless a person has a personal trainer it's difficult to maintain exercise."
But it's not all about coming in to do stomach crunches and karate chop the air. Katalin sets the scene.
"It's very reward-based. That's what POW!'s about. It goes back to the concept of a martial arts school also being a community center... In the old days, the martial arts training center was where the cultural center was... We're trying to become that same kind of Mecca where a person [doesn't just come] here to work out. We really do fun things. It's almost an adult playground, in a way."
Katalin isn't the only sifu in residence. The facility's main instructors are her business partners, each dabbling in show biz as well as ass-kicking. Billy Dec specializes in karate, tae kwon do, wing chun kung-fu, kali stickfighting, and muay thai kickboxing. He also spends his days practicing law and running the Circus and Dragon Room night clubs. Dino Spencer—fifth degree black sash in Shaolin kung-fu—has been a bodyguard to the stars, protecting the corpuses of Michael Jordan, Robert DeNiro, and even, gasp, David Schwimmer. Katalin did a Peter Sellers turn in the Mortal Kombat II videogame, in the triple role of Kitana, Mileena, and Jade. Ho Sung Pak has the most screen time. That's him in Jackie Chan's Legend of Drunken Master, playing Henry, a Boss from Hell who beats the snot out of his workers when they don't work overtime. Mr. Pak is less identifiable in his role as Raphael, the turtle with the staff in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II and III.
No, they're not hoary old masters living in mountaintop monasteries, but the four saw a need for a new, and, in a word much touted on the POW! Web site, "dynamic" way to present the martial arts.
Martial arts is plural because there are many to choose from. Karate, tae kwon do, and kung fu are what most people know. These are modern, unified systems of other, earlier systems. Tae kwon do and Hapkido are Korean; Karate is Okinawan and Japanese; and Kung-Fu is Chinese. Saying you're taking kung-fu could mean you're studying any number of styles, such as Shaolin, Wushu, Wing Chun, Hung Gar, San Soo, and numerous subsets—depending on the region of the Far East from which the style originated. The West has its own martial arts, of course, but most languish in obscurity. Boxing, of course, is a major exception, but French foot-fighting or Savate, on the other hand, is below the public's radar. There are also relative newcomers to martial arts currently gaining in popularity. These are largely eclectic styles that fuse and simplify—some only purporting to fuse and simplify—the best of the rest. Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do is one such system, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Israeli Krav Maga are others.
POW! itself offers a salad bar of self-defense. Styles on hand include Shaolin and wushu kung-fu, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, tai chi, tae kwon do, karate, Krav Maga, Kali stickfighting, and plain old Marquis de Queensbury boxing. Most schools offer one, two, at most three styles, and you stick to one particular system. More schools like POW! are starting to offer blends. Why is POW! such a crackerjack box of styles?
"Because it's boring to do one style every day," Zamiar answered. "People quit because they lose their motivation... You wouldn't want to do multiplication tables for years on end. You learn them , you study them, then you learn how to apply them in many different ways and to many different types of math. It's the same thing with punches and kicks. They can get really boring just through the eyes of one style. If you're only learning one style, you're completely limited because then you only know one small little system."
Self-defense—the martial part of martial arts—comes into play too. Katalin, while specifically trained in tae kwon do and Shorin Ryu and Goju karate wants to instill effective defense techniques into her charges, as opposed to beautifully choreographed forms (or kata). Pretty but dumb, at least on the street, thinks Katalin. All systems require years and years of research and practice. You can learn wushu proper at POW!, but if you're looking for self-defense, she advises picking up a grab-bag of techniques.
"As great as all those fabulous s-grips, snake applications, and leopard styles are...They're wonderful artistic things to learn, but they're not what works on the street...It's not reality"
While a newcomer to martial arts (I have three months training in hapkido Writer's Note: I now have a year and a half.) I see her point without totally agreeing. Definitely, there is a difference between sport styles like judo and tae kwon do, and streetfighting styles like hapkido and Krav Maga. Both are effective, but street styles downplay expression and point-scoring for purest defense and offense.
It's not invoked at POW!, but the phrase reality-based is a repeated mantra among martial arts conmen, used as a booga-booga sales technique to sell courses, books, and videos. Preparedness for actual combat is a genuine concern. Instructors worth their salt impress upon their students that real life is not like the movies. They must prepare so they don't choke when the feet and fists start flying. There's such a thing as employing fear as a selling technique, however. Offerings of blends of deadliest techniques, dim mak death touches, secret ninja powers, and similar hyperbole abound on the Web and in martial arts magazine ads.
The fact remains that even if you master Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Krav Maga, and Drunken Monkey Boxing, if you enter a biker bar and challenge all comers, you will probably get your corn creamed. Overall, most self-defense testimonies show the greater number of opponents are not ultimate fighting cage of death opponents, but rather obnoxious drunks and road-raging doofuses. Mostly, it seems best to learn how to decide whether to escape, hit hard and escape, or simply hand over your damned wallet before you end up outlined in chalk. To invoke Bruce Lee again, there is no magic in martial arts. Strength, balance, and coordination all come into play.
Considering the continued popularity of Asian martial arts in the West, it's peculiar that they're treated as being neither martial nor an art in many facilities. Tae kwon do is my niece and nephew's afterschool alternative to soccer and Irish stepdancing. Jazzy hybrids like Tae Bo and cardio-kickboxing are geared more toward keeping your tummy trim and your glutes tight rather than imbuing your fists and feet with skull-cracking power. Katalin claims that POW! combines fitness and fighting, with a hard-learned feel for what works and what hurts, not just on potential baddies, but on the martial artists themselves.
Back in the day, training at the old dojos was dangerous. Not through unwitting Vulcan death grips, but rather strains, sprains, bruises, and breaks. Katalin elucidated:
"Most of the old-school ways are the wrong ways to train the body. Absolutely, positively the wrong ways. A lot of people quit...because of pain and injuries, and if we [Katalin and her partners] had not trained the way we did in the 70s and 80s, we wouldn't be as injured as we are today."
"Injuries" doesn't mean injuries resulting from Thai kickboxing tourneys. During training, you're just as likely to get hurt kicking a Wavemaster bag or hyperextending as you are from falling or being struck. More likely, in fact. According to Zamiar, modern kinesthesiology is aghast at the old ways, which could turn out twenty-something human machines of destruction with battered middle-aged bodies. POW! takes the edge off with cross-training and special attention to strength, balance, stability, flexibility, weight control, and nutrition.
"Wellness is our philosophy here, through the martial arts," Katalin summarizes.
Arrogant with my yellow belt (Writer's note: I am currently an arrogant purple belt.) —meaning I could probably take a large eight-year-old girl in hand-to-hand combat right now—I understood where Katalin was coming from, but I wouldn't know the Tao of POW! until I experienced it firsthand. POW! was ready to prove itself to me. Katalin offered a standard trial class, and I was up for it. Chicago Journal Editor Brett McNeil was even more up for it, no doubt salivating at the thought of newspaper-hawking photographs of me getting my nose bifurcated.
I came after work on a Tuesday night. In perfect Yin and Yang, POW! had a different feel than my Hapkido dojang. For one thing, Grandmaster Hyun's Hapkido School rarely plays a DJ heavy metal mix during training. After bowing just outside the training area, Katalin introduced me to each of her partners. All were friendly and pleasant, though the intimidatingly mountainous Dino Spencer made me wonder why he needed to bother to learn self-defense at all. No one is wanting for practice space at POW!. With 6,000 square feet, there was plenty of room to move around, even with the numerous weight machines, punching bags, and a full-scale boxing ring in one corner.
I was left to watch a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class in progress. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is relatively new in the martial arts world. Founded by the Gracie family in South America and quite popular in cage matches, it involves groundfighting, using a series of grabs, pulls, kicks, and punches to take your opponent down and out. While Angus Young and Robert Plant helium-screeched overhead, instructor Dino Costeas wrestled about the floor with his students. At first I thought he had the best job in the place, several of his students being young women. I rescinded that thought when he grappled with a large sweaty fellow with 30 or so pounds on him. Dino persevered, congratulating the student afterwards and telling the others, "See, that's why I need to use that move." He slapped the guy on the back, "This is a big boy." Much laughter.
An easygoing attitude was felt all around. From experience, it's not hard to feel at ease with a group of people with whom you regularly trade blows. Call it the halo effect of being brothers and sisters in arms. My fellow POW! students were mostly young professionals. The Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu students wore traditional white, heavy judo uniforms, while the rest wore the official POW! uniform, which is any article of clothing emblazoned with the POW! logo. POW! doesn't use traditional belts to mark progress. Rather they earn a series of colored waist sashes and stripes, which, I'm sorry, look a little fabu for my tastes. My fellow POW! students appear ready to run with the bulls or serve dinner in a nice Spanish restaurant.
The martial art du jour was Krav Maga. Katalin handed me and another newbie, Dave, rolled-up strips of cloth. "Wrap up before we start," she tells us. Hapkido is practiced bare-knuckled, so I knew the final result of binding my hands for the first time. I failed to achieve mummy tightness, so I cheated by tucking my wrappings in and clenching my fists.
Krav Maga itself is the official fighting system of the Israeli Defense Forces, Israeli Police, and Security Services. Developed in the 40s by IDF Chief Instructor of Hand-to-Hand Combat Imi Lichtenfield, it was created to quickly teach large groups of people of varying fitness and combat readiness how to defend themselves. You can figure out who the attackers were and still are. Krav Maga cribs much from other systems, playing off your natural body movements. Pretty much, it's fighting clean or dirty...whatever works at the time.
Sifu Dino Spencer was the man in charge. The sixteen of us lined up to face one another while he barked orders in his best drill sargeant voice. The drill sargeant analogy was only borne out by Sifu Dino's predilection for making us drop and give him 5 or 10 push-ups, usually met with not-too-believable belittlement as being "too slow." Personally, I think I met the time and amount requirements of each order of push-ups each time. I didn't whine about it though, I was afraid Sifu Dino might squoosh me.
Next, we were put through a circuit of tactics. Each side alternated, giving and receiving blows and grips before moving on to the next station. I first paired off with Dave. It was his first night, and unsurprisingly he reacted like a freshman martial artist. Guarding against my jabs, slaps, and uppercuts, I could see holes in Dave's defense the size of manhole covers. Gingerly deflecting my punches, I am astonished to hear myself telling him, "C'mon. Block me! Make it hurt." His blocks become more convincing. I smile encouragingly at Dave, even as he battered my arms down to my radius and ulna bones. Truthfully, I felt great. A few months back I would have winced if you had pinched me. Now I'm absorbing haymakers.
While happy to help Dave hurt me, I paused when I saw my next "opponent." I can't remember his name. Let's call him Conan. Conan is a common personality in martial arts training. Conan is an Alpha Male, and is as serious as a heart attack about martial arts. To be fair, Conan was the good kind of Alpha Male. He genuinely wanted me to learn. After all, sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. No, you do not take martial arts to be gently escorted from one lesson to another with a minimum of discomfort. Still, neither should you try to ensure your fellow students receive their black belts while sitting in a wheelchair.
I was right in pegging Conan as a lover of verisimilitude. We worked on escaping from headlocks. Clenching my head in his free weight-crafted arm, Conan kindly stopped short of crushing my thorax. I reached up and backwards, blindly searching for Conan's nose so I could pull it back and expose his throat to a theoretical smashing. Verisimilitude Conan got crafty, pulling his head back further. Conan wanted to show me "what it's really like." Bully for him.
Conan wasn't allowing for technique, however, and I admit I was getting pissed. If he was really trying to kill me and I insisted on groping for his nose, I'd be screwed. He was taller, with four inches between my fingers and his snout. Once or twice I writhed serpentine into a nostril-ripping position and brought Conan back, back, back into a more equitable position. He got cute and put extra strength into his attack. Afterwards, Conan rightfully pointed out that if I can't get the nose, I should hook an eye or ear. Very true, but gouging out Conan's right eye in class would be bad form, as would taking advantage of the fact that, in my headlocked position, I could demolish his scrotum. Ah, 'tis all in good fun, and Conan taught me to make damn sure I never let a six-foot Pit Bull get me in a headlock.
It wasn't all disgusting nasal-digital contact. Other stations included punching, front snap kicks, axe kicks, elbow smashes, and so on. The circuit was rapid and interspersed with more pushups, situps, and monkey-jacks—which are effective but look totally asinine. The energy level was high, and as Katalin promised, no one was bored. My heart pounded; my breathing came fast and heavy, and adrenaline shot through me like mercury. I smiled frequently, as I often do during practices. I find it a stupidly gratifying way to feel alive.
Through all this, Dino and Katalin walked up and down the line offering suggestions. Turn your hip more, pivot on your foot, arch your back for extra power, keep your guard up, never tear your eyes off the other guy. As I turned into a vibrating, lashing, lawn sprinkler of sweat, they maintained careful control. That personal touch is important. Rapport with your instructor is the ultimate determiner of success. Training seemed low pressure, but high intensity was placed on doing well.
I shouldn't judge a style on one class, but Krav Maga is not for me. To snatch a Hobbesian phrase, it's nasty, brutish, and short. It's also as pre-packaged as an action figure. Visit the site at www.kravmaga.com and you'll find a fine selection of artfully designed KM merchandise. Hot Krav Maga babes and hunks in tight tank tops and warm-up pants smash assailants—strangely, also dressed in Krav Maga merchandise—with stern, constipated looks on their faces. I find it artless and crude, but hey whatever works. I should have come on POW!'s wushu or Ol' Skool Hiphop Kung-fu night. Darn.
What works too is that Krav Maga has an unusual appeal for women. With the allegedly fairer sex being prime targets for assault, muggings, and rape, it's gratifying to see that POW!'s clientele is largely female. Honestly, most guys want to learn self-defense because it's muy macho. These days, most women want to do it because they saw Ashley Judd kickboxing or Jennifer Lopez doing Krav Maga onscreen—looking so beautiful, yet so dangerous, yet so very fashionable and sexy while doing it. Kickboxing fitness presents a more chick-friendly environment than the old-style dojos. By way of comparison, about 10 percent of the students at most traditional schools are women. Compare this to the 65 to 75 percent double-x chromosome membership of POW!. Katalin doesn't sugarcoat, or rather sourcoat, that fact:
"It does help to have a female head instructor, without a doubt. It's much more comfortable for [women] when they come into class, and they see that most of the classes are going to be led by me. That segues them into feeling comfortable with other instructors...And we're FUN. That social aspect really makes it compfortable for women. Women are not as comfortable in overly sterile or rigid environments where they feel as though intimidation is going to be the only method of instruction.That was the method that I got. I'm not so sure respect was because of fear or because of respect."
POW! may not be for the purist, who thinks that martial arts is a sausage fest practiced by the scowling, rippled golems portrayed in Black Belt magazine (Jackie Chan seems to be the only one enjoying himself). Personally, I love the sterility, repetition, and discipline Katalin said others, understandably, abhor. Three hours a week I suit up in my white gi, cinch my belt, and repeatedly perform stances, kicks, punches, locks, torsions, and falls without a hiphop soundtrack. POW! students don't—and that's fine. The difference between doing and not doing something always discounts whether you're doing it in a way to meet the purists' approval. Whose kung-fu is the best? Who cares, as long as you're doing it.
In Perfect World, you devote yourself to the martial arts, practicing day and night, honing your body, technique, mind, and soul into a poetic expression of art and war. In reality, you have a day job. Bruce Lee never stopped working out, even performing isometric exercises in his car while waiting at stoplights. Discipline for the rest of us consists of not eating Ding Dongs while watching TV. For those of us lacking the drive and funding of Olympic athletes, it's enough to keep fit and be prepared for fight or flight as the immediate danger demands.
It's especially hard to dismiss the notions of the folks I've met with the best and worst reason for learning martial arts: being attacked. Dave had a noticeable scar above his eyebrow. He explained it came from an attack only a few months before. That was the impetus to do some online research on where he could learn how to start swinging. POW! sounded like the best and friendliest choice to him, a school unlikely to add insult to his injuries.
Sifu Katalin underlined it this way: "There's a karma here that isn't present in most martial arts schools."
Originally published in the Chicago Journal .
®2002 Dan Kelly
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