Phil Cawood has been training in Kempo Ryu Karate for over twenty years and believes that is has an answer to any confrontational situation. A full-time instructor, Phil is constantly able to pass on his knowledge to his students throughout England and Wales. Due to the security and doorwork that he and some of his students do, Phil believes that the techniques within the system need little updating in order to defuse the violent situations that are part and parcel of being a doorman. The reason that he named the system Kempo Ryu Karate Kickboxing was to enable people to distinguish between it and other similar sounding systems.

Phil studied Wado Ryu and Shotokan karate along with Muay Thai, and Kung Fu but when he came across Kenpo karate he realised that he had found the missing link in his training. Training as a first generation student of Master Ed Parker he gained his first dan and was a full member of the International Kenpo Karate Association (IKKA). It was whilst he was with the IKKA that he began to realise that Kenpo might be too complicated for the situations that he was facing.

He first saw Kenpo when German instructor Rainer Schultz demonstrated it in the seventies. Phil was particularly impressed with the way Schultz could blast out five techniques within the space of a couple of seconds. So impressed was he with this demonstration that he joined the Exeter Kenpo club and trained for five years before finally taking over as head instructor.

Eventually he gained his black belt under Ed Parker and returned to his home town of Leeds where he opened up some clubs and became the IKKA Norther area representative. As he learnt more and gained a deeper and more detailed point of view he began to examine what he was doing.

After a while he came to realise that the techniques tended to be a little complicated. As result he began to adapt and modify techniques in order to make them more practical for use on the street. Where there was a suitable opening he added kickboxing techniques. The result of this was a streamlined art that was more orientated around the objective of practical street self defence. Despite this he kept many of the original Ed Parker principles, the theories of which he considered to be excellent.

Phil believes that it was more of a case of utilising his own ideas and theories rather than betraying his roots. This is more than demonstrated  by the close relations that the Kempo Karate Schools Association (KKSA) has with the BKKU and Master Bob Rose. The fact that Master Parker adapted and modified Kenpo from the original Mitose Hawaiian system only serves to strengthen this belief. Phil has taken one step further and adapted it to fit the violent confrontations that you can expect today. To do this he cut out a lot of the more classical type moves and replaced them with more direct techniques that involve the Kempo philosophy of being able to attack as much of the body as possible in the shortest amount of time.

This was sourced from Fighter's Magazine