FEATURED AUTHOR
SIFU JOSEPH SIMONET

Calling him “one of the best-kept secrets in the American martial arts community,” Inside Kung-Fu features Sifu Joseph Simonet in the June 2005 issue, thrusting his KI Fighting Concepts into the limelight. Simonet’s groundbreaking system, hailed by writer and fellow martial artist Michael Janich as nothing short of “revolutionary,” is essentially a hybrid that evolved from kenpo, wing chun, silat, t’ai chi, and Doce Pares eskrima. To close associates who have observed the ascent of this rising star over the years, that unlikely blend seems only fitting and natural for Simonet. The passions, personalities, and styles that have shaped his unique approach to the martial arts over the years are many and diverse.

As an avid competitive power lifter in the early 1970s, Simonet embarked on his martial arts journey with the study of Japanese karate, progressing to Tracy’s Kenpo Karate in 1973. By 1974, at the age of 21, he was managing a martial arts studio in Kirkland, Washington. Approaching his newfound career with a wide-open mind and an insatiable thirst for knowledge, Simonet spent the remainder of the decade exploring goju-ryu, tae kwon do, and hung-gar gung-fu.

KI Fighting Concepts (the “KI” stands for Karate Innovations) emerged in 1979, a system of Simonet’s own design that was loosely based on kenpo in the early days. It was in roughly the same time period that Simonet discovered Filipino kali eskrima and wing chun gung-fu and availed himself of the virtual explosion of martial arts seminar and workshop opportunities in the United States. Throughout the ’80s he studied and trained intensively in a range of arts as varied in concept and technique as they were in origin, including jeet kune do (JKD), savate, t’ai chi, silat, Muay Thai, and arnis, to name a few. It was from this rich blend of styles that KI Fighting Concepts began to evolve. That evolution continued throughout the ’90s as Simonet diversified further, rounding out his experience and honing his expertise with training in pentjak silat tongkat serak, Yang-style t’ai chi, and Doce Pares.

Since reaching black sash level in wing chun gung-fu in the late 1980s, Simonet has also earned an 8th-degree black belt in Tracy’s Kenpo Karate and a 4th-level black belt in Doce Pares under Chris Petrilli. In addition, he has achieved the second-degree level in Grandmaster Cacoy Cañete’s eskrido, is a certified instructor in Yang-style t’ai chi under Dr. John Candea, and is a guru with a 2nd-degree black belt in pentjak silat tongkat serak. It’s an impressive array of credentials by any martial artist’s standards. And yet the belts and sashes are essentially meaningless as far as Simonet is concerned, except in terms of what he’s been able to extract from them in order to create a functional fighting system that does what it’s meant to do in the moment of truth.

As an art, KI Fighting Concepts is a work in progress, says Simonet—one that, these days, is shaped more by looking inward than looking outward. “I’ve quit adding more stuff,” he says with conviction. In fact, after 30 years of dabbling in a broad palette of martial styles and extracting something from each of them, Simonet says he has reached a point at which his unique individual expression of the martial arts has begun to emerge through a process of elimination. “I’ve thrown out 80 percent of all the curriculums I’ve ever learned,” he says. “It’s like taking a machete and cutting out all of the superfluous stuff until you finally get to the core.”

The result, as it appears today, is perhaps best described as a distillation of Simonet’s 34 years of martial art experience that has morphed and become what he describes as “a whole new animal.” The embodiment of that animal is a 60-second form Simonet calls the Slam Set, which is performed on the mook jong, or wooden training dummy. “The Slam Set is like the hub of KI Fighting Concepts—the center of the wheel,” says Simonet, “and the spokes are all of the arts I’ve learned.”

Representing the core of his curriculum, the Slam Set first entered the martial arts arena in 2000 with Paladin’s release of Simonet’s seminal video, The Mook Jong Slam Set. “When we came out with the Slam Set in 2000, that was the genesis of the direction I’m moving in today,” he says. “And, ultimately, the destination is simplicity.” After years of research and development, Simonet says he believes simplicity is the key to becoming a well-rounded, proficient, functional martial artist.

“The Slam Set is the essence of simplicity,” he says, “and yet in that simplicity it’s amazingly complex. The Slam Set is the art and science of mook jong in 120 movements, but from those core movements, all of which flow together to create a single 60-second form, the variables are virtually infinite. Take the alphabet—if you run all of the letters together, you don’t get a single word (except ‘hi’ and ‘no’). And yet those 26 symbols can be combined in various ways to create at least 6 million words. If you can get that many variables just using the 26 characters of our alphabet, just imagine the almost infinite arsenal of techniques you can extract from the 120 core movements of the Slam Set.”

Since the release of The Mook Jong Slam Set series, Simonet, along with KI Fighting Concepts instructor and business manager Addy Hernandez, has produced several more videos with Paladin Press, including Silat Concepts, Advanced Silat Concepts, Beyond Kenpo, Wind and Rock, and Extreme Wing Chun. He also coauthored the book Silat Concepts Form and Function: Jurus 1–6 and Their Combat Applications with Michael D. Janich. His newest video is Six Seconds of Controlled Insanity: Fight-Stopping Techniques for Real Combat.

Q & A

Paladin : Tell us about Six Seconds of Controlled Insanity. Who is it for, and what is that person going to get out of it?
JS: It’s for people who are serious about martial arts or self-defense and are apt to use the skills it imparts on a professional basis. It’s simple, it’s functional, and it works right away, so it’s definitely applicable to Joe Martial Artist off the street as well, and that person will gain a lot from it. But it’s targeted specifically toward law enforcement types, bodyguards, bouncers—people who are going to put it to work for them in the field.

Paladin: Six Seconds of Controlled Insanity is an intriguing title. What does the “six seconds” refer to? And how does the oxymoron “controlled insanity” come into the picture?
JS: "‘Six seconds" refers to the amount of time it takes. Again, the focus here is very narrow—it’s literally the beginning of the form, the first two movements of the Slam Set. "Controlled" refers to the fact that you’re bound by the laws of anatomy, body structure, range, and intent, all of which are finite and specific; while "insanity" refers to the idea that you have to be able to let yourself go in combat—trust the machine and let the rage come out. So the oxymoron is an apt illustration of the dichotomy between the physical and the mental in combat: you’re unhinhibited by letting go, but at the same time you’re completely inhibited by the rules of structure. Again, you’ll fight like you train, so that’s key.

Paladin: How does Six Seconds of Controlled Insanity fit in with KI Fighting Concepts?
JS: Six Seconds of Controlled Insanity is truly my expression of my art, as opposed to my trying to do any other art. It’s more KI Fighting Concepts than anything I’ve ever done up to this point. Using the Slam Set as a reference point, it’s the culmination of all the ingredients of the art and science of mook jong combined. Essentially, out of the 120 movements in the 60-second Slam Set form, Six Seconds of Controlled Insanity narrows it down to just two movements, and yet from those two core movements, you’ve got 190 minutes of footage.

Paladin: Why those two movements? What is so key about them in terms of practical self-defense?
JS: It goes back to Bruce Lee’s idea that a superior gung-fu man is a simplifier. Those two movements at the beginning of the Slam Set translate to so many things. What’s covered in this video consists of only two movements that take all of six seconds to perform, and yet it’s amazingly versatile. So it’s the first two movements of the form, but it’s really a straight punch; it’s really an attack, it’s really a defense (or both); it’s really knife work; and so on. It covers several ranges as well—from outside punching to and through trapping range. It’s a whole minisystem in and of itself because of its range and versatility. It provides the martial artist with an aggregate of options.

Paladin: What is “revolutionary” about KI Fighting Concepts—that is, how is it a radical departure from the various systems it evolved from?
JS: There are a couple of things. First, it’s revolutionary in that the entire database of movements is condensed down to a 60-second form. Second, it’s literally a fusion of the arts—a genetic mutation as opposed to an evolution. If someone who had never seen my art before came to my school and watched me train, they’d think, “Oh, yeah, I recognize that; he’s doing kenpo—no, wait a minute, that’s not kenpo, that’s silat—wait, no, that’s wing . . . you know, I really don’t know what that is!” KI Fighting Concepts isn’t taught anywhere else. You’ll recognize aspects of a whole range of traditional arts in its component parts, and yet it’s not traditional. It’s not held back by doctrine, dogma, or traditional rules. The simple form I use to express my art is still all of its component parts, but it’s something new; it’s all of them, and it’s none of them. It’s a whole new language of movement, and yet it’s so literal, physical, and specific that you don’t have to understand the language to get it. The movement is so natural that it just happens.

Paladin: Why does Inside Kung-Fu consider you one of the “best-kept secrets of the martial arts community”? Have you intentionally kept a low profile? If so, why do you think you’re suddenly gaining notoriety in certain circles?
JS: Well, I live in an earth-berm home 2,500 feet above sea level in the middle of Washington State, if that tells you anything. I was always a research and development guy, and for three decades or so, yeah—I was just low-profile, behind-the-scenes, training and seeking out several teachers. Eventually, I started integrating everything and making it my own, and then one night when I was living in Manitou Springs, Colorado, I had this epiphany of sorts. I wound up working out late one night in this barn on our property up there in the foothills, and it got to be like 3:20 in the morning, and it all started coming together for me, and it was just this amazing moment of clarity and insight. I went inside and got my wife, gave her a pad of paper, and asked her to come outside and just watch what I did and write everything down. It was cold, it was dark, and I was like this madman in this sort of trance, and my whole body was steaming. It was crazy. But she wrote it all down, and that’s how the Slam Set came into being. Not long after that, I did The Mook Jong Slam Set with Paladin, and the rest is pretty much history. The notoriety started to come after the first video with Paladin. And still, to this day, I have people tell me that they have whole reference libraries full of martial art videos—there are so many out there, but they always tell me it’s the Paladin videos that stand out as the ones they really learn from. So it was after we did that first video that I really started to gain some recognition in the martial arts world.

Paladin: Tell us about the mook jong dummy. Why is it beneficial to a well-rounded martial artist’s training?
JS: It’s a great training partner. The mook jong dummy is absolutely the best training partner I’ve ever had. It never gets sick. It never gets tired. It never gets hurt. You can hit it with full-power, full-speed attacks, and you can even throw things like eye-shots at it—things you need to train but just couldn’t do with a human training partner. It also toughens the arms and the body; that daily battering of full-contact training on the dummy has a way of hardening the muscles and the bones. And the dummy is consistent. It doesn’t change. You’re working out with the same training partner day after day, so it gives you a cookie-cutter consistency that enables you to develop a functional base or physical structure from which to build your personal arsenal of fighting techniques.

Paladin: The training dummy in your videos doesn’t look like the ones most people who are familiar with them have seen. Why is that?
JS: Well, the mook jong is a wooden training dummy that’s indigenous to southern Chinese systems. I use a modified version that’s not traditional. There are more options with the modified version because it’s simpler in its construction. Our modified version doesn’t have the traditional “leg,” or fourth appendage. It just has three appendages. Again, there’s a perfect example of how the simpler you make things, the more infinite the possibilities become. And the version we use is also free-standing, whereas the traditional mook jong is up against a wall and very single-dimensional.

Paladin: Do you manufacture or sell the modified training dummies?
JS: Not any more. We were for a while, but we got out of that business. You can get mook jong dummies from other sources, though, and, really, it’s easy enough to build one yourself. As you know, Janich came out with a book on that very thing, The Mook Jong Construction Manual. So that’s what most people who want one do—buy Janich’s book and build their own.

Paladin: You offer instructor certifications for training with the mook jong dummy. Tell us more about that.
JS: We have weekend training seminars up on the property in the mountains, and, yes, we do certify people in the Slam Set. All of the information on that is available on our Web site. www.kifightingconcepts.com

Paladin: Tell us how your acclaimed Wind and Rock camp has evolved over the years.
JS: This year we’ll host our sixth annual Wind and Rock training camp at our training center on Lake Chelan in central Washington. The property itself has evolved, for one thing. We’ve built more platforms over the years, and we recently added the mook jong octagon with 13 wooden dummies—this will be our second camp with that. We’ve also added a 600-meter hiking trail/obstacle course that we use as part of the training now. As far as the instruction itself goes, we don’t bring in outside instructors now; it’s just me and Addy teaching. And the focus has shifted to a curriculum of instruction geared toward certifications as opposed to the more free-form martial arts camp format we started out with. People who come to Wind and Rock now generally come to earn instructor certifications.

Paladin: Who or what has been your greatest influence as a martial artist?
JS: That’s a tough one. So many come to mind. But if I had to narrow it down to just one, I’d have to say Bruce Lee. He was a true visionary, the quintessential innovator. He didn’t just talk about it; he could do it, and he opened the door for those seeking martial arts enlightenment by unlocking the shackles of traditional dogma so it no longer had a stranglehold on us. It’s truly extraordinary how far ahead he was. The things he was saying 40 years ago were revolutionary at the time, and yet they’ve withstood the test of time. They are exactly what I adhere to in my practice today. In his 1963 book Chinese Gung Fu: The Philosophical Art of Self-Defense, Bruce Lee said, “A superior gung fu man is a simplifier.” That encapsulates what I’m about. Only half-cultivated systems add a lot of flowery movement. The ideal system is one that has shed all of the superfluous stuff to reveal the essential core.

Paladin: In a nutshell, what is your philosophy as a martial artist?
JS: The answer is simple—simplicity is the answer.

SIX SECONDS OF CONTROLLED INSANITY
Fight Stopping Techniques for Real Combat