Ghestalting: Remember Your Kempos

“I can’t remember that technique!” Do you recall saying this? Does your instructor show you the technique again, and you say, “Oh, I used to know that?” If these comments are familiar, then you must endeavor to learn these techniques more thoroughly. Martial arts moves must be more than familiar; you must remember the movements correctly. Here is how to improve your memory.

Before you can improve your memory, you must understand something about memory. The brain has several cooperative memory schemes. Two key strategies are long and short-term memory—each of these two schemes branches into sub-categories with specific recall mechanisms. We are only interested in short-term memory and ghestalting.

Short-term memory can hold five items with relative ease, plus or minus two items. This limited memory leaves a range between three and seven things. Notice that US phone numbers are seven digits long. The Phone Company utilizes this phenomenon. For our example, we will use the optimal number five.

To remember your techniques

1. Practice your first five techniques five times each.
2. Repeat this set of five at least three more times. This strategy will help imbed five kempos into your mind.
3. Please do not do more at this point; we are trying to train your mind.

The next step requires an explanation of ghestalting. Ghestalting is a phenomenon of grouping things into units. As an exercise of this theory, say aloud as many different types of animals as you can. You will notice that you recall between three and seven animals between pauses and that these animals group somehow. That is what we will do for your kempos.

Once you have completed the practice of the first five kempos, to be called Set 1, you can move to the next five kempos. Practice your following five kempos five times each. Repeat this second set as a whole at least three more times. We’ll call it Set 2. Now you have two groups of five or ten remembered kempos. Practice these two sets again to reinforce the sets or units.

What we’ve accomplished is to establish units or Kempo sets. Two of the items short-term memory can store are now groups of five kempos. We’ve increased your memory by 250% already. Repeat this procedure in the following days with Set 3, Set 4, and Set 5. What you will find is a dramatic increase in your memory of kempos.

Always perform your kempos in these sets. If you do one Kempo in Set 2, for example, then you should practice the other four. This reinforcement of these units or groups helps utilize the brain’s natural mechanism of ghestalting to help memory improve.

The old masters recognized this phenomenon and implemented it in their training. Forms and katas are methods of ghestalting, utilizing this phenomenon as a training exercise—the kata group various direction changes and body movements into sets of exercises. When linked together in a form, they create the katas we know today, like Pinan or Kusanku. Advance students can adapt this technique of ghestalting to their kata training. Use it. This memory hack works.

We now refer to kempos as Punch or Kick Defenses. There is a whole category of Defenses that deal with grabs, pushes, locks, and weapons. We renamed these elements of the curriculum to make the lessons easier to organize and how the techniques fit in the grand scheme of the art.