Filipino-American kickboxing gym celebrates 20 years in the Bay Area

SAN JOSE — Ed Carpio is master of what he calls “punch, kick, elbow, knee therapy.”

Inside his gym Condition and Competition Kickboxing along Old Bayshore Road in San Jose, six days a week, he and his team teach people how to skillfully and artfully stay healthy, and fight and defend themselves through kickboxing, Muay Thai and strength and conditioning classes.

“I’m here to make sure that I can fulfill your goal, whatever your goal is,” Carpio, 53, said.

On Oct. 5, the Filipino-American coach and former champion fighter will celebrate 20 years of business.

His method of teaching is rooted in martial arts, something he learned from his mentor and former coach, Cung Le, a Vietnamese-American fighter from San Jose who had a fruitful professional career in the early years of American combat sports through televised leagues such as Strike Force and the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Le, who grew up competing in wrestling, taught Carpio the fundamentals of martial arts starting in the 1990s through Sanshou, otherwise known as Sanda, a Chinese full-contact kickboxing sport which mixes punches, kicks, knees and wrestling. The discipline can be traced back to ancient duels involving two combatants who would face each other on a Lei Tai, or raised platform, and fight to the death.

The Chinese military eventually developed Sanshou into a national sport, absent the deathmatch caveat.

Carpio grew up in the 1970s and 80s, through the rising early era of America’s explosion of martial arts when Hollywood stars such as Bruce Lee started making films like “The Way of the Dragon,” and later when Jean-Claude Van Damme released “Bloodsport.”

Already involved in basketball and track growing up, he decided to join Le’s gym and become one of his first students. Carpio took and won his first Sanshou fight in 1996.

The trophy for that fight still sits in his office as a reminder of his early roots in fighting.

Carpio said during that time, gyms were more brutal, and walking into one could get a bit bloody – well before studies behind chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, were well known.

He would go on to become a national lightweight Sanshou champion before opening his own gym in 2006, leaving behind a career of management in tech, which included jobs at Hewlett-Packard and Cisco during the early rise of the tech industry in Silicon Valley.

Carpio decided his gym would be less bloodthirsty and more friendly to all levels of skill or desire, whether they came to fight or just to release some endorphins for fun.

“I loved teaching. I loved sharing knowledge. I love changing people’s lives and making an impact,” Carpio said.

He went through two different locations on Junction Avenue in North San Jose before settling three years ago on his current spot in a warehouse building near Highway 101 and Old Oakland Road.

Over the years, he’s trained hundreds of students, including, notably, Jan Koum, the co-founder and former CEO of the popular messaging platform, WhatsApp, before Koum sold his company and became a billionaire. Other notable people who’ve trained at the gym include Jerry Fealofani Afemata, better known as renowned reggae artist J Boog, and Cisco Lutu, a popular Vegas-based DJ known as BigBody Cisco.

“For me to be part of helping someone reach their goal, that’s it,” Carpio said.

For Alex “AP” Pasos, his goal was to fight and compete to become a kickboxing champion.

After Pasos walked into Carpio’s gym in 2015, he would go on to win five different championships and amassed an amateur fighting record of 10 wins and 3 losses, with two by knockout. Now, he’s both a fighter and a coach.

“All those belts, all those wins, it was through a lot of perseverance, a lot of ups and downs,” Pasos said. “It’s just the foundation of people that I’ve been with for over 11 years now. In that span of years that I was with (Team) CCK, I couldn’t see myself training or building with another gym or set of coaches.”

On the gym’s red and black foam mats, active fighters, casual fitness fanatics and first-timers alike train and sweat, throwing punches, kicks, elbows and knees with smiles.

San Jose resident Amanda Hernandez first walked into the gym alone in 2019 without any prior formal combat sports training, motivated by a goal to lose weight.

Now, she’s on Carpio’s fight team, trains five to six days a week, and said she’s in the best shape of her life. She said she’s improved her health, sharpened her senses, and has made lasting friendships with people she otherwise wouldn’t have met.

“Finding a love of a combat sport has sort of brought me back to my teenage self, my girlhood in a lot of ways,” Hernandez, 41, said. “It’s just something outside of the structure of my life that I’ve chosen to dedicate myself to, and it’s something I’m not doing for anybody else but me. Not for any other gain, or anything like that. Just for me. It’s so freeing when you’re doing something without a performative aspect.”

Behind the front desk, fighters and newcomers alike are greeted by Eddie Bugayong Jr., likely clad in his favorite Deftones hat and collectable New Balance shoes, who goes by “Coach Boogie.”

Bugayong Jr., 46, grew up with Carpio in San Jose, and has been there for every day of the 20 years Carpio has been in business. He first joined the gym as the front desk manager at Carpio’s first location, and would later develop his own love for kickboxing and Muay Thai, becoming both an assistant coach and pro-shop manager.

Through the years, he’s undergone a kidney transplant, heart bypass surgeries and suffered complications from diabetes. Through all that, it was training and coaching that completely changed Bugayong Jr.’s life, he said.

“For me personally, it’s done a lot for me,” he said. “It gave me a sense of community and a motivation to continue to do what I do.”

Through his health complications, Bugayong Jr. said training in martial arts has kept him healthy and happy. The gym, he said, gives him confidence and purpose.

“I take a lot of pride in what I do,” he said. “There’s moments of gratitude where I’ve been doing it for so long and I just look around and see what we’ve built. That’s something to be proud of.”