Traditional Taekwondo Technique Workshop Blog is a martial art resource by Colin Wee (5th Dan) promoting insight on Taekwondo patterns and taekwondo techniques. Colin is based in Perth, Western Australia. Colin has been hard at it since 1983.
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Hikaru Dojo, Perth, congratulates one of our female students 7th kyu who showed some quick thinking today and took the right course of action by calling the cops. Read the following note she sent to the Principal - name and school omitted for privacy. Good on you!
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9:40am, Wednesday the 28th of October 2009.
Dear Parents,
Hi, my name is and I am one of the parents here at School. I would like to relate an incident to you that happened to me this morning in the car park directly across from the school.
I was on my way back down to the car with my mother and toddler when a beat up looking vehicle parked 2 spaces down from us. Two men, one young and the other older, got out of the car and walked over to the little hut just across from where they had parked.
They took note of us and made some very unsavoury remarks such as “Hot Mama”, which made my mother and I very uncomfortable. I quickly strapped my baby into the car and urged my mother to get into the car as quickly as possible as they were taking (particularly the older man) more than a casual interest in us. I got into the car and reversed out of the parking lot, before driving off I made note of the drivers licence plate. At this point the older man advanced towards us in a menacing fashion and was obviously very keen to remove us as quickly as possible from the car park. He continued to look at us until we were well and truly away from the car park.
They were clearly dangerous and I was very concerned for the safety of my mother and child.
At this point I decided to report the incident to the Cottesloe Police station. By reporting this incident to the police within minutes of it occurring, the police officers were able to dispatch a squad car immediately and the two men were apprehended and arrested in the act of committing a crime. The police officers were very grateful for the information that led to them being able to make this arrest and would like to urge anyone seeing any suspicious behaviour to report it as quickly as possible. If you are not able to make it to a Police Station please ring 131 444.
The prevailing wisdom with kicks is that for most kicks (especially the basic traditional kicks) once extended, the leg is recoiled back along the same path. This means that you don't send the foot out and then change angle in mid-air. This of course can be done, I have myself done this in sparring for kicks that were not always fully committed in order to chamber the kick mid air and send the striking leg out again. However, this is not the same for do-or-die basic kicks. With 100% power, the torque and the vibrational force if not dissipated correctly, recoils back along the skeletal structure. It typically comes back for the first major joint - your knee, but the vibration is equally happy going for your hip, neck or your support knee. Last Sunday I was practicing side kicks with my 6th kyu, and I was noticing that the kick did not seem to be coming back along the same path. It seemed more or less correct but right in the end, it looked flappy and 'wrong.' After some experimentation, we came to the conclusion that for that specific side thrust kick (the lower limb rises towards the point of impact), the kick is pushed out with the large muscles of the leg - gluts and hamstrings. It's hard to control the retraction or recoil, and some people would relax the hip and retract it using the smaller quads and hip extensor muscles. This kick requires leg muscle retraction to power the leg back to the chambered position next to the support leg. This is the best way to return your body to a 'ready' position, or to allow you to re-engage the use of your hands to counter.
Taekwondo One Step Sparring Curriculum by my parent organisation uses six core one step techniques from the Nam Seo Kwan Taekwondo tradition. One step sparring allows us to gain insight into distancing and timing.
In addition, and I think more importantly, one steps allow students to practice bringing two hands up and placed between them and their opponents. It also allows students to strike 'from where their hands are,' and not necessarily start the strike from a hip chambered location.
The best thing with one steps are the endless variations that can be included for beginners, intermediates and advance. The strikes can be modified away from the traditional lunge punch to include faster jabs, shorter and punchier attacks. Intermediate and advance taekwondo one step sparring can also deal with the follow up punch from the opponent requiring a more pragmatic response to someone throwing several techniques your way. We do this by performing the first part of the basic one step sparring tactic, and add on what is required dependant on the follow on attack.
In the following video, we see GM Keith Yates performing one of the basic one step sparring techniques from our curriculum.
Students practicing their one steps today had to contend with moving their hands much faster than they would on other drills. They also had to constantly modify their technique against opponents of varying heights. And to be effective, they had to ensure their strikes would hang together on the point of impact to juice up their opponent, if necessary.
In continuing to deal with an Anonymous poster who has misgivings about a drill I featured in "Do-san: Defending Against Straight Blast Punches to the Face", I am including portions of his initial post and a video I have pulled off youtube to highlight elements in his post that are legitimate. While I have communicated that I don't particularly like his tone (nor the manner he's taken to Pat from Mokuren Dojo), there is some value to what Anonymous is getting at, and we should bear this in mind while we continue our own training.
The drill itself shows a response to a basic traditional punch thrown iteratively to the defender. The defender is shown deflecting the oncoming arm off centreline using the blade of the forearm. The forearm is rotated 90 degrees back and forth around centerline catching the striking limb from the outside.
Anonymous: I can’t say I’m impressed with this drill. For one the attacker’s punch is fully extended before he even reaches the defender’s face meaning she’ll never get hit even if she does nothing, what’s the point of defending attacks that’ll never connect anyway? With a good defense his fist should pass over your shoulder nearly missing your head, this is clearly not the case here. My second problem with this is that she seems to grab while parrying: this is dangerous since he’ll be able to pull you off balance when he retracts his arm (presumably into another strike), that is if she indeed would be able to grab if he would actually mount some decent attacks: you do not leave your arm dangling after you extended and attacks should be fluid and smooth, not mechanical like in the video.
In the following video I got off youtube, you can see karate students fighting against boxers. To their credit, the karate fighters are performing technically sound moves -- but to engage a boxer using such rules of engagement as you see below is not advantageous as you can see in the following video. This supports what Anonymous is saying - most traditional schools do not deal very well with even the simplest of attacks. A fight with a boxer would be a wake up call. Indeed.
Such a simple match up between a karate or other hard style type martial arts and boxing replicating the same conditions above would find any of us hard pressed to do better than the karateka in the video.
To better enjoy hard style techniques, kicks should have been done to the knee and groin area, attacks or counters should have been to gap close and throw the boxers, even to fight at close range for a takedown. No controls were used and there was certainly no accelerative gap closing that some sportive karate camps use to good effect. Upper body coverage was also very sparse.
The following is a video of a sparring match between boxer and kickboxer. The kickboxer here dominates the boxer -- he goes for the legs early and consistently. It can be said however that the kickboxer does seem to have experience boxing - from the way he covers and the way he's moving. But still, it shows some benefits of using legs.
Anonymous: If you think what I said is wrong than state your own reasons and we can actually have a discussion. If you cannot take criticism and expect everyone to just agree with you and sing your praise then you shouldn’t be voicing your opinions on the internet, let alone putting up videos of any of your techniques.
Yes, Anonymous didn't really say I was full of s***. But to my credit I have ensured all of the Anonymous postings make it on the blog, and in fact I have even agreed to various fundamental areas of his argument. I am not even saying that he is wrong. My position is that he is looking at this particular drill in isolation of our entire program - and assuming we ... namely, I don't know my stuff. Such a perspective as offered by this blog does not accurately give the entire context in which we build basic skills nor does it help Anonymous really learn anything that is of value to himself.
Anonymous: I certainly don’t need to discuss MA with people who only practice pretend, pre-arranged fighting
Anonymous: If this is how you and your students train you’re in for a rude awakening, I wish you good luck if you do get into a fight with someone that doesn’t want to play by your rules and actually knows how to throw a decent punch.
I will reserve my right to continue to voice my opinions on the internet.
This blog takes maybe 10 or so minutes of my time every post. I have to pick out what I want to write about, run through it quickly, and that's it. You can see many of my posts are rush jobs, but this is a resource that I'm building for my own needs. If I am full of s***, anyone can come and critisize (I am happy to post all comments). If you don't enjoy reading the posts, don't read.
Whatever I might claim, I am first a black belt from GM Yates' system and am influenced greatly by his approach to the martial arts. GM Yates is a lovely person to talk with, and I have learned much from him in the last few years. Whilst I did not train directly under him I am happy to count him as one of my teachers.
