T
TKDKid
Guest
So, I'm tired of hearing people say negative things about any given art. Tae Kwon Do, Aikido, Tai Chi Chuan, or what have you. When someone spews these sorts of things it's always based on no more than a few hours of observance at a single school. It just drives me up the wall.
Ofcourse, for the most part, the people here see the good that all arts have to offer, I'm just talking about the general MA public of which I'm sure we represent a small percentage. It just frustrates me to no end to hear someone say that TKD is useless for self defense when I know good and well that if I threw out my other training and relied on TKD alone I could easily defend myself against the average attacker.
Or that all Tai Chi is good for is old people exercise...give me a break. Don't get me wrong, I'm not flaming anyone here, it's just something that's been building up for a while and I needed somewhere to vent it.
I guess what tops it off is an article I read in the November 2005 issue of Black Belt Magazine. The article is by Bill Wallace on page fifty-two. He is writing about the merits of a few different punches used in boxing/ kickboxing and how they could be beneficial to many different arts. I agree. In fact, many of the punches he writes about are included in our basic TKD curriculum.
What really gets me though is his closing statement:
"If you were to start with two people of equal size, weight, build, strength, mentality and stamina, and have one do a month of boxing and the other a month of martial arts, the first time they faced off, the boxer would beat the tar out of the karateka. Why? For one thing, white belts almost never spar during their first month of training. If the do spar, they generally don't know what they're doing because chances are all they practiced during that first month was the reverse punch and front kick."
I have a great respect for Bill Wallace. I think he is an extrordinary martial artist with a knowledge I can only hope to attain, but seriously, what the heck? I don't know what karate schools he's been to, but at my TKD school our white belts learn well more than just the reverse punch and front kick their first month. I don't really remember being a white belt myself, it's been too long ago, but when my younger brother was a white belt he knew a pleathera of techniques and was sparring quite proficiently by the end of his first month.
I guess what I'm trying to get at here is don't make assumptions. We all know there are McDojos out there that make a mockery of pleanty of different arts, and we're all biased toward our primary art, no matter how much we refuse to admit it. But please, until you've found a reputable school of a certain art and spent a considerable amount of time in it, don't say that the given art is deficient, because it probably isn't
Ofcourse, for the most part, the people here see the good that all arts have to offer, I'm just talking about the general MA public of which I'm sure we represent a small percentage. It just frustrates me to no end to hear someone say that TKD is useless for self defense when I know good and well that if I threw out my other training and relied on TKD alone I could easily defend myself against the average attacker.
Or that all Tai Chi is good for is old people exercise...give me a break. Don't get me wrong, I'm not flaming anyone here, it's just something that's been building up for a while and I needed somewhere to vent it.
I guess what tops it off is an article I read in the November 2005 issue of Black Belt Magazine. The article is by Bill Wallace on page fifty-two. He is writing about the merits of a few different punches used in boxing/ kickboxing and how they could be beneficial to many different arts. I agree. In fact, many of the punches he writes about are included in our basic TKD curriculum.
What really gets me though is his closing statement:
"If you were to start with two people of equal size, weight, build, strength, mentality and stamina, and have one do a month of boxing and the other a month of martial arts, the first time they faced off, the boxer would beat the tar out of the karateka. Why? For one thing, white belts almost never spar during their first month of training. If the do spar, they generally don't know what they're doing because chances are all they practiced during that first month was the reverse punch and front kick."
I have a great respect for Bill Wallace. I think he is an extrordinary martial artist with a knowledge I can only hope to attain, but seriously, what the heck? I don't know what karate schools he's been to, but at my TKD school our white belts learn well more than just the reverse punch and front kick their first month. I don't really remember being a white belt myself, it's been too long ago, but when my younger brother was a white belt he knew a pleathera of techniques and was sparring quite proficiently by the end of his first month.
I guess what I'm trying to get at here is don't make assumptions. We all know there are McDojos out there that make a mockery of pleanty of different arts, and we're all biased toward our primary art, no matter how much we refuse to admit it. But please, until you've found a reputable school of a certain art and spent a considerable amount of time in it, don't say that the given art is deficient, because it probably isn't