A rant...

[bluemtn]

You want to know what really gets my nerves flaming? It's posters (not here, but another forum/ website that I rarely visit) that act like TKD isn't good for anything. The poster said, "I signed my child up for X art, because if he took TKD and got a black belt, he couldn't defend himself." What- I didn't learn blocks, punches, or anything else other than a few kicks within a few months of being in class, or something? Come on now... I realize that TKD isn't perfect, but if you can show me proof of ANY art that is, I'll do cartwheels through out the entirety of my yard- which is over an acre.

Sorry, but I needed to get that out. But please, no bashing or flaming about this. It was only a rant, after all.

 

[bluemtn]

I edited the title, since it really isn't specifically about those who don't do TKD.

 

[14 Kempo]

Ignorance ...

All arts have their positives and negatives. Some have more positives than do others, however, some of those positives change dependant upon the students abilities and capabilities. Any art is good for a child, no matter the art, as long as it teaches respect and disipline. And one laswt point, any art is better than no art when it comes to defending yourself.

 

[jks9199]

You want to know what really gets my nerves flaming? It's posters (not here, but another forum/ website that I rarely visit) that act like TKD isn't good for anything. The poster said, "I signed my child up for X art, because if he took TKD and got a black belt, he couldn't defend himself." What- I didn't learn blocks, punches, or anything else other than a few kicks within a few months of being in class, or something? Come on now... I realize that TKD isn't perfect, but if you can show me proof of ANY art that is, I'll do cartwheels through out the entirety of my yard- which is over an acre.

Sorry, but I needed to get that out. But please, no bashing or flaming about this. It was only a rant, after all.

Why do a lot of people have a bad image of Tae Kwon Do?

I think it's pretty simple. At least in my area, it's very easy to pass several TKD schools within a couple of blocks of each other. Most push their before & after school programs (why not be honest and call it day care? Or are they afraid of the regulation that would entail...), many offer guaranteed black belt programs, and most offer very little real self defense training.

And that's fine; they're selling what at least part of the market wants.

And there are other TKD schools around that primarily teach adults, with a very different attitude, and you're lucky to get a black belt from them after several years of hard work.

That's fine, too. They're serving a different market.

Since the McDojo thing has already been done, I'll work for a moment with that idea. There are little fast-food/diner type places with great food, that's healthy and delicious. There aren't a lot of them... and if you mention fast food/diner -- you expect greasy burgers, fries dripping in fat, and enough fat & calories in one "meal" for a family's entire week, not the exceptions. That's basically what's happened with TKD; the sheer volume of schools that are run as very successful businesses guarantees that the handful of places that are less business and more fight oriented get lost in the glare.

 

[bluemtn]

Why do a lot of people have a bad image of Tae Kwon Do?

I think it's pretty simple. At least in my area, it's very easy to pass several TKD schools within a couple of blocks of each other. Most push their before & after school programs (why not be honest and call it day care? Or are they afraid of the regulation that would entail...), many offer guaranteed black belt programs, and most offer very little real self defense training.

And that's fine; they're selling what at least part of the market wants.

And there are other TKD schools around that primarily teach adults, with a very different attitude, and you're lucky to get a black belt from them after several years of hard work.

That's fine, too. They're serving a different market.

Since the McDojo thing has already been done, I'll work for a moment with that idea. There are little fast-food/diner type places with great food, that's healthy and delicious. There aren't a lot of them... and if you mention fast food/diner -- you expect greasy burgers, fries dripping in fat, and enough fat & calories in one "meal" for a family's entire week, not the exceptions. That's basically what's happened with TKD; the sheer volume of schools that are run as very successful businesses guarantees that the handful of places that are less business and more fight oriented get lost in the glare.

How true and unfortunate... In my area, there really isn't that much, and it seems like the instructors of the various styles respect one and another (or at least for the most part).

 

[tellner]

An awful lot of it has to be laid directly at the doorstep of the South Korean government. They were trying to do a specific thing - make TKD the biggest martial art in the world or at least make it bigger than Judo and Karate. It was necessary for ethnic pride and nation building. They accomplished their goal but in doing created a thing that was guaranteed to sit poorly with certain segments of the public. They also had a built in base of detractors in the Japanese and those who favor the Japanese martial arts.

 

[exile]

Why do a lot of people have a bad image of Tae Kwon Do?

I think it's pretty simple. At least in my area, it's very easy to pass several TKD schools within a couple of blocks of each other. Most push their before & after school programs (why not be honest and call it day care? Or are they afraid of the regulation that would entail...), many offer guaranteed black belt programs, and most offer very little real self defense training.

And that's fine; they're selling what at least part of the market wants.

And there are other TKD schools around that primarily teach adults, with a very different attitude, and you're lucky to get a black belt from them after several years of hard work.

That's fine, too. They're serving a different market.

Since the McDojo thing has already been done, I'll work for a moment with that idea. There are little fast-food/diner type places with great food, that's healthy and delicious. There aren't a lot of them... and if you mention fast food/diner -- you expect greasy burgers, fries dripping in fat, and enough fat & calories in one "meal" for a family's entire week, not the exceptions. That's basically what's happened with TKD; the sheer volume of schools that are run as very successful businesses guarantees that the handful of places that are less business and more fight oriented get lost in the glare.

I think jks' post pretty much sums it up perfectly.

There are of course karate schools which do the same thing. But there are many more TKD schools than karate schools these days, I think, due in large part to the Olympic status that has made TKD a household name in place where karate is probably unknown. So TKD will wind up being a lightning rod for whatever complaints there are about the MAs in general, the way people used to talk about crime in New York City, in spite of the fact that NY had a lower per capita crime rate than many other places. The bigger you are, the bigger a target cross section you offer—as MAists, we should know that well, eh? :wink1:

But I think there's something else involved. I've posted about this before and Flying Crane has too, I recall. The problem is that hard training for SD and young children are a very difficult mix—because a lot of parents, I suspect, do not want their kids to learn the really nasty techs that TMAs have in their repertoires.

So here's a eight year old kid, say. And here is a simple tech that I learned early on in TKD: when your assailant throws a hard righthand haymaker at you , you step in on him while knocking the punch up and away with a rising block using your left arm, your right side now facing his centerline, and smash his face with a horizontal elbow strike. You then grip his punching arm or should with a muchimi-type conversion of your deflecting left arm into a grab, while converting the `chamber' of your right arm brought about by the elbow strike into a knifehad strike on the attacker's throat. You might follow this up by a head twist, breaking the assailant's neck, or, more mercifully, a hard side kick low to the side of his knee joint, which is likely to be permanently damaged if you're even a bit on target with the kick. All of this will take a little more than a second to execute, I'd say, based on my own training. Very good; now shall we teach this to the eight year old? Shall we train him to execute it in the realistic way we would be able to do with an adult? Do this child's parents want him or her to learn to be able to do this?

My sense is, the answer is no: parents do not want their children trained to destroy the face and/or rupture the larynx of another person, even an attacker, although they may say that they do. What they're uncomfortable with is the reality of violence which actually does implicate their child; what they really want is for the child not to be attacked, and for the MA school to keep him occupied for a certain number of hours a week during which they can entertain the illusion that he's being trained for self-defense. This may not be true in all cases, but from what I've seen, parents do not actually want their child to learn how to deliver a palm heel strike to an assailant's mouth that can result in the latter losing an impressive number of front teeth.

So in a sense, any MA school that wants to stay in the black had better not push serious CQ empty-hand self-defense techniques, at least if its bottom line depends on a large percentage of children. The problem isn't the kids; it's the parent's expectations. And since so many TKD schools depend on children for their clientele, it's pretty clear what's going to happen in many of those cases...

An awful lot of it has to be laid directly at the doorstep of the South Korean government. They were trying to do a specific thing - make TKD the biggest martial art in the world or at least make it bigger than Judo and Karate. It was necessary for ethnic pride and nation building. They accomplished their goal but in doing created a thing that was guaranteed to sit poorly with certain segments of the public. They also had a built in base of detractors in the Japanese and those who favor the Japanese martial arts.

Ah, yes. The systematic campaign to purge TKD of its kwan-era/Korean War phase ferocity, when the South Korean Tiger commandos put the fear of the war god into the North Koreans and later, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. A long book or two could be written about that campaign, by the ROK government through its TKD arms, the Kukkiwon and the WTF... they share a lot of the blame for KMAs losing the credibility they once had, when Ian Fleming's fantasy MA menace was not a Japanese karateka but the terrifying North Korean Oddjob, remember?

 

[karatekid1975]

I agree that most people have a bad "rap" with TKD. I did, too (when I did TSD). But it's the whole Mcdojang/daycare thing going on. But I invite those people to vist my instructor any day. They would get a different view right away. Yes, we do WTF sparring, but the biggest thing here is self defense. I love it.

 

[Steel Tiger]

An awful lot of it has to be laid directly at the doorstep of the South Korean government. They were trying to do a specific thing - make TKD the biggest martial art in the world or at least make it bigger than Judo and Karate. It was necessary for ethnic pride and nation building. They accomplished their goal but in doing created a thing that was guaranteed to sit poorly with certain segments of the public. They also had a built in base of detractors in the Japanese and those who favor the Japanese martial arts.

As a person from a CMA background may I ask why the ROK government sought to make TKD the biggest martial art in the world. Was it some sort of jealously over the popularity of Japanese arts? Was it a desire to set Korea on the world stage? This began well before TKD became an Olympic sport, so can anyone tell me why?

 

[exile]

I agree that most people have a bad "rap" with TKD. I did, too (when I did TSD). But it's the whole Mcdojang/daycare thing going on. But I invite those people to vist my instructor any day. They would get a different view right away. Yes, we do WTF sparring, but the biggest thing here is self defense. I love it.

Hi Laurie—Nice to hear from you!!! How are things going?

Judging by your post, the answer is `Very well'. And you've got a dojang with a SD-oriented instructor—a sign of a lucky person, for sure. I'm glad to hear it. SD-oriented TKD is an absolutely lethal system, if you train it hard...

 

[tellner]

Steel Tiger, I wasn't there and can only guess, but it's an educated guess. Korea has had an odd combination of national feelings of inferiority, possibly brought about by being brutally treated by Japan and being stuck between Japan and China coupled with a strong sense of nationalism further modified by partition into one modern state and the closest approximation I can imagine to Hell. Part of the nation building had to be freeing the Hermit Kingdom from feelings of being less than the Japanese. Having a martial art that was also in the Olympics, was styled in a uniquely Korean fashion and which had more adherents worldwide was - just my best guess - a significant part of that.

 

[Steel Tiger]

That's for that Tellner. It gives me some perspective with which to judge the various discussions of TKD politics.

 

[Logan]

It's not the art, it is the artist. TKD suffers in reputation sometimes because of its size - the % of bad weeds is probably around the same as most arts. However, tkd is so widely popular that these weeds are a tad more visible in number.

Some of the best martial artists I know are tkd practioners. Certainly, amongst the most dedicated and hardest training.

 

[tellner]

Sometimes it really is the art. WTF Tae Kwon Do has been systematically stripped of realistic punching, close in work, throwing and a number of other things in order to optimize it for competition against other WTF TKD practitioners in very specialized sporting competitions. If you're after the practical use of weapons, for instance, it's undeniably lousy. If you're after high kicks there's no doubt whatsoever that it's great.

"It's not the art, it's the artist" is certainly true in one sense. Styles don't fight styles. Men fight men. It is also the most ludicrous cop out. It's used to shift blame for the deficiencies in the tactics, techniques and training methods onto the practitioner. You can't deal with a swordsman? It's not your style's fault even if there's no weapons and the few counters they teach are laughable. It's your fault for not studying hard and long enough and having faith that it will work.

 

[stickarts]

No matter what you do there will always be a critic!

Full steam ahead!!

 

[Shaderon]

I agree with both Tellner and Logan, even though what I consider pure arts, the ones centered around combat not sport, (not degrading sport arts here) would, if studied long enough and in their entirety, would probably have all contingencies catered for, the order in which they are taught dictates what each person of each level is ready for. I can actually think of a couple of moves that could be pulled on a man with a sword.... one includes another weapon which I have in my cupboard back home and I can fashion out of an innocent looking object very quickly using a breaking technique. But that's only because I'm a bloodthirstly wench with a love of reading about higher stuff than I've learnt in class.

Sport arts usually have the most dangerous stuff stripped out, the larynx destruction that Exile described (which is a favourite move of mine incidently) is watered down as it's not needed in sport arts, to get points you don't need to disable your opponant.

Saying that, sport arts CAN be brought back up to combat level given the right additives, and some teachers I have read about on here seem to be doing just that.

Exile's point that parents don't want to have their children taught deadly moves is correct, to me the main reason for this, having seen, heard and felt my daughter and her friends training, is the fact that children are so unpredictable and have to learn consequences before they can learn to damage others. Some parents don't want to take the responsibility of teaching the child consequences, and in todays society they aren't learning from their play as much. If they steal or vandalise they don't get a smack off the victim any more, their parents get fined.

 

[Xue Sheng]

You want to know what really gets my nerves flaming? It's posters (not here, but another forum/ website that I rarely visit) that act like TKD isn't good for anything. The poster said, "I signed my child up for X art, because if he took TKD and got a black belt, he couldn't defend himself." What- I didn't learn blocks, punches, or anything else other than a few kicks within a few months of being in class, or something? Come on now... I realize that TKD isn't perfect, but if you can show me proof of ANY art that is, I'll do cartwheels through out the entirety of my yard- which is over an acre.

Sorry, but I needed to get that out. But please, no bashing or flaming about this. It was only a rant, after all.

Ahh my style (Xuefu :mst: ) is perfect, but I cannot teach it to you because it is to deadly :uhyeah:

Those who think and say TKD is not good for anything obviously never trained with my teacher back in my TKD days. And more likely they NEVER trained it at all. I have mellowed with age (or at least I feel I have) and I have started just telling these people yup, your right it is not effective and gone back to my training (of course these days I am generally told that about Taiji)

I agree with both Tellner and Logan, even though what I consider pure arts, the ones centered around combat not sport, (not degrading sport arts here) would, if studied long enough and in their entirety, would probably have all contingencies catered for, the order in which they are taught dictates what each person of each level is ready for. I can actually think of a couple of moves that could be pulled on a man with a sword.... one includes another weapon which I have in my cupboard back home and I can fashion out of an innocent looking object very quickly using a breaking technique. But that's only because I'm a bloodthirstly wench with a love of reading about higher stuff than I've learnt in class.

Sport arts usually have the most dangerous stuff stripped out, the larynx destruction that Exile described (which is a favourite move of mine incidently) is watered down as it's not needed in sport arts, to get points you don't need to disable your opponant.

Saying that, sport arts CAN be brought back up to combat level given the right additives, and some teachers I have read about on here seem to be doing just that.

Exile's point that parents don't want to have their children taught deadly moves is correct, to me the main reason for this, having seen, heard and felt my daughter and her friends training, is the fact that children are so unpredictable and have to learn consequences before they can learn to damage others. Some parents don't want to take the responsibility of teaching the child consequences, and in todays society they aren't learning from their play as much. If they steal or vandalise they don't get a smack off the victim any more, their parents get fined.

Since I train a few CMA styles that are in the eyes of many very different (And they would not be entirely wrong) Let me say that if I train Taiji and only taiji like my sifu did for many years it would be effective, very effective at what it is designed for. If you are looking to go out and start a fight and lift the other guy off the ground and slam him…well then Taiji would not be effective nor for you. If I want to defend myself against an attack and use the other guys force against himself and take his center, redirect him and take him down (and appear to be doing it in a relaxed manner) then yup Taiji is very effective.

If I take Xingyi and decide I am going to hop around like a western boxer and dodge parry and punch well then Xingyi does not work to well either. But if I am going to meet your attack with one of my own that is both defense and attack and use my power to hit and stop you as well as your power then I have just hit you with pretty much the force of a truck and it is incredibly effective.

If I take Sanda and decide I want to go about this in a relaxed defensive manner as I might do with taiji… well it ain’t gonna happen. But if I want to take you out fast and hard with punches, kicks, shuaijiao and qinna then it is rather effective.

As to sport and non-sport. Sanda also known as Sanshou it has both sides to it and it you train non-sport you are trained moves that have been designed to do maximum damage to your opponent where if you train sport your goal is different and many of those moves have been removed. However there is still Shuaijiao trained in both and if you can use Shuaijiao in the ring it is likely you can use it outside of the ring and the only big difference in that scenario is the surface your opponent lands on. In the ring the surface on which your opponent falls can be much softer and smoother than outside of it. So what may when you the fight in the ring may do considerably more damage outside of it.

 

[exile]

As a person from a CMA background may I ask why the ROK government sought to make TKD the biggest martial art in the world. Was it some sort of jealously over the popularity of Japanese arts? Was it a desire to set Korea on the world stage? This began well before TKD became an Olympic sport, so can anyone tell me why?

Steel Tiger, I wasn't there and can only guess, but it's an educated guess. Korea has had an odd combination of national feelings of inferiority, possibly brought about by being brutally treated by Japan and being stuck between Japan and China coupled with a strong sense of nationalism further modified by partition into one modern state and the closest approximation I can imagine to Hell. Part of the nation building had to be freeing the Hermit Kingdom from feelings of being less than the Japanese. Having a martial art that was also in the Olympics, was styled in a uniquely Korean fashion and which had more adherents worldwide was - just my best guess - a significant part of that.

I think Todd's got a lot of the answer to this question, ST. But it's something that didn't happen overnight. If you look at the development of TKD, you see certainn distinct phases:

(i) Kwan era 1: the earliest phase. The lads have come back from Tokyo and elsewhere with their dans in Shotokan or Shudokan karate, and are trying to make a go of it in the MA business. Things are very, very tough in Korea, there is a lot of street gang activity, people are desperate. It's a good time to be teaching MA, except that the Japanese occupation is reaching a high point of brutality as preparations for the war go into high gear. Kwans run into trouble early and have to close as the war goes on and starts looking bad for the Japanese.

(ii) Kwan era 2: TKD is still essentially Japanese karate, diluted wrt Okinawan, and probably trained via kihon line drills rather than the kata basis of old Okinawan practice (the way Matsumura and Itosu trained their own students). But practice probably involve full, hard contact; it's still way more brutal and realistic than it has become in our own time. More kwans are founded, and there are serious rivalries involved.

(iii) Korean War era: Gen. Choi uses his position in the Korean military to impose a particular training routine on the Korean military forces: they are all to train in H2H using his `military'-style TKD (nicely described in some detail by Simon John O'Neil in one of his Combat-TKD newsletters. This is the `blasting through' style, a kind of ultra-Shotokan, designed specifically to kill your opponent if you're an infantryman separated from his weapon or out of ammo. This was the battlefield style that made the White Tiger and later Black Tiger commandos and the much-ROK Marines the terror of both the North Korean and the VC/N. Vietnamese combat units and proved itself most publically at the Battle of Tra Binh Dong.

(iv) The Park dictatorship era: the high point of Gen. Choi's control over KMA. As a good friend of the dictatorship, Gen. Choi was rewarded by being allowed to, in essence, control the teaching of all MAs in Korea through various ROK sports ministries with licensing power. The pressure comes down through the military bureaucracy for a uniform system of combat and a standard curriculum, and we begin to see the Kwans dissolving into essentially social clubs, the military now in effect assuming a monopoly over training practice.

(v) The post-Choi era: after Gen. Choi's fall from grace, the structural situation is the same as before: the ROK government has—uniquely among governments in Asia— a monopoly over MA training in the country. As things normalize and the fear of war recedes, the government decides that the interest of the state and nation is better served by bringing TKD to world attention as a major, ultimately Olympic sport. This means that `military'-style TKD needs to be replaced by something people can do without killing each other....

... and the rest is, as they say, history.

This is a rough model, I know; it's just a kind of initial categorizing of events that seem connected in a certain way and I hope to be able to refine my understanding of what went on significantly as more info comes out (along the lines of Robert McLain's great interview with GM. Kim in our own MT Magazine, well worth a read... several reads, actually). The crucial issue that I see is that unlike any other Asian country, the government of S. Korea imposed a unity for military reasons on MA training that it then was able to redirect to another purpose when that seemed more in the national interest. You have to be in control of the MA business in the first place to do that—and as a result of the Korean war and the fact that Choi was both a MAist and a high ranking military officer, they were able to do that.

I know, I know, it's still a very incomplete picture. But you gotta start somewhere....

Saying that, sport arts CAN be brought back up to combat level given the right additives, and some teachers I have read about on here seem to be doing just that.

Yes... but it's much harder to do that, as we know, than it is to train a MA for combat when it hasn't been watered down... still, you have to play the cards you've been dealt.

Exile's point that parents don't want to have their children taught deadly moves is correct, to me the main reason for this, having seen, heard and felt my daughter and her friends training, is the fact that children are so unpredictable and have to learn consequences before they can learn to damage others. Some parents don't want to take the responsibility of teaching the child consequences, and in todays society they aren't learning from their play as much. If they steal or vandalise they don't get a smack off the victim any more, their parents get fined.

This has a lot to do with it, definitely. Everyone is very concerned now about kids and violence, and teaching a child how to go about crippling or otherwise permanently damaging another child—which a genuinely combat-oriented TKD/karate/etc. training approach can easily achieve—is going to be very problematic for parent who themselves have little acquaintance first-hand with violence. Whatever people say, they probably don't really want their children to learn systematically brutal methods... lawsuits and all the rest are so unpleasant, and also, we just don't want to think of our children that way...

 

[Xue Sheng]

Yes... but it's much harder to do that, as we know, than it is to train a MA for combat when it hasn't been watered down... still, you have to play the cards you've been dealt.

And again

Sanda also known as Sanshou it has both sides to it and if you train non-sport you are trained moves that have been designed to do maximum damage to the other guy who is also trying to do maximum damage to you. Where if you train sport sanshou your goal is different, you want to win by points or submission, or throwing the guy out of the ring and many of those moves that cause maximum damage have been removed.

However there is still Shuaijiao trained in both and if you can use Shuaijiao in the ring it is likely you can use it outside of the ring and the only big difference in that scenario is the surface your opponent lands on. In the ring the surface on which your opponent falls can be much softer and smoother than outside of it. So what you use in the fight in the ring may do considerably more damage outside of it.

Something few of us take into consideration in this whole sport non-sport "realism" issue (and until recently I did not take it into much consideration either) is terrain.

No matter what you train, sport or non-sport there is an incredibly big difference from training in a nice, clean, air conditioned training hall with smooth clean floors that are sometimes padded or a ring for that matter whether surrounded by ropes or a cage and of course the presence of a teacher or referee than an actual fight outside on uneven ground with rocks and pavement on a hot, cold or rainy day with no one there to tell you stop.

But this is stuff of a different post.

 

[Shaderon]

Since I train a few CMA styles that are in the eyes of many very different (And they would not be entirely wrong) Let me say that if I train Taiji and only taiji like my sifu did for many years it would be effective, very effective at what it is designed for. If you are looking to go out and start a fight and lift the other guy off the ground and slam him…well then Taiji would not be effective nor for you. If I want to defend myself against an attack and use the other guys force against himself and take his center, redirect him and take him down (and appear to be doing it in a relaxed manner) then yup Taiji is very effective.

If I take Xingyi and decide I am going to hop around like a western boxer and dodge parry and punch well then Xingyi does not work to well either. But if I am going to meet your attack with one of my own that is both defense and attack and use my power to hit and stop you as well as your power then I have just hit you with pretty much the force of a truck and it is incredibly effective.

If I take Sanda and decide I want to go about this in a relaxed defensive manner as I might do with taiji… well it ain’t gonna happen. But if I want to take you out fast and hard with punches, kicks, shuaijiao and qinna then it is rather effective.

I agree, that's why we use our own styles and not try to copy anyone elses.

As to sport and non-sport. Sanda also known as Sanshou it has both sides to it and it you train non-sport you are trained moves that have been designed to do maximum damage to your opponent where if you train sport your goal is different and many of those moves have been removed. However there is still Shuaijiao trained in both and if you can use Shuaijiao in the ring it is likely you can use it outside of the ring and the only big difference in that scenario is the surface your opponent lands on. In the ring the surface on which your opponent falls can be much softer and smoother than outside of it. So what may when you the fight in the ring may do considerably more damage outside of it.

I agree with this also, which is why in my opinion the sport versions of the arts can be brought to work in a combat scenario, but I do admit it would be difficult and for combat stuff you are better learning a combat style of the art to start with. It's possible, just hard work.