making your hands smarter

[dturtleman]

hi, guys. i'm still a relative noob; i'm a yellow belt, hoping to test for my high yellow next month. i've been doing tae kwon do for about a year. does anyone crosstrain in another art, in order to get better at punching/hand techniques?

 

[Touch Of Death]

hi, guys. i'm still a relative noob; i'm a yellow belt, hoping to test for my high yellow next month. i've been doing tae kwon do for about a year. does anyone crosstrain in another art, in order to get better at punching/hand techniques?

There is a lot to be said for TKD hand basics. However the differences in the other arts have to do with how you approach situations. If you like TKD, learn it, then search.
sean

 

[dturtleman]

well, to be honest, i like my teacher, and the best part of the class is the class time: 5:30 am fits my schedule. i just wonder sometimes if tkd is right for me. however, i could easily be a martial arts tramp; i keep flirting with bjj (5 minutes from my house), shorin-ryu karate( 2 blocks from my house), sambo (15 minutes from my house). maybe a problem i have with tkd, is that it still makes me feel like a klutz.

 

[Touch Of Death]

well, to be honest, i like my teacher, and the best part of the class is the class time: 5:30 am fits my schedule. i just wonder sometimes if tkd is right for me. however, i could easily be a martial arts tramp; i keep flirting with bjj (5 minutes from my house), shorin-ryu karate( 2 blocks from my house), sambo (15 minutes from my house). maybe a problem i have with tkd, is that it still makes me feel like a klutz.

I'm probably the wrong person to advise you on this, but if you aren't comfortable with that way of thinking, go with your gut. TKD is different from the other arts you mentioned. It or a school just like it will always be there later after you experiment with the other methods, but more often than not you will not come back; so, this is a choice you must make on your own. I am biased and so is everyone else. Tell your TKD instructor your concerns, he may be willing to concentrait his knowledge of hand basics in a more advanced manner. You never know.
Sean

 

[utb1528]

I have also studied boxing.

I would recommend spending at least 2 years in one art before cross training though.

 

[exile]

The technical core of TKD is Shotokan karate, no matter how diluted the TKD syllabus becomes as a result of the joint actions of the WTF and Kukkiwon. If there's a hand tech/tech combination in Shotokan, it will be there in TKD, almost certainly. There are way more hand tech cominations in the hyungs than there are kicks, and that should tell you something about what the technical foundation of TKD actually is. Fist strikes, knifehands, many different elbow strikes, forearm strikes (those `rising blocks' you've learned are in many, maybe most, cases intended to be applied as strikes to the throat and/or lower jaw, e.g.), hammer- and back-fist strikes and on and on... It's all there. But you have to learn it, understand it and train it relentlessly for it to do you any good. Sounds to me as if maybe the problem isn't TKD, but your school's emphasis...

 

[Steel Tiger]

The technical core of TKD is Shotokan karate, no matter how diluted the TKD syllabus becomes as a result of the joint actions of the WTF and Kukkiwon. If there's a hand tech/tech combination in Shotokan, it will be there in TKD, almost certainly. There are way more hand tech cominations in the hyungs than there are kicks, and that should tell you something about what the technical foundation of TKD actually is. Fist strikes, knifehands, many different elbow strikes, forearm strikes (those `rising blocks' you've learned are in many, maybe most, cases intended to be applied as strikes to the throat and/or lower jaw, e.g.), hammer- and back-fist strikes and on and on... It's all there. But you have to learn it, understand it and train it relentlessly for it to do you any good. Sounds to me as if maybe the problem isn't TKD, but your school's emphasis...

This goes back to something we were discussing on another thread about forms/patterns/kata. The information is in there it just has to be found and understood. It has always perplexed me when I have watched a TKD class to see many hand techniques in the patterns but when it came to sparring those same hand techniques disappeared.

It is possible that this apparent lack of emphasis on the core curriculum has contributed to the seemingly bad reputation that TKD has gotten over the years.

 

[Shaderon]

As a low grade student of TKD (about a year also) I can say that I have recognised the hand techniques that we learn in our class but in the sport style sparring we do (we do both but mainly sport as that's what the competitions are based on) it does disspear in favour of the quicker kicks that get the points faster. At least at the colour belt levels.

Reading posts on this board has helped me see plenty of things in TKD that I didn't see before, it helps you open your eyes a bit more.

There are plenty of high ranking TKD people on this forum as well as high ranks in other sports. I'd say have a look around, but also have a read of the posts that come from the people in TKD and the other arts you fancy too.

I'd also echo not to cross train for at least a couple of years too, if anything it'll kill your stances stone dead before you've managed to commit them to muscle memory.

 

[Drac]

I would recommend spending at least 2 years in one art before cross training though.

Yep..Get the basics of one art down THEN look at another..

 

[exile]

This goes back to something we were discussing on another thread about forms/patterns/kata. The information is in there it just has to be found and understood. It has always perplexed me when I have watched a TKD class to see many hand techniques in the patterns but when it came to sparring those same hand techniques disappeared.

It is possible that this apparent lack of emphasis on the core curriculum has contributed to the seemingly bad reputation that TKD has gotten over the years.

I'm convinced that this is the whole story of why TKD gets dissed in so many venues. A year or so ago I read a really eye-opening article in TKDTimes by Simon O'Neil in which he pointed out the obvious disparity between the low number of kicks in TKD patterns and the high number of han/arm techs, and then drew some very useful conclusions about how the forms, taken (as they were originally designed) as guides to combat practice, could be realistically interpreted to make sense of them. His conclusion: Just as in other branches of karate, the main combat work in TKD is done with the hands, but kicks are recruited as finishing techs, or applied when you have your attacker under control to help bring him into a lower position, so that his presents more high-valued targets (head and neck, particularly). It was clear that Olympic TKD has pushed the curriculum in the opposite direction, because of the way the scoring is set up, but the experience of generations of Asian MAists, as reflected in kata and patterns from other MAs, is that the hands and arms are the primary combat tools. I can see a point coming where the two different currents in the art—the Olympic foot tag half and the increasingly visible combat-oriented side—part ways amicably, with possibly a name change somewhere along the way.

This isn't as unrealistic as it might seem. Look, for example, at how Shotokai has spit off from Shotokan, and at this excerpt from an interview with the current head of the Shotokai style (check out http://www.shotokai.com/ingles/interviews/murakami.html):

Tetsuji Murakami Sensei Interview

Extract from an Interview
What is the origin of Shotokai?

Before I answer that question, I would like to explain the origin of the word Shotokai.

Shotokai is the organization behind Gichin Funakoshi's method. "Kai" means school. The senior students of Master Funakoshi established an association with the friendly objective of helping the master's friends and the practice of Karate. The Dojo was called Shotokan (kan=house). Master Funakoshi called his method Karate-do, but it was very easy to confuse the name of his Dojo with the name of his method. His student came from the Shotokan....

Shotokai posesses the Main Dojo (the Shotokan) and the house of Master Funakoshi, which have both been restored. The Head of Shotokai was Shigeru Egami. In the face of Karate's evolution, considering the fact that "Shotokan" [sports karate] was straying further and further away from Master Gichin Funakoshi's Karate, he chose a different position.

When Master Funakoshi arrived in Japan (from Okinawa) he was more than 50 years old and his students thought he executed his movements in a relaxed way due to his age. This relaxation is, in fact, fundamental. It is only nowadays that all is done with strength and this is actually a true contradiction.

Furthermore the evolution of competition in Karate is opposed to Karate-do ettiquette. Competition has resulted in the loss of many things in Karate-do.... but possibly, we may not have the right to criticize considering that we practiced it and now we have abandoned it! [Murakami Sensei originally trained in sports karate]. Competition, today, is not the result of practice, rather the result of practice for competition... and this is very different. A specific preparation is not pure practice!

Reading this, you do a double-take: whoa, is this guy talking about Shotokan??? It could so easily be a `hard'-style TKDer's lament about TKD... so what they did was, change the name to reflect their commitment to the ancestral form of Shotokan, the hard fighting style. Something like that could easily happen in TKD. I sense a very high level of frustration with the ongoing dilution of TKD's combat orientation, and I don't think it's just me!

As a low grade student of TKD (about a year also) I can say that I have recognised the hand techniques that we learn in our class but in the sport style sparring we do (we do both but mainly sport as that's what the competitions are based on) it does disspear in favour of the quicker kicks that get the points faster. At least at the colour belt levels.

Reading posts on this board has helped me see plenty of things in TKD that I didn't see before, it helps you open your eyes a bit more.

There are plenty of high ranking TKD people on this forum as well as high ranks in other sports. I'd say have a look around, but also have a read of the posts that come from the people in TKD and the other arts you fancy too.

I'd also echo not to cross train for at least a couple of years too, if anything it'll kill your stances stone dead before you've managed to commit them to muscle memory.

This point about muscle memory and building in a feeling for the linkage among techniques... very important. There's no substitute for time on the dojang floor.

Yep..Get the basics of one art down THEN look at another..

This is true across the board, I think, regardless of the art. I'm not one who believes that cross-training is inherently bad (I'm off to a Hapkido seminar in Drac's neck of the woods this coming weekend, so I'd be a bloody hypocrite if I did, lol), but you need a place of strength to venture out from, and that should be your main art, one that you've internalized to some extent so that there's a kind of body-logic to it. Switching arts after a few months or even a year, and then again, isn't going to allow you to do that.