Hi, GS—you've gotten a lot of useful advice and suggestions; I'll toss some of my own experience onto the heap of possibly helpful input.
(i) So far as things clicking is concerned... there are several levels which interact to make things click, and you kind of have to train those levels differently. So for example, a lot of kicking techniques only click when you have developed
both strength
and balance. You can train these by specific drills and exercise (Loren Christensen's outstanding book
Solo Training gives some excellent excercise to develop both), but the point is that a proper roundhous or sidekick is very hard for a beginner precisely because the kinæsthetic and strength requirements are so specific to MAs; the necessary increase in the power and endurance of the hip flexors, for example, is unlikely to be achieved by anything you can do with free weights, say, in a normal strength training program. Your best bet is just to keep training kicks, about 30 minutes to an hour a day ideally. It took me about 18 months to get to the point where I could actually do a decent roundhouse kick in good form and stop the kick at any arbitrary poiint and `freeze' there for at least ten seconds. It took me still longer to be able to do that with a rear-leg side kick. So that aspect of it depends on your training frequency and intensity.
But there is a more complex level, involving the sudden coherence of a series of disconnected techniques and moves into a kind of smooth, swift flow which is in part a matter of some kind of higher-order cognitive breakthrough... so that you suddenly `get' a complex technique, or a form, or a self-defense application, which had previously seemed impenetrable. This kind of gestalt phenomenon is very hard to predict or to train for, and it's far from exclusive to TKD, or MAs (I've experienced it in skiing and tennis), or physical skills in general (I've also experienced it studying physics and logic). It seems to reflect a general phenomenon where previously complex, separate concepts or skills are suddenly seen as coherently linked to each other, so that a more general, simpler picture emerges. Right now, we don't even have a commonly agreed-on name for this phenomenon, let alone the ghost of an account of how it happens, or when.
(ii) stretches: bigfootsquatch's post (#14) mentions Tom Kurz's work, which I've always found very useful and applicable. So do not neglect dynamic stretching, is about the best I can offer here. I know it seems a bit unorthodox... but I'd save the static floor stretches and the like for the cooldown at the end of your workout.
(iii) magazines... there are actually a number of threads on this that you might check out in the MT Archives (the `search' utility is your friend!
). There's a fairly broad consensus that neither
Black Belt, nor
TKD Times, are particularly trustworthy or reliable. I would go further: both of 'em are primarily delivery vehicles for advertising and their content is largely determined by their major advertisers. At one point, when I had gotten my fifth issue or so of
TKD Times, I decided to try a little experiment, involving comparison of the column space devoted to particular dojangs, `industry leaders' and various notables, on the one hand, with advertising investment by those dojangs, industry leaders and so on on the other. I quit after two issues' worth, because it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Women's magazines are often accused of using advertising revenue considerations to guide their coverage, and so far as I can see there's a lot to that, but they can't hold a candle, for sheer obvious greedhead payola, to the MA magazines.
That wouldn't be so bad, if the articles these magazines published at least had some sound content, but in so many cases, what's published in an obvious crock. Someone mentioned earlier in this thread that you have to watch out for putative `experts' in the MAs, and boy, does that come out clearly in the big MA mags. Take the latest
Black Belt—please! :lol: (well,
I thought it was funny!). They have some middle dan rank Tang Soo Do guy (TSD is an identical twin MA to TKD; they only look different now because their life experience has left scars on them in different places) raving on about the supposed two-thousand year ancient history of the KMA, invoking a bunch of putative archæological and textual evidence for this ancient status. But every single alleged fact he adduces turns out not only to not support his claims, but to actually provide strong evidence that for almost all of its history the martial arts of Korea were firmly rooted in Chinese combat systems that, moreover, long predated their appearance on the Korean peninsula. A single example will have to do: this guy raves on for a while about the enormous military manual
Muye Dobu Tong Ji,, cited as a primary source for indigenous KMAs, which supposedly establish the evidence base for a distinctive Korean MA tradition on the peninsula. The joke here is that the
MDTJ was positively identified by both the martial arts historians Dakin Burdick and Stanley Henning (in separate articles in 1997 and 2000 issues of
Journal of Asian Martial Arts)—whose training allowed them to analyze not only the original Korean version but also Chinese and Japanese military manuals of the same general era—as an almost literal
translation of a Chinese treatise by one of the big-shot Han generals (charmingly titled, in translation,
The New Book of Effective Discipline)—
published 250 years earlier than the MDTJ. The author in the
BB article in question clearly had no clue about what kind of results current academic scholarship has turned about about these core, classic works; nor was he apparently aware of a followup article by Manuel Androgué in a 2003 issue of
Journal of Asian Martial Arts, representing the deepest and broadest study of the relationship between modern Korean MAs and traditional military training manuals, which backs up Burdick's and Henning's earlier conclusions and more, concluding, after an exhaustive consideration of its content and relations to earlier Chinese texts, that
from an historical perspective, it becomes apparent that any appeal to the Muye Dobu Tong Ji as evidence for the antiquity of any Korean modern art is unacceptable today.
And every single other component of the
BB articles `argument' turns out to involve reliance on long-discredited confusions of legend with history that have been gutted by carefully documented historical scholarship.
This kind of bogus legendmongering as history is pretty much par for the course in
Black Belt. My advice: if you subscribe to only one periodical in the MAs,
Journal of Asian Martial Arts is light-years ahead of anything else on the planet. So far as I know, it's the only peer-reviewed source amongst MA periodicals, and its authors are required to provide full documentary citation for their claims. The disadvantage is, it covers a hell of a lot more ground than just TKD, or even the KMAs. But what you
do get from them on the KMAs has been vetted under a magnifying glass and passed muster.
If you have a second choice, I suspect the British MA magazines are a cut above what we have in North America. Britain is the home of the new renaissance of interest in TKD as a hard, no-nonsense street-effective martial art, following a similar development in karate, TKD's parent art, over the past decade.
Taekwondo in particular seems to have a good rep there.
