“It’s like the side kick in Koryo!”
A pair of teenage brothers were sparring in a class I was teaching, and the older one did a sliding side kick into his brother’s chest. After clobbering his younger brother, he proclaimed he was inspired to do the move from the taekwondo black belt form Koryo.
As a poomsae nerd and someone who loves the integration of concepts, I couldn’t have been prouder, even if it was at his brother’s expense.
Unfortunately, modern taekwondo has received criticism (some deservedly so) on its lack of technique integration in training practices: forms, sparring, one-steps, hand-to-hand, board breaking, and kicking drills… They can feel like disconnected pieces that end up not forming a comprehensive whole.
I’m not here to persuade anyone to take up taekwondo or argue that it’s better than other martial arts (I don’t believe it is). My purpose is to help current practitioners and instructors think critically about how they are using the tools of their trade.
Instructors and masters, this is what students are looking for, and this is what you can easily provide.
Taekwondo has many moving pieces and can seem very compartmentalized, especially as aspects of it become more molded to finicky tournament requirements and organizational mandates. Some people are really into tournament-style forms (poomsae) and Olympic-style sparring. For everyone else, they can feel left on the sidelines with a mishmash of drills and techniques that don’t seem to work together to build a stronger martial artist.
Let’s put the vertical side kicks of tournament-style poomsae and the scooping roundhouse kicks of Olympic-style, point-chasing sparring aside for a moment and focus on the true purpose of taekwondo: self-defense. Within that, you’re training the body to use precision, effectiveness, speed, and agility. Those four components should be in everything the taekwondo student does.
Taekwondo is a martial art comprised of strikes, kicks, and blocks for the purpose of defending oneself against an attacker. Practitioners have opportunities to practice these movements in a variety of ways: drills and repetition, forms, sparring, and self-defense, which could be one-step or three-step sparring or more advanced hand-to-hand with joint locks. Even board breaking requires the four elements of precision, effectiveness, speed, and agility.
Martial arts instructors are responsible for demonstrating the connectedness and effectiveness of techniques. That’s why we have drills and application. Kicking a focus pad is one thing. Kicking a moving person is another. It’s up to the instructor to help their students connect what they are learning, and it’s up to the students to look for it and make connections for themselves. If you’re preparing students for sparring, don’t only do static kicking drills and then throw them into the ring, expecting them to have the knack for it. Incorporate movement and spontaneity into the drills: change positions, speed up and slow down, and set up the need to react quickly.
One-step sparring, hand-to-hand, and other self-defense techniques can feel clunky and a little too well-rehearsed to seem like they would work in a realistic situation.
Like kicking drills, add some speed and spontaneity. If the students are just going through the moves with no thought to reaction or follow-through, it’s a memorization exercise at best and poor self-defense at worst. Get students used to reacting when their attacker moves rather than moving into defense position before the attack has even happened. For more advanced students, have them make up their own self-defense techniques and even try some “sparring” matches where they try to grab and throw each other at random.
It’s a little harder to be a taekwondo apologist when it comes to forms.
I’m going to guess I have some karate counterparts who hear the same thing about kata that I hear about poomsae: forms are useless, unrealistic, and don’t teach people to fight.
Well, yeah, a form isn’t realistic in the sense that a fight is not going to happen in that exact sequence (unless you are Michael Jai White in a Never Back Down movie). That’s not the point.
Forms are meant to hone technique and precision.
You don’t have time to do that in a sparring match or hand-to-hand combat—those moments are the test of what you’ve been practicing in forms, so it’s important to use that poomsae practice time wisely. My former master, whom I’ve mentioned in a previous article, used to preach that we are hitting someone with every move of the form. Movements should be crisp and strong, and it’s disheartening to see students look sloppy and limp when practicing forms. Like self-defense, forms can just turn into useless memorization exercises if technique is not emphasized.
Instructors should be able to translate what students are doing in forms to sparring or to self-defense (i.e., what you are defending against), and older students should build the habit of seeking those connections…which is how one of my favorite students ended up putting together the puzzle pieces for himself when he side kicked his brother in the chest.
Instructors are responsible for making these connections for students at all ages and making what they teach useful and applicable. At some point older students need to decide if (1) they are in an environment that supports fluid integration of technique and (2) they want to be accountable for actively and purposefully making those connections themselves. I appreciate when my coach reminds me of how the drill we’re practicing translates to the sparring ring, and as a growing black belt, I also need to keep up the mental habit of technique integration.
We can’t be by our students’ sides for every moment they might need to defend themselves, so let’s make technique integration a tenet of our teaching and training practice.
Melanie has worked in the healthcare industry since 2004 and lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
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