for aguments sake, say a streetfight, bar room fight sort of thing. With a ruleset I would imagine who ever trains for that ruleset would win.
I have followed this thread with interest and the one question I have, as I no longer compete, is why do people struggle to fight when they change styles, clubs, organizations? I know that is a relatively open ended question and a lot of people will answer that it will be the ruleset, but if you train hard and spar hard and practice as much as you can in any art, surely your key skills, as it were, should be transferable.
I have fought semi-contact, full contact and point stop style of fighting and apart from having to check on the rules I have found that I have had no real difficulty swapping from one to the other. Sure, I mainly excelled at full contact and mma style fighting as it enabled me to use all my skills, semi-contact meant that I possibly couldn't punch to the head or kick below the waist, but that was an easy adjustment to make and point stop just meant I had to dial back my power and stop fighting whenever the ref called it.
I personally teach my students to fight hard, we spar as if we are full contact fighters, and hit between 60 - 80% of our full power, as I believe this is more practical for the street, but the competitions we can participate in are the point stop style and I believe my students would no struggle to make the distinction between the 2.
Forgive me as I don't mean to sound insulting, but surely a TKD practitioner should be able to move from his WTF ruleset, for example, to a full contact environment and transfer his skills across. Therefore, if he excelled at TKD sparring I would expect him to stand up against a full contact fighter fairly well, probably on an equal footing (obviously if going into mma with only TKD, he will struggle with the grappling and ground work as they would have little to no experience in those areas). Baring in mind, this scenario should also work vice versa, i.e. a full contact fighter moving into a WTF style competition sparring environment.
Just my 2 pence
Sounds like a fun place. Different environment than your average TKD school. I will be the first to agree that the more styles one trains with, whether learning the style or simply gaining familiarity with it, the better prepared one will be. It also gives one an appreciation of what is going on outside of their own sphere. It is very easy to view one's own world of taekwondo, or any other art, as being the big picture when in reality, even with an art as widespread as taekwondo, it is simply a part of the greater whole.
There are a lot of recordings of subpar performance on youtube. As I said earlier, I do not use it as a barometer of the state of an art, regardless of what it is. I've seen a lot of bad sword vids. And even more mediocre sword vids.
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Or boxing, judo, gymnastics, archery, track and fields, swimming, skating, or fencing.
Depends on how you define a well rounded martial artist. Again, the sense that I get is that KKW/WTF schools do not train "WTF" exclusively, but train in a more well rounded curriculum. You may choose to ignore that or dismiss it, but that doesn't negate the fact that your characterization of WTF sparring as being passed off as comprehensive self defense is incorrect.
Of course it isn't. It's a competition rule set for what amounts to Korean sport karate. The last two TKD schools where I trained separated self defense from competition. I see enough posts from other taekwondoin and have spoken to enough from other schools to know that those two schools were not unique.
Obviously not.
Without any kind of stats on how Olympic inclusion has impacted enrollment, it would be hard to say. I suspect that it has probably had a minor halo effect on taekwondo schools in general. Being in the Olympics is 'nice.' It generates warm fuzzy feelings in people who care about such things and lends a measure of prestige in the minds of some.
I would love to see ten of the top ranked fighers in each style; ten MT and ten TKD. I really don't care who would win, but it would very interesting to watch.
I have to ask the same question. Aside from making a tactical error (staying one place for too long while his opponent developed his attack), I really couldn't get any sense of his ability one way or the other. He was obviously outmatched once they went to the ground, but aside from that, there wasn't enough there to make an assessment.
There was a lot in a very short amount of time that tipped that this guy was not that good by standards that I am use to seeing even by TKD guys from around this way that do MMA as well as TKD. His kicking skills were not that great as his pre fight ax kicked showed. Now he may have been stretching out his legs but even so they looked more like a can can dance style more than even stretching out. You don't bounce on the kick motion but this guy did. That is something beginners do. Also the one attempt at a kick he did do (I am guessing that he tried a jump or flying side kick was poorly executed and no one would use that kick to attack with, let alone right out the gate, just a bad or stupid choice of kick. But the worst thing is the fact that he did not see the slowest biggest motion for a take down. That should have been an easy slip but this guy had no reading or reaction to it whatsoever. He looked flexible but he did not look like a fighter at all. His ground game was a simple school yard head lock that a beginner in wrestling would have reversed or escaped easily. Again the guy was not a fighter at all and it showed. This guy could have been a boxer or anything and would have gotten beat just as easily. This again goes back to my statement that just as many MMA, BJJ, Karate, Boxing and on and on guys get beat everyday just as badly and as quick as any TKD guy. But when you see a bad MMA guy get beat quickly and badly by another MMA guy no one says anything. Then there are the TKD guys that excel at MMA with a little ground game and everyone dismisses their TKD even when they use one of those so called fancy high kicks to KO a pretty good MMA or other style opponent. It is what it is, fighters are fighters regardless of style of art used.
This goes to show that unless you are competing at that level, there are a lot of subtleties that you will miss. I practice taekwondo and didn't pick any of that out. I haven't competed in years, and even then, never at a very high level.
The bolded part was my assessment as well. I will let those who wrestle or ground fight comment on the rest.
This has been said many times by many people in the course of these discussions over the years.
