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.
