Self defense in modern Taekwondo

[Shaderon]

I would agree that a lot of people view TKD as a sport, however everyone I've spoken to in GTUK talk about WTF as "the sport version of TaeKwonDo" and not true TaeKwonDo. In my Dojang, while we train, there is constant talk about what we would do if an attacker "did this" and how we would defend against it. People who complain about light contact or hard blocks get told "you are learning to fight, deal with it". If my school closed down, and I lost my instructor (can't see it as we are friends now) then I don't think I could face learning WTF style at all. I'd rather travel further for lessons and pay more, after all I got into this to learn how to defend myself, not how to win points in a sports match.

However, I can see the point in having a "sport version" of TKD, in the games, no one really wants to see anyone get really hurt, ok they do in boxing but people are used to that, if someone got a really hard kick to the head and it put them in hospital, then arms would be thrown up and people would cry out for MA to be made illegal, like some do with boxing, but more so as people would get more upset I think at kicks that do damage.

 

[IcemanSK]

I would agree that a lot of people view TKD as a sport, however everyone I've spoken to in GTUK talk about WTF as "the sport version of TaeKwonDo" and not true TaeKwonDo. In my Dojang, while we train, there is constant talk about what we would do if an attacker "did this" and how we would defend against it. People who complain about light contact or hard blocks get told "you are learning to fight, deal with it". If my school closed down, and I lost my instructor (can't see it as we are friends now) then I don't think I could face learning WTF style at all. I'd rather travel further for lessons and pay more, after all I got into this to learn how to defend myself, not how to win points in a sports match.

However, I can see the point in having a "sport version" of TKD, in the games, no one really wants to see anyone get really hurt, ok they do in boxing but people are used to that, if someone got a really hard kick to the head and it put them in hospital, then arms would be thrown up and people would cry out for MA to be made illegal, like some do with boxing, but more so as people would get more upset I think at kicks that do damage.

Hi Shaderon. Welcome to MT.

There are groups within the WTF who don't focus on the sport aspects of TKD. These groups tend to say they align themselves with the Kukkiwon, rather than WTF. These schools are nothing like your description of the WTF above.

I'd encourage you to not paint any MA organization (especially one that big) with such a broad brush. You will see here on MT that many TKD folks who bring all kinds of perspectives....Some are the "norm" for their branch, some are not.

 

[matt.m]

You know I have always said that Tae Kwon Do and Hapkido are the perfect arts to blend. However, and I have had this talk with high ranking dans, you should not blend the two.

For instance: In MSK:TKD - We do the ITF and WTF poomsea, we do 3 one step sparring techniques per gup rank......up to 26. We also do 3 steps, or combinations. We have self defense techniques. From 8-4th gup or (White-Blue) we have 6 power basic moves. We do a lot of sparring, even though our drills have great success in the ring they were designed for street defense.

At brown and red, 2nd and 1st gup a 3rd poomsea is added. We have multiple board breaks for the test beginning at 3rd gup test. The 1'' pine for adults only.

I am 100 % for certain that the way that TKD was handed down by Lee H. Park is very self defense capable.

 

[Brad Dunne]

You know I have always said that Tae Kwon Do and Hapkido are the perfect arts to blend. However, and I have had this talk with high ranking dans, you should not blend the two.

Matt, I find this interesting and perplexing at the same time. Why do they have this position? There have been other discussions that have accounted for just this nature of TKD/HKD intermixed. Many of us have had HKD techniques in our curriculums since day one. I find there is a very big distinction between learning technical applications as opposed to embracing an art in it's intirety. Many, if not all, of the original instructors who came from Korea to the U.S. in the 60's/70's were versed in Hapkido. Now to what extent in Hapkido I don't know, but the self defense aspects that were taught were very much Hapkido based. I find it odd, to say the least, that since TKD has "in general" devoided itself of the self defense mindset in favor of the sport application(s) and now there is a movement, of sorts, to regain what was lost, why they would not wish to avail themselves of what was there originally?

 

[Shaderon]

Hi Shaderon. Welcome to MT.

There are groups within the WTF who don't focus on the sport aspects of TKD. These groups tend to say they align themselves with the Kukkiwon, rather than WTF. These schools are nothing like your description of the WTF above.

I'd encourage you to not paint any MA organization (especially one that big) with such a broad brush. You will see here on MT that many TKD folks who bring all kinds of perspectives....Some are the "norm" for their branch, some are not.

Hi Iceman, thanks,

Sorry I didn't mean to offend anyone, just quoting what I'd heard and saying my opinion based on that of what I'd prefer to do. I've not much information other than the little I've read here and what I've heard other people say. I obviously still have much to learn.

 

[IcemanSK]

Hi Iceman, thanks,

Sorry I didn't mean to offend anyone, just quoting what I'd heard and saying my opinion based on that of what I'd prefer to do. I've not much information other than the little I've read here and what I've heard other people say. I obviously still have much to learn.

No offense taken. It's a popular misconception. I just want to let you know that all is not as it would seem. (I may have been too forceful [defensive] in my post as well). Our own Terry1965 is very much into Olympic style, & yet very much into self-defense oriented TKD as well.

Your question, is still valid.

 

[exile]

I would agree that a lot of people view TKD as a sport, however everyone I've spoken to in GTUK talk about WTF as "the sport version of TaeKwonDo" and not true TaeKwonDo. In my Dojang, while we train, there is constant talk about what we would do if an attacker "did this" and how we would defend against it. People who complain about light contact or hard blocks get told "you are learning to fight, deal with it". If my school closed down, and I lost my instructor (can't see it as we are friends now) then I don't think I could face learning WTF style at all. I'd rather travel further for lessons and pay more, after all I got into this to learn how to defend myself, not how to win points in a sports match.

However, I can see the point in having a "sport version" of TKD, in the games, no one really wants to see anyone get really hurt, ok they do in boxing but people are used to that, if someone got a really hard kick to the head and it put them in hospital, then arms would be thrown up and people would cry out for MA to be made illegal, like some do with boxing, but more so as people would get more upset I think at kicks that do damage.

Hi Shaderon. Welcome to MT.

There are groups within the WTF who don't focus on the sport aspects of TKD. These groups tend to say they align themselves with the Kukkiwon, rather than WTF. These schools are nothing like your description of the WTF above.

I'd encourage you to not paint any MA organization (especially one that big) with such a broad brush. You will see here on MT that many TKD folks who bring all kinds of perspectives....Some are the "norm" for their branch, some are not.

I think both of you are right! It's true, as Iceman says, that the WTF/KKW represent a kind of `big tent' approach, in that it's possible for a school which differs pretty significantly from the prescribed curriculum to still be associated with the KKW—my own instructor is 5th dan KKW certified, but we don't do Taegeuks as our colored belt forms; we do the Palgwes instead, and you can learn the Pyung-ahn and other `suppressed', kwan-era hyungs that are fairly literal versions of the grand old Okinawan kata that Funakoshi's teachers and their teachers practiced (and thoroughly understood the combat applications for!) So you can be reasonably `subversive' and still be part of the KKW orbit...

... but I don't think it's all that controversial to say that the influence of the WTF has been to push the sport aspect of TKD, and I have to say, based on the `applications' for hyungs that I've seen in the past at the KKW website, that their view of self-defense techs is pretty much a very literal block/punch/kick model taking no account of the real progress made during the past decade in bunkai/oyo analysis (especially by UK karateka) and extended to TKD by (again, mostly UK) practitioners like Stuart Anslow and Simon O'Neil. The essay that started this post a couple of years ago seemed to be saying that the tournament scoring practices and rules enforced by the WTF tend to encourage an approach to competition sparring which has little to do with self defense apps, and that this approach seems to be encouraged in the successive curricula which the KKW has issued as its `official' core. In the last chapter of his masterpiece about the combat application of kata-encoded techniques, Bunkai-Jutsu, Iain Abernethy points out that kumite, as understood by the past Okinawan masters who shaped modern karate, was based on fairly intense `all-in' application of the combat techs summarized in the kata; he cites the following passage from H D Plee's 1967 book Karate: Beginner to Black Belt on sparring:

One must not lose sight of the fact that Karate is `all-in' fighting. Everything is allowed... This is why Karate is based on blows delivered with the hand, the foot, the head or the knee. Equally permissible are strangulations, throwing techniques and locks'

And exactly the same thing is true of TKD: the actual technical content of karate and TKD are almost identical in many respects. But when, in competition, high kicks to the head are encouraged, hand strikes frequent unscored, and knee and elbow strikes forbidden, along with whole ranges of set-up techniques, you have to ask yourself just what kind of vision of TKD is being promoted by the largest TKD organization in the world? Is there any evidence that the KKW is trying to complement this very artificial emphasis on a tiny subset of TKD's technical repertoire over an extremely unrealistic combat range? It seems to me that the kind of work that Simon O'Neil and Stuart Anslow have been doing is well outside the KKW orbit; on another MA board that I looked at last year, when I was trying to get some further information on O'Neil's work, I came across a post by him that indicated he'd gotten a fair amount of flack from high-ranking TKDists for the kind of bunkai he was proposing for TKD forms and his suggestion that blocks be rethought as strikes and locks, that kicks in the hyungs be regarded as finishing strikes, aimed low to maximize joint damage, with major reliance on hand and arm techs to set up such kicks.

I don't get the feeling that promotion of this kind of alternative thinking, and identification of the street-applicable aspects of TKD, is a big priority in the main Korean TKD institutions. People such as Shaderon (and many others on MT, as far as I can see) who want to pursue that approach to TKD can, of course, do it on their own, but I don't see that there's much in the way of support for that whole view of the art in the WTF/KKW world. I have the strong impression that, institutionally speaking, Tang Soo Do has, at least up to the present, been far more oriented in that direction...

 

[matt.m]

You know I have always said that Tae Kwon Do and Hapkido are the perfect arts to blend. However, and I have had this talk with high ranking dans, you should not blend the two.

Matt, I find this interesting and perplexing at the same time. Why do they have this position? There have been other discussions that have accounted for just this nature of TKD/HKD intermixed. Many of us have had HKD techniques in our curriculums since day one. I find there is a very big distinction between learning technical applications as opposed to embracing an art in it's intirety. Many, if not all, of the original instructors who came from Korea to the U.S. in the 60's/70's were versed in Hapkido. Now to what extent in Hapkido I don't know, but the self defense aspects that were taught were very much Hapkido based. I find it odd, to say the least, that since TKD has "in general" devoided itself of the self defense mindset in favor of the sport application(s) and now there is a movement, of sorts, to regain what was lost, why they would not wish to avail themselves of what was there originally?

Brad my friend all of these are great questions. To the first, GM Hildebrand has said that he tried to blend a touch of hapkido into TKD in the early 70's. GGM Park put a quick stop to it. GGM Park said, "This in TKD, not hapkido or judo. Do not show any tae kwon do student a hapkido technique."

There is no doubt that TKD self defense is very much hapkidoesque. The problem is though that they are esque, at least the way MSK teaches it.

To the third point of yours that I bolded, well you are right again. I know very much that this is so. Is it right, is it wrong to be? I say that tae kwon do is more of what you make it. If you love the sport aspect then that is what you favor and will be good at. Sparring does have its place the same as poomsea, that is a big reason why I think that tae kwon do is a great art. There is enough for everyone and each student can make it their own for themselves.

 

[Adept]

Which is ironic because if by "MMA" you mean "UFC", "Pride", "K1", etc..., as many seem to, those are just sports as well, and it's hard to really take sword arts serioulsy as self-defense in today's society either. And so on. There are a lot of aspects and practices in MA today that are really just for sport but for some reason, sport-oriented Taekwondo seems to be looked down upon

This is a point from the initial post I was going to comment on.

TKD, as a combat sport, shares a niche with boxing and MMA competitions. TKD however, lacks the 'realism' for lack of a better word, that these other combat sports have. Everyone knows a competent boxer or MMA fighter is a very dangerous opponent 'on the street' but most (myself included) consider a sport TKD fighter to be much less dangerous.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it is not TKDs sporting aspect that makes sport TKD poor for self defense, but the rules and style of combat that sporting TKD fighters engage in.

One must not lose sight of the fact that Karate is `all-in' fighting. Everything is allowed... This is why Karate is based on blows delivered with the hand, the foot, the head or the knee. Equally permissible are strangulations, throwing techniques and locks'

And exactly the same thing is true of TKD: the actual technical content of karate and TKD are almost identical in many respects. But when, in competition, high kicks to the head are encouraged, hand strikes frequent unscored, and knee and elbow strikes forbidden, along with whole ranges of set-up techniques, you have to ask yourself just what kind of vision of TKD is being promoted by the largest TKD organization in the world?

Absolutely! I have long held that, in order to gain the most accurate measure of a persons ability to fight, the only rules in place in a competition should be those that limit the potential for extreme and permanent injury.

I would love to throw some WTF TKD fighters into the Octagon and see how they do!

 

[exile]

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it is not TKDs sporting aspect that makes sport TKD poor for self defense, but the rules and style of combat that sporting TKD fighters engage in.

Good point, Adept—a critical point really, because a sport emphasis by itself doesn't necessarily compromise technique. It can actualy expedite technical improvement—skiing is a good example of an activity in which sport competition has led to the discovery of the most effective techniques for turning a pair of skis and moving them efficiently over even very difficult terrain, like mogul fields. It's the racers who discovered carved turns, stepping to improve one's line, hip angulation to apply pressure over the whole length of the skis throughout the turn, and so on. And as you say, boxing, though a competitive sport, doesn't suffer from the same perception of combat irrelevance that WTF TKD does. The reason I think is that boxing starts from a much more realistic premise: the heavy lifting in boxing-style combat is to be carried out by the hands. In Olympic style TKD, the assumption is that the hands are largely irrelevant—you score with your kicks, preferably as high as possible, or you don't win. But the technical content of TKD itself, as reflected in its hyungs, makes it clear that by far the greater percentage of techs were originally envisaged as hand/arm-based, with kicks as finishing strikes aimed LOW. That is I think the main difference between boxing and WTF TKD... the realism of the premises in the scoring system.

Taekwondo means `foot/fist striking way'—the name itself tells you that hand techs are at least half the story (the hyungs say more than half, but...)... so why does the WTF scoring system ignore this aspect of the art? Visual appeal, apparently... karateka have the exact same complaint about sport karate: excessive emphasis on high kicks, with consequent loss of combat realism.... draw your own conclusions!

 

[Miles]

First of all, sorry for the long post.

ISo you can be reasonably `subversive' and still be part of the KKW orbit...

Not so much subversive. I call it "open-minded."

... but I don't think it's all that controversial to say that the influence of the WTF has been to push the sport aspect of TKD, and I have to say, based on the `applications' for hyungs that I've seen in the past at the KKW website, that their view of self-defense techs is pretty much a very literal block/punch/kick model taking no account of the real progress made during the past decade in bunkai/oyo analysis (especially by UK karateka) and extended to TKD by (again, mostly UK) practitioners like Stuart Anslow and Simon O'Neil.

I agree that the WTF is only concerned with sport. That's what it does. The KKW site does show only very basic applications. At the instructor course, we were shown that blocks were in fact more than strikes but were also joint locks.

Is there any evidence that the KKW is trying to complement this very artificial emphasis on a tiny subset of TKD's technical repertoire over an extremely unrealistic combat range? It seems to me that the kind of work that Simon O'Neil and Stuart Anslow have been doing is well outside the KKW orbit; on another MA board that I looked at last year, when I was trying to get some further information on O'Neil's work, I came across a post by him that indicated he'd gotten a fair amount of flack from high-ranking TKDists for the kind of bunkai he was proposing for TKD forms and his suggestion that blocks be rethought as strikes and locks, that kicks in the hyungs be regarded as finishing strikes, aimed low to maximize joint damage, with major reliance on hand and arm techs to set up such kicks.

I don't get the feeling that promotion of this kind of alternative thinking, and identification of the street-applicable aspects of TKD, is a big priority in the main Korean TKD institutions. People such as Shaderon (and many others on MT, as far as I can see) who want to pursue that approach to TKD can, of course, do it on their own, but I don't see that there's much in the way of support for that whole view of the art in the WTF/KKW world. I have the strong impression that, institutionally speaking, Tang Soo Do has, at least up to the present, been far more oriented in that direction...

Taken from the Kukkiwon website but with emphasis added by me:
"....A man of good defense techniques may not necessarily provoke a fighting, although he is capable of winning. To the contrary, a man of insufficient defense capabilities would prove himself stupid if he dares a fighting. Defending oneself from attacks alone could not lead to a final solution, if the other party continues attacking; therefore, it is necessary to apply the techniques of weakening the opponent's offensive.
That is why most of makki Taekwondo techniques are designed to hurt the opponent in the course of defending oneself by using the wrists or hand blades, which, if trained hard, may inflict impacts on the other party's vital points, making the latter's arms and legs incapacitated.
Therefore, makki techniques must be trained hard so that they may function equally as offensive techniques. With this, one may show himself or herself generously, not by winning over the opponent by initiative attacks but by overcoming the latter by mere defense techniques without impairing others. This is indeed a righteous way if a man of virtue that Taekwondo teaches."


Exile, keep the faith, it's all in there, just waiting to be pulled out at the right time. Other arts teach joint locks earlier (i.e. hapkido, aikido) whereas other arts teach striking last (i.e. judo). But a good TKD instructor is going to teach striking, falling, joint locks, and throws.

Train hard!

Miles

 

[exile]

Exile, keep the faith, it's all in there, just waiting to be pulled out at the right time. Other arts teach joint locks earlier (i.e. hapkido, aikido) whereas other arts teach striking last (i.e. judo). But a good TKD instructor is going to teach striking, falling, joint locks, and throws.

Train hard!

Miles

Nice post, Miles. I agree, it's all in there. My main concern with the KKW approach is the literalness that I detect in the `official' bunkai—there's no generally agreed on terms in Korean for it, or I'd use it!—compared with the subtle approach that the various karateka and `rogue', leading edge TKD analyists have proposed (e.g., the chamber is actually the crucial part of the block, establishing locks and traps, or being the actual deflection part, whereas the `blocking' motion is a decisive strike on a weak/vital point, such as the collarbone or throat). So a down block would not be a way of imposing limb damage to the assailant's attacking arm (as the passage from the KKW site you quoted seems to suggest) but rather a finishing strike to an already controlled attacker whose upper body is under forced compliance due to the locks or partial throws enforced by the seemingly innocuous chambering/retraction part of the block (where the retracting fist actually imposes a wrist lock on the attacker's grabbing arm, the up-chamber of the down block slams into the attacker's forearm above the elbow, and the two move together, along with a quick 90º rotation of the defender's body, impose an arm lock on the attacker, using pressure to force him down and delivering the `block' as an arm bar to the assailant's throat—that kind of thing). A lot of times, it seems that people say, oh sure, a block really is a strike, but what they mean is, a block that you interpret as a normal block but much harder will incapacitate the attacker and then you get to move in and counter attack. What I'm looking for from the KKW is an approach to the problem of bunkai analysis that I see in Abernethy's work, or Rick Clark's or Javier Martinez'.

The thing is, we know that Itosu began this strategy of repackaging the actual combat scenarios of Okinawan karate as very simple kick/block/strike movements. He told us that he was doing that, as part of his successful campaign to get karate training into the Okinawan public school system around the turn of the 20th century. And as Master Penfil pointed out in a post on one of the current TSD threads, Hwang Kee observed in one of his books, written late in life, that there were important bunkai for certain important kata in Okinawan karate that Funakoshi himself had never been taught and never acquired. The analysis of the truly effective content of kata/hyungs is a kind of quest which requires imagination and the kind of lateral thinking amongst MAists that you find in people who do code-breaking for a living. Definitely, as you say, a good instructor will try to teach the whole technical repertoire... but the problem is finding the best quality apps, the sequences of moves which have the best chance of applying in the real-time nastiness of violent conflict so that the defender walks away at least relatively unharmed. This is the area—personal CQ self-defense—where I see people outside the KKW orbit making the really important contributions...

 

[Manny]

That's why I dropped TKD 17 years ago! I was in TKD for it's martiality and self defense and afther 1988 all the classes were towards competition techniques only leaving SD out.

It's true, TKD has evolved in a tournament pointing sport and it's sad that a rich martial art that was is dying.

I love SD, in fact I took some clases yeras ago of shotokan and aikido cause this.

If only as you mention dojans around the world will give 1/3 of the class devoted to SD it would be a change.

Manny

 

[exile]

That's why I dropped TKD 17 years ago! I was in TKD for it's martiality and self defense and afther 1988 all the classes were towards competition techniques only leaving SD out.

It's true, TKD has evolved in a tournament pointing sport and it's sad that a rich martial art that was is dying.

Manny

Manny, it's gonna come back. I really do believe there's change in the air. But it might lead to a bunch of schools breaking with the KKW over curriculum issues. Conceivably those schools might wind up using the AAU as their large umbrella org, as the original post in the `AAU vs. WTD' thread suggests... or maybe they just won't feel they need such an organization. After all, the kwans didn't have one when they first started in Korea in the late 1940s–early 50s, and SD was pretty much their first, last and middle name...

 

[Shaderon]

I agree it's in the air.... our method of training includes a lot of the hand techniques and Hyung techniques trained in their own merit. One of the good things about Western Society is people ask questions and demand answers, if they don't get them, they go elsewhere and look for them.
Our school hasn't been with the KKW for a long time though..... we were with the original break off. The head of our school was one of Gen Choi's students so we still have a slight military style lean.

 

[RealTaiji]

Isn't there a precursor to Taekwondo, that is Qigong-ish or meditative, coupled with meridian maps and kill strikes?

What is it? Who does it?

 

[tellner]

Isn't there a precursor to Taekwondo, that is Qigong-ish or meditative, coupled with meridian maps and kill strikes?

What is it? Who does it?

If you go back far enough. With a bit of exception on the part of one of the kwans - and not the biggest or most influential - it comes from Japanese Karate later revised and edited in the interests of Korean nationalism. Move back a generation and it's Okinawa Te. Move further back, and it's Chinese boxing and indigenous Ryukyu martial arts. Somewhere in there you'll find what you're looking for. But it's a fair stretch.