Truthfully,

[granfire]

I think many people these days are not very comfortable not having both feet on the ground. or the everyday wear to accomplish a kick.

 

[ralphmcpherson]

Sir: I beg to differ. Almost equal time for punches, blocks and and kicks is called for. Many people walking off the street -- and some Taekwondo dojangs -- think or look like they know how to throw basic punches, but they don't.

It takes time to learn how to land fast accurate punches, in motion, and at a moving targets. We had a young 1st dan from another school visit our dojang last week, and he had serious problems hitting a moving paddle with straight punches. This happened in a simple drill where I force students to block a paddle swung to the head or belly, and ask them to immediately follow that up with a forward slide, straight reverse punch and a round house kick. The punches and kicks are aimed at another paddle which I hold at rib-cage level, while I am rapidly moving backwards.

Dont get me wrong , punching is not easy and time does need to spent on it. I have a mate who does boxing and it blows me away how good he is with his hands and it is the result of a lot of hard work. In my opinion though , if you were to get 2 people of equal ability (with no martial arts experience), and one spent a solid month learning only punches and punching drills and one did the same but with kicking , my experience shows that the guy doing punching would progress further than the guy trying to learn kicks. A really fast , accurate and powerful jump spinning kick or 540 kick can take years to get down well and that is just one of many kicks. Just my opinion though.

 

[Archtkd]

Dont get me wrong , punching is not easy and time does need to spent on it. I have a mate who does boxing and it blows me away how good he is with his hands and it is the result of a lot of hard work. In my opinion though , if you were to get 2 people of equal ability (with no martial arts experience), and one spent a solid month learning only punches and punching drills and one did the same but with kicking , my experience shows that the guy doing punching would progress further than the guy trying to learn kicks. A really fast , accurate and powerful jump spinning kick or 540 kick can take years to get down well and that is just one of many kicks. Just my opinion though.

Good points, but I'm sure you, like I, have seen interesting things, sometimes driven by gender of the student, physiology, psychology, social background and raw talent. I, for example, have two students who signed up at the same time. Both were in good physical shape but had zero martial arts or any fighting experience. One is a girl, 9, the other a boy 12.

After five months the boy can punch very well, but his kicks, while strong, are sloppy and his movements are imbalanced. The girl can't punch, but her kicks are good -- fast, powerful, fluid and accurate. They've both been doing the same drills since day one.

 

[Wey]

My instructor (7th dan) has said many times "no matter how good you are with your legs , if you cant throw punches you're screwed".

I like that quote. The main reason why I asked this question is because all of the Tae Kwon Do practitioners that I've sparred (only 3) have all only used their feet. I know sparring only three people and then making an assumption isn't exactly rational, but it does make you wonder what the rest of the "family" trains. And, when sparring with them, they only watched my feet, probably because they train for tournaments and thats the only thing that matters. I was just wondering about the "tuth" so to speak, of TKD. Thanks for the input.

 

[ralphmcpherson]

I like that quote. The main reason why I asked this question is because all of the Tae Kwon Do practitioners that I've sparred (only 3) have all only used their feet. I know sparring only three people and then making an assumption isn't exactly rational, but it does make you wonder what the rest of the "family" trains. And, when sparring with them, they only watched my feet, probably because they train for tournaments and thats the only thing that matters. I was just wondering about the "tuth" so to speak, of TKD. Thanks for the input.

It probably has a lot to do with range , as a tkdist I would rather use my legs and rather spar with some distance between me and my opponent. If Im sparring a mate (who doesnt do tkd) and I can keep them at distance , I will just use legs as there is no need to punch and they are in my comfort zone. I wont just come in and close the distance and throw punches just for the fun of it. I will usually only punch so they will move back and i can start kicking again. Thats not to say I cant punch , its just that I enjoy kicking heaps more , thus why I do tkd in the first place.

 

[Muntman]

My instructor (7th dan) has said many times "no matter how good you are with your legs , if you cant throw punches you're screwed". This shows in his training , sometimes during sparring he will say that for the next round or two no kicks are allowed and it has to be all punches. We do a lot of punching drills and punching is heavily encouraged in our sparring. In my own time I do some boxing drills on a punch bag and enjoy working on my hand speed etc. I do , however , prefer kicking and this is why I love tkd so much.

Thats like my class. Punching drills are practiced quite often to make our selves more rounded. We train punching (from midrift to base of the neck) and are actually encouraged to do so in sparing as much as kicking. this works for the different body types and show how people are inderviduals under the same style of martial arts