I don't think of the systems as being well rounded. It has more to do with the individual's personal usage of the system. Take Wing Chun for instance. For the most part there is very little ground work in Most wing chun training however, all the principles and concepts can be utilized on the ground. Problems arise when the individual attempts to use stand up training in the ground environment without ever training on the ground. It isn't the systems fault it is the individual's for never training in that environment. The movements and available techniques are there in the system. Different training systems may expound on particular aspects but most have the movements and positions somewhere in the training. If you want to be well rounded in all possible areas then train in all those areas. You want to be a good straight kicker then train that kick, you want to be a good roundhouse kicker then train that kick. You want to be a good stand up fighter then train realistically in stand up, you want to be a good ground fighter then get on the ground and realistically train on the ground. You want to be a good weapons fighter then train realistically with and against weapons. The system cannot do it for you. YOU must do it!
Danny T
BINGO! This is something I have been preaching for the 2 1/2 years I have been on this site. REP from ME!
And rep from me too, Danny. There is so much crystallized common sense in this statement that it seems as if very little more needs be said on that particular point. Interestingly, this is yet another, very well-stated expression of the idea that it's not the art per se, but (i) how it's taught and (ii) how you choose to train it, which makes for both effectiveness and what GC identifies as excitement.
All a matter of opinion, you might consider that "true", while I would consider it very artificial.
Fighting is what we do, everything comes through that. When you fight with someone trying to knock you out, you learn a lot more about yourself then sitting on the floor meditating will ever teach you.
Again, very true and very nicely put.
If you really want to learn about yourself it comes from how you act under pressure, not how you act when nothing can possibly go wrong. Whether it is a physical fight, a job negotiation, or fighting cancer, that is where you find your character development.
And believe it or not, that was a position that you find even in the Western
mystical tradition. Meditation and contemplation were taken to be effective only when they had `food' to digestexperience. When I was an undergraduate, in one of my humanities survey courses, we had a text written by one of the great mediæval mystics, damned if I can remember which one, in the form of a dialogue between a young man and an old, revered hermit scholar whom the former has searched out to ask about the nature of God. The old mystic listens to the boy's questions, especially how he should live his life, and then tells him to become a soldier. To fight, to learn the customs and habits of a wide variety of other places (just about the only way of doing that in the Middle Ages, unless you were very rich) and then, after many years of accumulating experience, to do what the old man has done: try to see the common basis of all of his experiences, and God's nature will emerge after he contemplates his life experiences carefully and honestly, undistracted by the need to please others. The boy is pretty surprisedyou mean I actually have to
do something before God reveals Himself to me?? :lol: I loved it...
GC, there's one thing I think you might consider. Arts, even though they ultimately share a common technical core, differ greatly in how their curricula are structured. TKD, like other variants of karate, tend to have very highly structured curricula; my impression from talking to Kenpoka is that Kenpo (of the EP variety, anyway) is sort of the logical extreme of this approach. The karate-based arts in general don't allow much `mystery' or spontaneity. But as Danny and CN would probably agree, that's really a function of the individual school curriculum. So, for example, suppose you had a TKD school where, after the warmup and the work on basic kihon drills, the instructor announced a particular hyung and told you, `OK, we're looking at moves 5 through 8. Perform those.' And everyone did. Then the instructor said, `All right, imagine that an attacker has grabbed you with his left hand by your shirt and is clearly preparing to use that grab as to immobilize you while he winds up a right hook to your jaw to deck you. Find the fighting application of those four moves which will enable you to knock him out/break his neck/force him to the ground/...? by the last moveregardless of what he tries to do to resist! Find a partner, work out the application so the outcome is
forced, and then we're all going to watch you perform it and explain it.' And suppose
every class had a twenty minute or half-hour segment along those lines... would that not be exciting (and a little bit scary... putting your best SD analysis of the hyung out there for everyone to see)?
OK, at most dojangs, TKD isn't taught that way. But there's no reason it couldn't be, or wouldn't be if you found the right instructor. It's a very nonstandard curriculum approach... but it's certainly not unknown; an increasing number of UK dojangs, influenced by the bunkai-jutsu movement in karate there, do something like this. So the excitement factor is I think really a matter of instructor choice.
Anything can be made mechanical, repetitive and predictable, but if there's one thing I learned at the M&G training sessions we had in Buffalo this past weekend, it's that there's no such thing as an inherent unexciting MA...
If I could train Hwa Rang Do in Flagstaff, I would be there with the whole family.
If you want that excitement back, return to HRD.
