TKD forum stupidity...

[Captain Spaulding]

I've been a part of this TKD forum for some time now, but it'd gone downhill and I had given up on it, til I saw this thread. And I felt I had to comment.

You know, I'm sick of getting it from both sides. Either I'm wasting my time doing TKD, or I'm just jumping on a bandwagon doing BJJ.

Well, read for yourself. The one comment that really gets me is this:

"Anyone who has trained in the same martial art for 20 years or more can defend themselves regardless of the art or the training methods. To stay with one way that long, there must be some merit to it. To think otherwise is foolish!"

Anyway, enjoy. Or don't.

http://www.itf-online.com/discussion...?TOPIC_ID=1601

[Fantasy Warrior]

That Garth makes some good points which support your view. However, he agree's with the guy who says

Originally posted by Blindgob

If you don't like that schools teach TKD in a static way, that's an issue of the school and the instructor, not of the art itself....

(lol). Have you considered the issue that "if it's not the art's fault" then why does the culture of ALIVENESS not come from the top of the org??? The upper echelons don't seem to care whether the training is alive or not and don't promote it -in fact I'd guess they actively ignore it -how can you sell an art on it's kicking (this goes for ITF too) if that is undermined by people training Alive and finding out just how limited kicking is????

If every art trained Alive, you'd end up with everyone doing one of three genre: Sport Grappling, MMA or the better end of RBSD depending on the emphasis of the club. TKD's current content would cease to be viable....

ALIVENESS is a direct threat to TKD because it's been sold on a fundamental lie since its inception.

[Doctor Shaft]

ALIVENESS is a direct threat to TKD because it's been sold on a fundamental lie since its inception.

I agree. Although, TKD/TSD might not have been always so against the "aliveness." At least in the art I've trained in, I've been told by those that were in it at least twenty years before I started that things were very different . There there was a sort of "aliveness" component to the training.

The problem, I suppose, was that it was unrefined. You didn't have the sport genres to give you guidance on how to do it effectively AND safely, and schools would generally only have the "toughest" or most dedicated guys. Maybe one woman.

But that doesn't build large schools. Things changed, and they've stuck ever since. To this day, people are probably more worried about losing students and/or being sued if someone so much as gets hurt in training that's "not supposed to be dangerous."

It's just the truth. MMA and RBSD schools benefit, I think, from the modern era. People have seen Pride, UFC, etc., and I guess realize now that they could conceivably train that way too and still have the "bruce lee" stuff going on. They don't have to be a boxer. I don't know.

[MattJ]

Quote by Kickcatcher -

ALIVENESS is a direct threat to TKD because it's been sold on a fundamental lie since its inception

Hmmmm......not sure I agree there. There are levels of aliveness, and some schools adhere to different standards than others. I have a few TKD friends that have trained mostly full contact stuff. While they lack the grappling element (in TKD sparring), they certainly have good timing and functional power in their strikes.

I realize that these type of schools are in the minority, but not all TKD schools are no contact tippy tappy crap. Not sure whether those schools that do have the "Alive" ethos are getting their "culture" from the top down or not. Don't many of the native Korean TKD orgs promote full contact? In that case, it would be at the regional level that the message is being lost.

Not sure though.

[Phrost]

Real alive training would be MMA competition.

And we all know what happens when someone who only trains in TKD and nothing else goes into a MMA ring/cage.

[MattJ]

Agreed, Phrost.

However, Boxing is promoted as being alive, yet it is missing the entire groundfighting range (like full contact TKD). This is my point about levels of aliveness. As a striking art delivery system, full contact TKD could almost be thought to be superior to boxing, (assuming head shots, etc, were allowed), since kicks are involved as well.

[Poop Loops]

This just makes me realize how good my old TKD school was. We did full contact sparring (but with pads) and we did pad work while moving around.

Of course, Phrost has a point. That's the reason I quit TKD: very limited rules.

PL

[Poop Loops]

It seems like Kohler is the only dumbass there. Most others agree that TKD needs aliveness and crosstraining wouldn't be a bad idea.

PL

[Captain Spaulding]

This is where I'm coming from:

The school where I did TKD had a lot of "alive" training, as well as partner drills and that sort of thing. We also did sparring that had the same rules as the UFC (except that we could kick in the head on the ground).

My instructor knew that most students there weren't training to become real badasses, but for those who were, he created something like a separate club to train for that. It included ground fighting and grappling (as many of the guys in the club had done wrestling, BJJ, or Judo) along with the TKD that we normally did (which included boxing), but in a harder more competetive way.

So I know that this kind of training can be done in a TKD school. But when I moved away and tried to find this at another TKD school, I was met with everything from extreme reluctance to open hostility.

And I think TKD can be as effective a striking art as there is, but most train in a way as to make this impossible. So I try to nudge others along. Besides, I was never part of the ITF, but my instructor had been a few decades ago, so it's like the school I went to was a distant cousin.

[Kengou]

TKD does do sparring; that's certainly alive training. It might not be full contact, and there might be limited punches or no grappling, but it IS sparring, and it IS alive.