What I Learned From Tae Kwon Do

I divide my current training into a mixture of TKD and Krav Maga due to the emphasis of the school on technique.  The following are some revelations I have made about TKD, its practitioners, and its merits.

* Sports martial arts serve as excellent developers of character, competitiveness, confidence, and citizenship for youth.  Despite these great merits, I severely doubt the efficacy of many TKD practitioners in actual combat.

* Flexibility, particularly of the hips and legs, is a greatly under appreciated skill that increases a martial artist's range of motion, thereby increasing their options in self defense situations.

* Kicking can be a useful tool for self defense, but is even more useful as a means of developing balance, leg strength, and flexibility.

* Intensity alone is sufficient to build muscle in the absence of any weights at all.  My biceps often grow inexplicably after very intense kicking workouts.

* The side kick is a ridiculously hard technique to master for those who have not developed the small muscles on the sides of the hips.

* The back kick can be an unexpectedly powerful tool for delivering a surprise strike to a pursuing opponent.  That said, I cannot ever recommend its use as an actual self defense technique.

* TKD sparring has so little in common with actual fighting, that I cannot recommend it for self defense training.  That said, TKD is a legitimate sport and those who train it deserve to take pride in their accomplishments.  There are simply more efficient and effective ways to learn how to defend oneself.

* The Korean nationalism engrained in this school of TKD seems odd.  I cannot recall even one Japanese martial arts center with a giant red sun flag waving over the class, yet the TKD school I visited had a giant Korean flag which seemed out of place in a class of American youths and instructors.

* Mothers of TKD students are worse than soccer moms and seem to promote an atmosphere more conducive to politeness and apologetic weakness than rigorous self defense training.

* Some TKD students have the absolute weirdest battle cries I have ever heard.  (oouh...HEEYYY)  I cannot explain the choice of these sounds, but they seem purposeful.

* Learning effective kicks takes far longer than learning effective strikes.  This may owe to the morphological disadvantage inherent in using the legs as weapons, or the limited use of legs in western culture (mostly used for walking).

* To quickly build agility and balance for using the legs, stop using your hands to open/close doors, turn on light switches, etc.  Use feet instead.

* There seems to be a distinct generational gap between modern and old school TKD teachers.  Younger teachers are less physically hard, more polite, and more lenient with students.  Old school teachers are physically well developed, callous in speech, and strict about standards.