potsie23

Well, I do see your points, really I do, but I still have to say, if you are not mentally prepared to train or fight then what? What came first, the chicken or the egg? And as far as my school goes, they don't promote rank just to get you to black belt. Ive seen students wait almost 6 months to be promoted from a novice rank. I respect your thoughts and opinions bushido, but I guess I would have to agree to diagree in this case. Maybe my opinion will change in the future after I have had more training. Thank you for your thoughts, it has given me something more to think about.

I guess I wasn't as clear as I could've been. I believe that everything we do in our class is balanced with each other. I guess to say that we only learn a certain set of self defense tactics or moves is mis-leading. We do learn self defense tactics, but we learn how to balance them with our other curriculum. To say they should be the core of what you learn I believe is wrong. Martial arts is not only about self defense, for me, it is a path to better awareness, of both myself and of my surroundings. Maybe thats cliche or naive, but thats how I see it at this point in my journey, which as I said is a new one.

I think all that is very true. If you are willing to train long enough and hard enough to gain some muscle memory the movements and actions will become somewhat automatic, but as you said, the emotional reaction to the attack is the deciding factor in how one will defend oneself. Is it fight or flight? As I said I'm very new to martial arts and am still learning the monumental task of thinking openly and outside of the box, so the emotional value is there. It is very difficult to know what I would do, but you hope that through training and conditioning we will develop the more important ability to recognize when to fight and when to walk.

I'm new to MA's. In my do-jang we cover all aspects right from the start. There are many aspects to our discipline. If you work at all the aspects of your particular discipline within TKD, they will blend to give you the ability to effectively defend yourself if you ever have to. It is not one set of skills that work better than the other, it is the ability to draw on all of your skills that make self defense effective. I hope this helps and makes some sense.

I am very new to the martial arts, but where I take classes we cover self defense tactics as well as sparring combinations. Our instructor is very good in teaching self defense tactics that can be adapted to the moment, if and when they are needed, but I believe they should be taught as a seperate group of skills within the disipline. I hope this makes sense.

Hello my name is Jeff. I am a new student to TKD and hopefully will be getting my orange belt in a couple of weeks. If anybody has any suggestions on how to keep your cool when testing, I would appreciate it very much. Thanks.