TKD Rant

[sensei8]

The fact that there are such differences within a styles ought to be enough to conclude that everything depends on how a particular system is taught and the methods of training. Training for the ring or competition will make one good in the ring. Training to deal with social/criminal violence will prepare one for that. The path matters very little if it leads to where one aims to go. TKD, karate etc are just different paths.

Meh, not exactly...

Not all styles are created equal, just like not all people are created equal (on the genetic level). Some styles are simply better than others with mounds of supporting evidence....

So the dreaded "street fight" is the last vestige of hope for the common fraudulent martial artist. Disclaimer- I'm not saying that YOU are fraudulent, merely stating that the whole "street fighting" thing is the most overused, overhyped selling point for those people....

The most important thing really-is the quality of sparring one style does. Leaning how to fight against a fully resisting opponent is perhaps the single most effective thing anyone could do.

For example, I can take someone who's boxed for years- give me 5 or 6- but never really sparred. Never mind that they did "boxing" they're not going to know how to move effectively in a fighting situation compared with someone who HAS sparred against fully resisting opponents. The same could be said for a BJJ student who practices for years but never actually trains....

In short, I don't care what name you wish to call whatever it is that you do- as long as its being kept "real" and on the level.

Now why do styles have the reputations they do? In short, your competitive styles have a rep for actually doing full resistance training, therefore they tend to produce very effective fighters. Those that aren't competitive (because they train "for the street") have a habit of NOT training with a fully resisting opponent ("too dangerous") and therefore produce very poor quality fighters. I've trained with, sparred, and fought against many of these people. Street fights and self defense for any competitive fighter are nothing short of a joke, because fighting against a resisting opponent that knows what hes doing is significant more difficult that fighting against a resisting opponent that has absolutely no clue what hes doing.... I mean I've never sweat more in my worst street fight than I did in my lightest warmup

Solid post!!

That's why Shindokan predicates resistive training; either you're effective or you're not!! Resistive training exposes weakness as the onion is pealed away one layer at a time.

[CTTKDKing]

While I no longer practice TKD, I hold a 2nd Dan in WTF TKD and I personally hate the mentality people have toward it or any art form that takes a bad rap for no real reason. TKD gets criticized for Olympic sparring, but that's a sport that is practiced as such. If you go to a school that only focuses on the sport side then yes, it'll be ineffective in a street defense scenario. If you go to a school that only focuses on Olympic sparring you'll do 90% kicks as that's the only way to score in Olympic TKD.

My school was a WTF school that did offer classes on Olympic sparring but my head instructor was a hand to hand combat instructor for 7 years in the South Korean military before he came to the US. Those Olympic sparring classes were optional and secondary to the main school where we spent a lot of time training for self defense and fitness. Someone earlier said that ITF TKD was about 60/40 feet/hands and ours was the same and we spent a lot of time drilling empty hands against knives and sticks.

All styles can be learned from if you learn to approach them with the correct mentality. I know people who rag on American Kenpo in the same way that people rag on TKD because of the bad rap that Villari's brings to the martial arts world. But not even all Villari's schools are bad. It's 100% based on the quality and mentality of the instructors and the demand of quality instruction by the students.

My current school is an MMA gym that also offers traditional classes that revolve around self defense, which is where I predominately train. We have multiple sparring classes that focus on the different aspects of martial arts. We have ones with heavy padding to practice with real world simulated scenarios, and we have sport classes for the BJJ, MMA, and Muay Thai fighters. Recently we had a hybrid seminar where all the styles came together to spar with one another, open style in a round robin. A lot of the more hot headed MMA fighters learned a really valuable lesson that day.

It's not the style, it's the practitioner.