Tag: free sparring

Four more principles for teaching a good Taekwondo class

1. Don’t substitute actual Taekwondo with general fitness

I’ve been to a lot of Taekwondo classes where, instead of doing line-work, or sparring, we’ve just done very general circuit training – the aim of which has just been to improve students’ fitness.

But when people go to a Taekwondo class, they want to do Taekwondo – they are enthusiastic about Taekwondo. Taekwondo, when done correctly, IS incredibly physically demanding – doing 10 fast, powerful, high-section turning kicks along a line is a physically intense activity. There should be no need to do general fitness activities instead of Taekwondo, because Taekwondo itself should improve students’ fitness. And Taekwondo is why the students are there – that’s what they want to do.

This is not to say that general fitness exercises can never be done in a Taekwondo class, but they shouldn’t be a large chunk of every lesson.

2. Plan every lesson

Planning a lesson will give it structure, and you’ll be able to focus on a specific aspect of Taekwondo training – for example: jumping kicks. Planning a lesson prevents each lesson from being the same, and makes sure that your students cover everything they need to between gradings.

Now this doesn’t mean that you have to plan the lesson in the same way that secondary school teachers do – you don’t have to spend hours thinking of and writing out your plan. Often all you need to do is come up with a few unique or interesting ideas ten or fifteen minutes before the lesson starts, and then just make those ideas the theme for the lesson.

3. Speak in Korean often

Students generally have to learn Korean terms for gradings. A lot of students find learning Korean difficult, but one way that you can make it easier is by using Korean terms often throughout a lesson. By doing this, students learn what words mean in context, which makes them easier to remember.

Always give instructions in Korean in a Taekwondo class. When you mention specific techniques or stances, give the name of the movement in English and Korean (and if it’s a very easy movement that everyone knows the Korean for, sometimes only give the Korean, and let students work out what you’re referring to).

4. When students are training in pairs, shuffle students around so that they aren’t always training with the same person

A lot of activities in Taekwondo training are pair-based: set sparring and free sparring are the main ones. In these kinds of activities, students tend to choose a partner who is either a similar grade to them, or is one of their friends (often both). This means that, if they’re always left to choose who they pair with, they always train with the same person.

The problem with this is that students don’t learn as much when they always train with the same person. This is especially true with sparring. If students always free-spar against the same two or three people, they will get used to how those people spar – what techniques they use, their speed, where they tend to leave openings. If students spar against lots of different opponents – opponents of different grades too (it’s fine for a green belt to spar against a black belt, as long as the black belt sees it as a training exercise for the green belt and doesn’t go all-out) – they will have to adapt to different sparring styles, and they will also see new techniques that they can use that they didn’t think of before.

So whenever students are doing pair-based activities, mix the pairs up every few minutes. Often the simplest way to do this is to have the class do a ‘circular change to the left / right’, where students are facing each other in pairs, and each student steps to the left to face the next person along (and those at the ends move around onto the opposite side of the line).

Why do we practise forms in Taekwondo?

Forms are practised in all styles of Taekwondo, and they are practised by students of all grades and degrees. Clearly they are central to Taekwondo training. Some people (like myself) like forms, and like practising them, but a number of people dislike forms. I’ve met a number of people over the time I’ve been training in Taekwondo who strongly dislike forms, and who vastly prefer to do other kinds of training such as sparring and self-defence training, and who wonder why we train in forms at all in Taekwondo. It is to those people that this post is written – I aim to show that even if you don’t like forms, there are good reasons why they’re such a big part of Taekwondo.

1. Body Control

This, I think, is THE most important reason to practise forms. Body control is just the ability to move your body into a specific position and know, without looking to check, that your body is in the correct position. It’s the ability to perform a punch and to know that your wrist is straight and that the opposite hand is on your waist without having to look to check, or without having an instructor come along and adjust the position.

This might sound like a very basic ability – and it is – but a lot of people, when they first start training in martial arts, do not have this ability. This is especially true with older students (30 years and older), who – if they have never done any physical activity that requires precise movements of the body, such as martial arts or dance – will have become used to a certain way of moving. When they first start training in martial arts they have to unlearn the way they have learnt to move over the first few decades of their life.

Forms are excellent for teaching body control, because they are a choreographed sequence of movements, and they should be performed in a very precise way. Importantly, the transitions between movements in forms are very specific – you have to move a specific foot, you have to turn a specific direction, you have to start the next technique at the correct point, and you have to maintain balance throughout. All of this forces you to think about how you are moving, and this is how forms train you in body control.

(This point isn’t so relevant if you’ve been training in Taekwondo or another martial art for several years. After a few years of training, you will have learnt body control, and it’s not an ability you will forget quickly. However, for beginners, learning body control, and hence practising forms, is essential.)

2. Competitions

Some people dislike the ‘sport’ side of Taekwondo: the style of fighting that’s used for competition sparring – which is often criticised as unrealistic – and the performance of forms. However, Taekwondo practitioners want to be able to compete, so there should be a part of Taekwondo which allows them to do that (even if it doesn’t completely emulate a real fight).

Forms are an excellent way of judging a Taekwondo practitioner’s ability. They are a test of balance, flexibility, and just the ability to accurately perform any given technique. Since everyone in a given style of Taekwondo will learn the same forms, they are a standardised way to compare the abilities of a group of practitioners. Indeed, so useful are forms for competitions, Kukki-won created a set of 10 new forms specifically to be used in competitions.

3. Forms are the lexicon of a martial art

This is another very important reason for practising forms. The forms of a particular style of a martial art contain all of the techniques that are part of that martial art. They are a dictionary of techniques – if you learn all of the forms, then you have learnt all of the techniques taught in that martial art.

This idea is arguably somewhat undermined by the fact that people like Choi Hong-hi and Hwang Ki wrote encyclopaedias for their styles of Taekwondo, and those encyclopaedias are far more detailed and specific than the forms are. Nevertheless, it is still the tradition, in the martial arts that are related to Karate, that each generation of students teaches forms to the next generation, and that knowledge is passed down through those forms, which encapsulate all of the knowledge of that style. Forms form a kind of ‘oral history’ – a ‘choreographic history’ or a ‘choreographic lexicon’ – and passing that from one generation to the next is part of the traditions of Taekwondo.

4. Fitness

Forms are not performed particularly fast, but practising them does improve your fitness. Forms often involve performing low stances and various different kicks, which improve your flexibility and strength. They often also involve one-leg stances, which together with any high kicking techniques improve your balance.

One could argue that there are plenty of general exercises you could do to improve these aspects of fitness, but forms do all of them at the same time. Forms are excellent for improving your general fitness.

Forms do not teach you how to win a fight, but they’re not supposed to. They’re supposed to be a foundation of training from which other forms of training – free sparring, self-defence training – develop.