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).
