In my martial journey I have been lucky enough to have great instructors in both the traditional and modern art. Unsurprising each seem to have very different views on traditional practices.
The traditional arts hold traditional as some thing that must be observed and never questioned. I was watching a class the other day and a small child got told off for turning the wrong direction when fixing his dobok. The staunch practitioners of these arts tend to think of the modern arts as soulless with no roots or culture.
On the other hand, more modern martial artists tend to view all the traditional as a was of time. Something archaic or indeed fake that should be discarded in favour of training time. One argument against this is that these arts have their own practices that will in time become tradition. They just haven’t been around long enough yet.
As a person who has spent time in both camps my view on this lies somewhere in between. I like the tradition of the older arts it makes me feel linked to the past that I am continuing a practice and I am part of something bigger. However, I do try to understand each of the traditions, for me it is important to know the background of what we do so that we can see a reason for doing it. Without this understanding we can fall into practicing something that in fact has no meaning and maybe isn’t even as traditional as we have been led to believe.
One big example of this, of course is the forms that many arts practice. In my opinion time should be spent in studying the movements and learning the applications. Through this study we will find that some are effective, some are not what we thought, and some are based on cultural practices that are not true anymore. We can then use this understanding to guide our practice. Without this knowledge and understanding of the practice of forms has little or no value. This understanding would also help us distinguish between forms that have been developed as a fighting system or forms that are a group of movements thrown together for aesthetic or athletic performance.
One the other hand, blindly following tradition just because it is tradition is a mistake. This can lead to many pointless practices being included in a desperate effort to be more traditional than anyone else. One of my old articles on the Zen story of ‘the ritual cat’ illustrates this perfects. For ease of refence this is the story.
Ritual Cat
When the spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, the cat who lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. So, the teacher ordered that the cat be tied up during the evening practice.
Years later, when the teacher died, the cat continued to be tied up during the meditation session. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up. Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.
Another point about blindly following traditional practices, is that it leaves no room for growth. The strict adherence to older practices effectively puts a strangle hold on whatever you are practicing martial art or otherwise. No one is allowed to try anything new because it’s not traditional, this clearly is not a good situation to be in.
I recently post on lain Abernethy’s forum about one of the issues of using large blocking movements. In this article I am going to expand on the ideas presented in that post.
People who study bunkai and application to the forms movements are usually in agreement that many of the movements labeled as ‘blocks’ are in fact something else. The reasoning behind this is very sound. As an example ‘San Makgi’, for this movement to be a used as a block we have to have a very specific situation and also be confident enough to block 2 attacks at the same time.
Clearly, when we take some movements as blocks we run into a few problems. However, there is one more problem that is worth discussing. That is one of natural movement and mindset. When we are protecting ourselves or in a state of panic and fear, we tend to make ourselves small and be in a tight position. Our hands come up tight round our head to protect ourselves from whatever is coming towards us.
Even if we are prepared for an attack this can happen. If we look at MMA competitors or boxers, who are in a highly conditioned and in a high state of readiness, they will still resort to bringing the hands up in a protective posture rather than blocking each individual attack. This is a natural defensive movement and as such is very difficult to override. Especially when we are not prepared for an attack.
Now if we take this into consideration and then look at the blocking movement in many of the patterns, we can see that the exact opposite is happening. We are extending our arms and infacting offering ourselves less protection than the more natural position that our body wants to adopt when under threat. We can see this clearly in the openg positions of many of the patterns, Do San or Joong Gun for example would have us in fairly open postures in response to an incoming attack.
Now you can make the argument that the movements in the patternsrepresentideas and the ‘openness’ of the movements is there just for demonstration purposes. However, I don’t feel this has much validity as the amount we have to change the movements to make them practical would render the original movements useless.
I have stated before, but it is worth repeating that I feel in many cases the cross hands ‘chamber position’ is a much better defence. It is closer to our natural flinch response and puts us in a better position to grab limbs and execute counter attacks.
I have written before how that can be seen in Do San, but we can also see it in Yul Gok with the middle forearm block and even the low block in Chon Ji can be better applied in this way.
Are there times when an extended block may work? Yes, of course there are, but as well as the movement we have to consider the mindset required for that movement to be effective. To be that open and to move forward into an attack we have to be aggressive and have some degree of confidence.
This of course goes for other movements as well. Whenever we train we need to consider the not just the technical and physical aspects for a technique but also the mindset required to make the technique work. Mindset itself is something that we need to spend time working on but that is for another article.
In this article, I will be using the general term ‘forms’ to refer to the solo practice of martial arts since I feel that these views apply to all martial arts not just Taekwondo.
For those of you who have read other articles on this blog, the title of this article may surprise you. After all, a good deal of the articles I have written are concerned with how to apply the movements from the Taekwondo patterns to self-defence situations. However, I feel that the true practice and meaning of forms in the martial arts has been lost somewhere along the way.
When I was younger, I asked the question “how many forms do I need to know to be considered good?” Well, of course, the answer is ‘none’. Many effective styles have little or no form practice within their system. In fact, even the systems with a form based syllabus have changed over the years. Traditionally, students were not required to know the number of forms that schools would have on their curriculum these days. Normally they would specialise in a small handful of forms and work on the techniques contained within them. Knowing a complete system was only for the teachers and masters of a particular style.
The practice of learning one form, pattern, or kata per belt level is relatively new. Possibly a product of when traditional martial arts became less about fighting and self-defence and more about tradition and culture. It no longer mattered if a student really understood the movements within the forms of their style, students just had to be able to perform them in solo practice to a certain standard, usually competition based. Adhering everyone to the competition standard brings its own positives and negatives that is for another article.
With this focus on forms, came styles and teachers that specialised forms. The teacher would push the idea that forms make martial artists, that martial artists of old created a countless number of forms, and of course the existence and importance of ‘secret forms’. In my training, I have come across styles with huge curricula that involve as many as 64 forms with some supplementary forms on top of that! I know of one famous teacher of Chinese styles from America who makes an annual trip to Beijing to learn more forms from his teacher so that he has more material for his students. Within taekwondo, I know of one group whose curriculum contains all of the KKW poomse, the ITF patterns, and some weapons forms.
There are a lot more examples like this and of course, for the most part, after a certain point knowing yet another form becomes pointless for the students and it becomes clear that the teachers don’t have anything else to teach. Here I feel it is less about training students and more about entertaining them. Giving them something new and shiny to practice instead of working to improve what they already know, lest students become bored and leave.
The over emphasis on forms has also increased the popularity of sport forms. All tradition or martial effectiveness is forgotten in favour of flashy movements, intense facial expressions, and pointless screaming.
So should we abandon solo forms practice? Certainly not, but like all other arts of the martial arts we should approach it with a practical mindset. Not just from a self-defence point of view but from a martial art point of view as well. All traditional forms, no matter what style, should be studied deeply, including body movement, power generation, accurate stances, and of course application of the movements. They should not be used to pad a curriculum and keep students entertained.
As well as just about every other industry, the internet has changed the way many people look at martial arts. Before when it was something that really only happened behind the closed doors of the local village hall or specialist magazines. Now techniques and training examples are everywhere accessible to anyone at any time. With this accessibility comes the ability to critique techniques, often for no other reason than just to get some attention but sometimes pointing out some valid issues with what is being presented. In this article, I am going to look at some responses to personal protection techniques and where they lack validity.
You don’t need physical protection if you practice verbal de-escalation
This was a comment that was made on one of my articles n the application of Do San. I believe that the commenter had maybe just started looking into verbal de-escalation and had started to believe that it was a cure all to violent situations. Whereas verbal de-escalation is important, there are some instances where attempting to talk someone down is either impractical or inappropriate. For example, someone attacking you with the intention of relieving you of your possessions is one example where you may just have t react, you may not have the time nor the presence of mind to talk the attacker out of what he is doing in which case we need to be able to fall back on some kind of physical skill. Saying that you don’t need such skills is akin to saying that you don’t need to wear a seat belt in a car because you are a good driver.
That wouldn’t work because ……….
Comments that are pointing out small errors in the technique are often very valuable and in the past when receiving such comments it has pushed me to have a look at the issues and try to solve them. Often this would be because you are overlooking one aspect or thinking that their technique is stronger than it actually is. The problem comes from people who will point out mistakes in techniques, but not put their own techniques through the same level of testing.
Again, looking at what I see as the alternative application for the opening Do san. What I see is a hair grab and then a punch, someone mentioned to me that these days many people have short or shaved heads so the technique can be slightly modified to a head or clothing grab.
When I spoke to someone who was more traditionally minded, they commented that I had not considered the person could punch with their free hand or follow up with a kick. First of all the technique does account for all these things, but more importantly, the high outer forearm block also doesn’t account for any of these secondary attacks. This would make the critique a little disingenuous as the purpose is to rubbish the alternative technique rather than have a truly objective look at its effectiveness.
Let’s see if that technique works…
I see this a lot on YouTube usually from martial artists who may have a strong competitive background and thinks that that translates to self-defence. So, they will take a technique from a system and try to replicate it. usually, they will come back and say that the technique doesn’t work and ‘will get you killed’. Again, sometimes this is valid but very often the intent of the presenter is not to genuinely look at the techniques but rather to show them all as ineffective, then to present their own techniques as ‘superior’.
So, the demo will begin and what you have is 2 people, one who knows what the defence will be and knows how to resist and the other who is not practised in the technique. The attempt is usually half-hearted and is made to fail multiple times before both parties sigh and/or laugh at how silly the technique is and resign it to the rubbish pile.
Taking techniques in this way, completely ignoring context and putting them almost in a competitive situation means that the technique will only work if each person allows it to, especially since neither one is well versed in the technique in questions. In the end, these sort of demos are largely pointless and mainly a vehicle to sell other systems.
A quick word on that, if you need to criticize other systems in order for yours to seem valid, then likely it isn’t’.
In conclusion then, techniques should be tested and we should be open to criticism. No one is perfect and no technique covers everything. However, we should be very careful about where the critique comes from and what the ulterior motive of the person giving the critique is. Through this, you will be able to separate what is valid to what is just here to put down what others are doing.
It is has been a while since I took a look at a pattern in full so this month I will be breaking down some of the movement in Yuk Gok. Quite a long post this month due to the number of things covered in the pattern.
Similar to Do San, Yul Gok seems to be largely overlooked by TKD practitioners. The main reason for this seems to be the number of ‘soft’ movements contained within the pattern. However, within Yul Gok there are a lot of very interesting movements that are worth deeper study. Studying this pattern in depth also makes us ask some very important questions about pattern practice and pattern application.
Sitting stance punch
The opening movement of the pattern brings up one of the issues of pattern practice. This would be pattern movements changing over time. When I learnt Yul Gok, many years ago I was taught that the foot moves out in a slight arc rather than straight out to the side into a sitting stance.
An example of this can be seen in this instructional video with GM Donato Nardizzi
In other recent videos and speaking to current practitioners It seems that this arc movement has been removed. Such a small detail may not make much of a difference in the competitive arena, especially if everyone is using the updated movement. However, it makes a large different to the application.
If you move the foot out in an arc, I see this movement being applied as a reap. Shifting your left foot (in the case of the first movement) behind the leg of the attacker while grabbing and twisting their shoulders with the slow motion punch movement of the hands. This movement may not be enough to take down the opponent but will hopefully be enough to take their balance. The following double punch is there to continue the counter attack.
Inner forearm block, front kick double punch.
The next movement, although labelled as a block, I like to apply as a collar or clothing grab. Again we see the raised crossed hands preparation, similar to Do San we can see this as a natural defence to an attack. We then work to secure the opponents attacking hand but instead of going for a hair grab, as in Do San, we try to grab the shirt of the attacker. When we have hold of these points we are in a better position to control our opponent and counter. This goes in to the 3 C’s of tactical taekwondo. Our counter in this point is a kick to the groin and a double punch.
Palm hooking Block
Again, this movement brings up a couple of questions. It is seen in mainstream application as grabbing someone’s wrist from a punch. There is a very good reason why it is seen like this. However, if we look at other applications, when we are always grabbing the arms and wrist of the opponent, then why do we need a movement specially for this? Grabbing, holding and hitting is a basic skill of the self defence side of TKD one that is present in many possible applications and never done in the large movements that are presented here.
In my take on this pattern, this is actually an anti-grappling technique. If some one grabs you by the arm or wrist the twisting movement here will help release your opponent’s grip and reverse the situation and grip them. The crossed hands position here is to assist the release and grab with your other hand. This in turn clears the way a punch as seen in the pattern sequence
Bending ready stance
This is by far one of my favourite applications in the pattern and maybe in all patterns. I think the issue here is the name, ‘ready stance’. It gives the impression that is it a stance you adopt in preparation for something. I even heard one 3rd degree putting forward the idea that it is a stance used for intimidation. Clearly it is not an intimidating stance at all, in fact it is a stance that would invite attack from any possible opponent.
In my opinion bending ready stance comes under taekwondo grappling. The hands in in the forearm guarding block position, which I had written about before as being a stand up grappling position. With this we add the leg position and to me it looks like your front leg is attacking the knee of your opponent’s front leg (left on left as in the pattern). The following side kick can be applied low and attack the rear leg of the opponent. These are down in order to unbalance the opponent. You then locate their heads with your forward hand and execute an elbow strike. This is easily on target as all you are doing is aiming for your own palm.
Twin knife hand block
This again falls into the grappling side of taekwondo. I apply this when the opponent has hold of you in the traditional grappling grip, back of the neck/collar and triceps/upper arm. The movement is to separate the arms of the opponent and create space. This allows you to perform the next movement as a unbalance/take down
The Jump
Jumping in the patterns remains one of those topics that people argue about. In the mainstream, it is seem as jumping over something to attack. In self defence, if there is an object in the path of a would-be attacker, you would generally want to keep it there. Not try to remove the obstacle yourself.
Others say that jumps are just for performance basis. In some cases I can see where they are coming from.
In the case of Yul Gok, right now I would say that the movement it there to make the movement (back fist or clothesline) more powerful. I realise that for some of you this will seem a woefully inadequate explanation, but it is where I am in my study for the time being.
Double forearm block
I have written about the double forearm block before, but mainly in the patterns that come after Yul Gok. In this pattern I actually think there is no real application here.
I have a couple of reasons for this.
If it is a defensive movement, whether the mainstream block or the application I promotion this blog, you need a movement after it. You cannot just block and expect that the attacker will give up. In the pattern that is exactly what happens, we block left and right and finish.
The other reason I think that there is no real application to this movement and it is more for performance or a philosophy, is that ending patterns with a left right movement is very common, and of these instances ending with a block left and right is also very common. If something is repeated so much through all pattern practice, then I would suggest there is maybe a reason other than self defence that is it there. The same goes for the crossed hand position, although there are some places where it can be applied, there are other instances where the crossed hands position can make an application more difficult.
So a rather long post this month, but I think the pattern Yul Gok is deserving of a lot more attention that many people give it. I hope you enjoyed reading this article and found it thought proving at least.
With al the different aspects of TKD it is natural or even a good idea to specialize. Depending on your age, interests, or physical ability you may be more drawn to power breaking, patterns, competition sparring, or self defense aspects of TKD.
However, there comes a point in specialization where being a balanced martial artist will actually get in the way. For example, if you want to excel in power breaking you will of course spend a lot of time with the breaker boards, over time you may feel the need to lessen your time in practice in other aspects of the art. Maybe you’ll spend less time thinking about or training sparring tactics, maybe you’ll see that you don’t need so much conditioning for that one powerful strike, and of course boards don’t hit back so you don’t really need to study blocking or in fact any of the traditional movements.
Then you will probably do very well in this sort of competition.
If this is your aim, and you are clear about what your goal then great. You will face just as many demons on the way to reaching the goal of breaking 10 concrete slabs as you will doing anything else.
The same can be said for tricking.
It takes a lot of training and dedication to achieve anything in these 2 aspects or in deed any aspect of the martial arts.
However, if you strip away all the other parts of an art, can you still be said to be doing martial arts? Or are you doing something else?
This is in no way a criticism of people who have worked very hard towards a goal of their choosing, but I think it is important to be real abut what you are doing. If you are a specialist in breaking or tricking, or demonstration forms, in my opinion, that is how you should present yourself.
If you don’t, you run the risk of misrepresenting yourself and your skills, in the day of YouTube the most common criticism of the above type of videos is that it is no good in a real fight. This is true, but you don’t necessarily have to care if being effective in a real fight is not your aim. The only issue comes if you think or tell others (maybe your students) that they are training in one thing while focusing on another.
What ever your goal is, keep it real and train hard for it.
Getting to black belt or achieving anything of value takes patience and hard work. It is an admiral quality that people display when they just keep turning up to the dojang and taking another small step towards their goal. This is one mindset that is important to making progress. We can call this a ‘yin’ mindset, something that keeps you chipping away at a goal and knowing that you will get there eventually.
However, we also have to train our ‘yang’ mindset, that of facing a challenge in the present. One that cannot be chipped away over time, but has to be dealt with in its entirety immediately
Years ago I was in a class and we were doing pad work, the instructor introduced the technique to be practiced, which happened to be spinning turning kick. This produced a collective groan from a group, mainly from the higher grades within the class. Granted spinning turning kick is not the easiest of techniques but it is hardly tough enough to have people groaning about it. At that point, I feel, all the people who expressed their dislike of the technique had already lost.
For sure they had exposed a weakness in their technique, the fact that they didn’t enjoy practicing the technique. Also they exposed weakness in their mindset, they had almost already admitted defeat just because it was a tough technique. In that session, no one that expressed their displeasure put in 100% effort. Maybe just going through the motions until the instructor moved to a different technique.
Ok, so it was only a pad drill, but what happens if we carry that mindset into other parts of the art. If we have to spar a tough opponent or even defend ourselves physically. We can’t get used to admitting defeat when we are presented with a challenge. We need to develop a strong mindset that doesn’t let us shy away from challenges
We do this simply by facing up to challenges, in class we hear there is a difficult technique, we have to spar the club champion, we have to spar 2 on 1 , or 3 on 1 or even 5 on 1. No matter what the challenge we should meet it with no complaining and pretty much no comment at all.
At the beginning of this article I referred to the 2 different mindset as yin and yang. Both have to be present in your training. Whereas turning up for training everyday but never meeting a challenge will not help you progress, turning up for training once a month will mean that the basic will always be a challenge for you. If we balance the two, turning up and also constantly accepting challenges that we are presented with they we will make strong progress in our training.
Next time in training, when you are presented with a challenging situation, watch how you react
I haven’t posted anything in a while due to being busy. However I do have a few articles in the pipeline. This month I want to look at double punch, and its application
It would be easy to assume that double punch is very common technique in the Taekwondo syllabus. Certainly it is common in both line drills and sparring. However, when we look at the patterns, double punch is not very common at all. In fact up to black belt, I can only count 4 patterns that contain the technique.
My first question when starting to investigate the double punch was, why does it exist at all? Everywhere else through the patterns a single punch in deemed enough to hit an opponent. If it is enough, why have a double punch at all? If is not enough why doesn’t every technique end with a double punch? Also why stop at double punch, why not double knifehand?
There may be an argument that sometimes you need to hit an opponent more than once. This is true but we can’t really build patterns on ‘sometimes’. Trying to account for every possibility in a fight would make patterns unmanageably long and is something best practiced in well constructed sparring. Also the principle of ‘sometimes’ is not reflected in any of the other patterns.
As with other techniques, we have to look at the double punch in context.
Let’s start with Do San. In the pattern we have a wedging block, a front kick, and then the double punch. I have written before about my own interpretation of this movement. However no matter what interpretation you practice, it is likely that the front kick will disrupt the opponents’ balance thus moving his head about. It would be difficult therefore to catch the head with a single punch as it bobs about. Watch any boxing or mma match and you’ll see this to be true.
If we consider this then we can say that the first movement isn’t a punch at all but a movement to relocate secure the head before punching. This is similar to principles that we can see all the way through the patterns. That of grabbing and hitting. Another application would be to grab the head and use the double punch motion to twist the neck.
As an aside this movement is taken almost directly from the karate kata ‘jion’ but instead on a double punch it is a punch, double punch. To me this strengthens the case that they are not all meant to be punches
If we look at Yul Gok, we can see a similar idea. In the opening movement of Yul Gok the foot slides out to form a sitting stance, when I learnt this pattern I was taught that the foot moves in a semi-circle, rather than moving directly sideways. To me this represents a reaping or unbalancing technique, the hands at this point aiding the unbalancing. Again this technique takes the opponent’s head far off the centerline and we need to relocate it in order to deliver the punch, equally we can also look at this as wrenching or twisting the neck.
Similar ideas can be taken from the opening of Hwa Rang, of unbalancing and the relocating the head.
When looking at alternative application, I think we have to be careful not to be over critical with the mainstream applications. Maybe you feel that the way the applications are presented are not all correct, but I don’t think we should assume they are all wrong either. In saying that, I do feel that double punch is one technique that appears simple but has some extra meaning behind it.
As an ending to the ‘My journey‘ articles, I am reposting one of my first articles.
I start training in Taekwondo at the age of 16. I had never done any sort of serious physical activity before beyond the P.E. lessons that we were subjected to at school. Playing cricket in hail stones and trying to kick a football through mud. I was less than fit and flexible but I knew it was something I desperately wanted to do, so week after week I would go and take part in the class my face would turn from red to blue to white and I invariable ended up sitting out of some of the class catching my breath. It was only due to some great instructors and seniors in that club that I managed to get myself together. Years later my experiences and the things learned (in between mad dashes to the bathroom to throw up) are still a source of learning and motivation for me.
I have since moved away from my hometown and ceased serious practice of TKD, although I still practice the patterns. I have studied in a number of different countries and under different masters of different styles but all the way through be it shaolin kung fu, aikido or stick fighting I have looked for ways to link all my knowledge back through to taekwondo
The way I do this is through the patterns of ITF taekwondo which I believe are a largely mis understood and under used part of the syllabus. The usual applications for the movements, such as an outer forearm block to stop a hook punch or a low block to stop a front kick, are presented all with the underlying feeling of “yeah well, this is how they used to fight in Asia” or even more oddly “this is the art side of TKD, of course it would never work, but I am telling you this anyway” and then classes get on with the ‘real’ stuff of sparring. This is not a problem only in TKD but in most martial art that include forms practice in the syllabus. Students of the martial art for the most part seem not to want to study the movements in-depth and are satisfied with agreeing with the first application that is presented no matter how workable or unworkable it seems
This is mainly because forms practice in many arts has been reduced to a demonstration art, people spend years training to hold kicks in position or get the placement of a punch millimetre perfect without spending one training session examining the application of the movement. This has been compounded by the grading syllabus of many schools also requiring a demonstration of a form rather than demonstration of the understanding of the form.
Slowly through practices like this and the introduction of sport style sparring with gloves and rules that make many of the movement from the forms redundant (i.e. it is difficult to perform a knife hand with a boxing glove on) the true applications and essence of traditional Taekwondo is being lost.
Tactical Taekwondo is my attempt to present the information I have learnt during my years in the martial arts and how it can all be found in TKD if we look at the patterns closely.o
This is a continuation of the previous article detailing my journey through the martial arts, if you would like to read part one you can find it here
Krav Maga
After leaving Aikido I floated for a few months until I was invited to try Krav Maga by one of the Aikido black belts I had trained with. I was a bit reluctant at first, I wasn’t at all sure about going for what could be seen as a modern art after spending so much time in the traditional styles.
After a bit of persuasion I went along to see what it was like. I loved it. Running about hitting pads, sweating, and breathing heavy was like returning home. The simplicity of Krav and the training methods makes for a very effective self-defense system.
The classes had just newly opened were quite small, in fact I was in the first group of 8 people to train Krav in Beijing. Of the 8, every single one of us had a black belt in one style or another, this made the training really hard and a lot of fun. We all knew how to train and whether it was pad work or contact drills we were all pushing each other as hard as we could.
One thing that happened while I was Krav was I realized how much extra power I had from learning to relax in the Chinese styles. I was no longer forcing the punches and feeling tight in my body but letting fly with loose strikes. Due to this, the standing and walking practices I learnt from Zhu Baozhen remain part of my practice to this day.
Krav Maga grew rapidly in Beijing, class numbers rose from 8, to around 20, to over 30 on some evenings. With the increase in students more instructors were needed, I happily put myself forward for the instructor’s course. Different from other martial arts, in Krav you don’t become an instructor after time served. You go through a very demanding course. In my case it was 2, two-week long courses. During the course you train every day from about 8 am – 6 pm, constantly running through the technical aspects of the art and the teaching methodology. Each course ends in a day long exam.
The standard expected from instructors is very high and the course is both mentally and physically demanding. It was a great experience, really pushing yourself to your limits each day.
I passed the course and returned to the gym to face the new challenge of being an instructor. I took my turn running regular classes, women’s self-defense classes, and special seminars. I was very happy to be working in the industry.
Balintawak
From time to time I go online to find out what is happening within the martial arts in my local area. It was through a casual internet search that I found my final teacher Mr. Frank Olea. He had posted an ad on one of the local forums that simply said ‘weapons training’. Being a Krav trainer, which involves a number of different weapons, this sounded something that would suit me.
I contacted him and set up meeting. It turned out he was living very close to me and was a Master level teacher in the Filipino art of Balintawak.
Balintawak is a single stick system of Eskrima, traditionally taught one on one from instructor to student. The instructor teaching the student through giving them increasingly complex and rapid attacks for the student to deal with.
That was how the training was, first defending against simple attacks, then attacks where my weapon hand was held, then defending against disarm attempts and so on. All of this was done training outside, and because of our individual work schedules, in the dark.
Frank would continually push me to understand the weapon movements especially the knife which he specialized in. He was also always pushing himself and trying to develop his art, the benefit of having a younger master as a teacher. He would occasionally come up with a new attack combination or angle that I had to defend against, either with a stick or a training knife. One night he came down from his apartment and announced that for the next few weeks we would be training with live blades.
For me Balintawak brought a number of things together the methods of Balintawak complement the Chinese systems very well due to the close in nature of the style. It also blends quite well with some of the Krav techniques.
Frank granted me permission to teach his style shortly before I left Beijing.
Currently, I live in Jakarta where I teach both Krav Maga and Balintawak with some Tactical Taekwondo thrown in. I choose not to study any additional styles right now. I use my time in this country to consolidate what I have learnt from all the teachers I have known.
As I said in the about section I try to bring everything I learn back to the original TKD patterns that I learnt. For example, my interpretation of the opening movement of Do San was inspired by the attention paid to natural movements in Krav Maga techniques, and my application of Sonkal Daebi Makgi was taken from the chicken form from Xingyiquan and some of the Bagua entering movements.
I hope you enjoyed reading about my journey through the martial arts. I don’t know where my path will lead me next, but I know I will be training and studying martial arts for as long as I am able.
Tactical Taekwondo 