Sunday 6 December 2020

Another live training session :-)











I just published my second live training session on YouTube:-) This time I did:


- Opening meditation 

- Olympic sparring footwork

- Dynamic stretching exercises 

- Kicking (front, round, side)

- Basic Hand techniques in Horse stance

- Taebaek Poomsae in depth

- Taegeuk 5-8

- 2 step sparring 1-5 as practised in the TTU

- Stretching 

- End of session meditation 


It’s in Norwegian language but it will be easy to follow along for anyone regardless of language :-) it is live so there is no editing or anything. It is therefore complete with water breaks etc. Just plug and play :-)


So If you’re interested go to my YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/XtSkHcb7j7o


Or see it here


Saturday 5 December 2020

(Epic) Guest post: The flower boys of old

 A long time ago (so long I don’t really remember if we were discussing history or what, Øyvind sent me a draft of an article he has started writing about the hwarang. It was easily one of the best pieces of writing I’ve ever read on them, so when he asked me if I remembered the draft he sent me and if I was willing to post his finished article I was overjoyed, humbled and homered all at once :-) I’ve been called a Taekwondo nerd many times, a badge I wear with honour, but Øyvind as you will see operates on a whole new level of greatness :-D This I am sure will be a great read for you, and unlike some people Øyvind has used good sources and critical thinking in his research. Thank you Øyvind :-) 


The flower boys of old

Written by Øyvind Kveine Haugen, independent researcher

 

If you have been involved with taekwondo for any period of time, you will undoubtably have been told that once upon a time, there were these mighty warriors in ancient Korea called "hwarang". They are usually mentioned in the curriculum when trying to explain the ancient roots of the martial art, right after the cave paintings of Goguryeo (37BC-668AD) but before the unification of Silla (668AD) and the Goryeo-Khitan wars (perhaps more correctly explained as a series of unsuccessful attempts of invasion, spanning roughly from 993-1019AD). In the ITF Chang Hon syllabus there's even a hwarang tul (tul being the ITF suffix for their forms, comparable to poomsae in WT style taekwondo), complete with the following description: "It is named after the hwarang group of scholar-warriors that originated in the Silla Dynasty in the early 7th Century." (Taekwondo Wiki).

The hwarang ideal has become a popular symbol in modern Korea. It has been used in the name of the Army Officers Training School, as the name of a high-ranking military decoration, as the name of multiple bars (one of which was frequented quite often during the author's stay in Seoul in 2010-11 due to its 3-hours-long "happy hour"), and generally brings about a sort of national pride mixed with romantic ideals of earlier days, much the same way as Shaolin monks are revered in China. However, this way of thinking about the hwarang is relatively new. It is an idea that has grown parallel to Korean independence after the war, and as far as I have been able to work out, the source of this idea might have been Yi Son-gun (李瑄根), who in 1949 published "a study of hwarang-do" (花郞道研究hwarangdo yon'gu), which reads like a, frankly, speculative essay on hwarang ethics and ideals, and how these ideals influenced the entire Korean populace in the centuries after.

So, today I'd like to dig into these scholar-warriors and try to separate facts from fiction. 

All translations are my own unless explicitly noted.