Kwan-era Taekwondo grappling, was that a thing?

This year has been almost a complete Kwan-era bubble for me both on this blog, patreon and facebook. It has been a lot of fun, and lately I seem to have gained a little speed on facebook growth, which has me getting a lot of comments that I try to answer, but I have to do so briefly. Here there are no rules and I can go on as long as I like. So this time I will be talking a little on grappling in Kwan-era Taekwondo.

First, what is Kwan-era Taekwondo? To keep it brief, when I talk about Kwan-era Taekwondo I talk about all Kwan (schools) that would eventually take up the Taekwondo name, so I am talking about 1945-1970ish. Like the end of the Viking age (which many draw the line exactly at 1066), the Kwan era in practical terms continued after 1970. The unification happened in 1978, yet here we are in 2026 and people are still practicing Kwan specific Taekwondo and gaining Kwan dan grades. The unification and abolishment of Kwan and the Kwan existing only as social clubs will get their own posts down the line, don´t you worry. But for now let us return to grappling in the Kwan-era.

Second, what is grappling? This one is much harder to define. Taekwondo has always been a striking heavy martial art, favoring ending situations quickly through the use of percussive techniques (knees, elbows, head-but, punches, kicks, finger-strikes etc. So the grappling part was a supportive method to maintain the preferred strategy. So most Taekwondo grappling would be grabbing "something" while striking with the free arm. Yet I want to define grappling as: Release from grabs, grabs, locks and joint destruction techniques, sweeps, trips, take downs, throws, holds, etc. We will not see the moniker: "grappling" within Taekwondo, the techniques appears in the old manuals as parts of sparring examples, self defense skills and so on. 

The role of grappling in Taekwondo: I already touched upon it briefly above, but I want to talk a little about the role of grappling in Kwan-era Taekwondo. Taekwondo is the art or way of smashing the assailant using our feet and arms, so grappling is not the first option. Like a modern soldier carrying a pistol, a lot has gone wrong if the pistol is drawn and used instead of using the primary weapon(s). Taekwondo grappling happens when an opponent clinches, or grabs your arms or body to keep you or limit your striking capability. Choi Hong Hi stated that if grabbed you have 3 options: Release technique to free yourself, punch or kick with your other attacking tools or perform a joint destruction technique. This is a good view into the Kwan-era way of thinking. The throws, trips, takedowns were also not there to out-throw a Judo master, but as a means of helping the striking, or applied if an opportunity presented itself in a half dazed opponent.

We are therefore not going to find sophisticated joint-locks to out-lock a Hapkido master, or throws to out-throw a Judo master, or holds and submissions to out-wrestle a wrestler. We do find simple, basic techniques meant to be used alongside striking. Another thing we are missing is sophisticated ground work, like you would see in BJJ, although ground strikes, falling techniques, and some ground defenses are shown. 

But grappling is just a couple of pages of houndreds of pages of a book?

I was asked in a brilliant comment if Choi Hong Hi had written about grappling, because the commenter did not recall seeing anything. Now, grappling like I said earlier does not really appear as its own thing, I have yet to see a "grappling chapter" in the early manuals. But looking at self defense techniques etc you find a lot. So he checked the 1970 book and commented that it was really just a couple of pages out of 700 (I think he wrote). Now this is true, but we need to consider a couple of things. First the books of the era was often written to give a complete overview of the art. So a lot of the books focus on theory, basic techniques, forms, sparring etc. I met some pushback from others in DM on this, most people arguing that if only a couple of pages were devoted to it, it could not have been that important. 

At this point let us take a short step back and look at what we are comparing. We are comparing specific techniques (throws, trips, locks, releases) against the totality of the book. That is not a valid comparison when trying to judge how important something is due to the amount of pages devoted to it. If we want to get real, we need to look at "grappling techniques" demonstrated, count the pages and then compare against basic techniques to get a good idea. After all, theory like history of Taekwondo, how to organise a training session, forms, competition rules, sparring, etc falls outside of the scope of what we are trying to compare.

So with that mindset I took out Choi Hong Hi´s 1965 book, "Taekwondo The Art of Self Defense". The book totals at 305 pages (including the appendixes like transcription tables). The pages devoted to grappling is 14 pages. So going with how the commenters and private messages are judging this we have a 14 to 305 ration of grappling, or just 4.6% of the book is grappling so it is virtually non existent. 

But we are not actually comparing oranges to oranges here, we are comparing oranges to an orchard. Let us look at this from the other angle, the one that gives us a much better view of how much there is, keeping in mind we are only looking at one single book here. 

We have 14 pages of grappling in total, how many pages are devoted to stances? Stances are important and fundamental to the art right? The answer is 7 pages devoted to stances. So in Taekwondo, grappling is more important to stances :-D Well we are not really being fair, stances are not a technique, it is just. part of technique. So I guess we should look at "essential techniques" (covering all defenses and offensive technqiues using the whole body) and compare that with the grappling pages. The essential techniques clock in at 55 pages. 14 is less than 55, which due to grapplings role as supporting method is only natural and expected, but you see how this gives us a much better perspective than the 14 out of 305 pages? 

Conclusion

When you take away the theory, the conduct of basic training, training equipment, forging, sparring, forms and all things not actually techniques you are left with 55 pages of comparative value against 14. We could put those two numbers together to get a total of 69 pages and then using that as our 100% see that grappling takes up 20,3% of the technical documentation of the art, leaving 79,7% what we today associate with Taekwondo (kicks, blocks, strikes etc). 

This does not mean grappling was practiced 20% of the time in training, but it does show that it was a clearly defined and documented part of the technical curriculum.

So if you train in a modern dojang that does not touch anything grappling related (no releases from grabs, throws, locks etc) you have (if we take this 1965 book as an example) "lost" 20% of the arts technical content. That might not sound like much, but if someone cut off 20% of your body, I am sure those 20% would be missed :-P