Taegeuk Il Jang - A love letter.

This will be a busy few months for me. I have taken upon myself to start teaching in the Dojang I study in every Friday evening for the grown ups. I will be teaching the syllabus of the organisation I
belong to (Traditional Taekwondo Union) with (hopefully) my own thoughts and spin on things. I hope to be able to use a couple of minutes after the training session is over to either film or take pictures of some of the apps I use for the forms as practical applications for Poomsae beyond the normal kick block punch ones. I am not sure as of which media I will end up with but currently I lean towards pictures as that would allow me to make the posts into articles for this blog as well as Totally Taekwondo Magazine (and others like Moosin).

But before I start diving into Applications of Taegeuk Il Jang I thought it would be fun to write a little about the form and why exactly Taegeuk Il Jang as opposed to any of the other forms.

Thank you :-D

This blog got its facebook fan page years after it only consisted of this blog. Samir my "mentor" when it comes to spreading the blog further to a wider audience was completly right when he told me that the interest for traditional Taekwondo material is higher than you would believe when looking at the sportive focus that seemingly dominates Taekwondo today. I am astonished that we in a very short time have gotten over 500 likes! I want to thank all the supporters of the blog and of traditional Taekwondo :-) It is a pure joy for me to keep writing when I get so much support. Just the other day I woke up to this message:

"Hello, I am currently reading all your posts on moosin.com (Some 30 or so of my posts has been published there). I am loving them all, Thank you very much for so many good ideas that I wanted to implement but did not dare because I wasn't taught like that (especially in self defense and not close yourself just to the sport)"

So in short what I am trying to say is

 

(And special thanks to Samir for making me establish the fan pange, teaching me how to run it and for making this photo/banner)  

Il kyok pilsal (일격필살)

Im pretty sure that the headline will make just about zero sense for most Taekwondoin beyond it being "something" Korean. I do hope I will make the term very clear through this blog post though.

The term is often translated into English as "one strike one kill" or  "1 deadly strike" and it used to be a pretty common term in traditional taekwondo dojang during the Kwan era (1940s-70s); but these days it is not used much, and if it is used it is often changed into il kyok pilseung (일격필승) meaning roughly tranlsated one strike one win, victory in one move etc. It is more political correct than the original using pilsal (필살) but both do contain the essense of this post which by the way will go into a few different aspects of Taekwondo training while having the term Il kyok pilsal (일격필살) in our minds.