This summer`s first outside training

In Bergen the schools gyms close very early for the summer. Last Friday (20th of May) was our last training and now we will only have sporadic training sessions outside (because we lack a place to be) until the government opens up their school gyms for us again. This is despite the lack of a place to be one of my favorite parts of my taekwondo year. I simply put out on facebook or by phone that I`m going to practise at such and such place at such and such time and People who genuinely want to practise show up. It is less formal, and I often use this part of the year to experiment on training drills and poomsae applications. Yesterday was the first of these training sessions and we had a small group of 4 people show up.

To give you an idea of training during summer if you are in a similar situation I want to share roughly what we did:

Warm up:

• Gentle stretching
• Knee raises (front, inside to outside, and outside to inside, 10 reps each knee)
• Dynamic stretching (leg raises, front, side, back, inwards and outwards 10 reps each foot)

Training

Dallyon: This is a "lost aspect" in many modern Dojang, but it is one that I am pushing a lot when I teach. We did 3 forearms drills.

1. Inward low block, outward middle block and regular low block (all with the same arm before changing arms)
2. Inward block, regular low block, outward middle block.
3. "Flow drill", (description for a right punch)Partner one steps forward and punches to the mid section. Partner two does a left outward block, right outward block and a left low block motion to clear away the arm.Partner two then steps forward and punch partner one. Repeat many times and change the punching arm.

We then practised low kicks against the thighs, both inside and outside of the thighs. This is also something that we see too little of in modern Taekwondo. I spiced this up by including both "sportive counters" (doing a leg check against the kick, flowing into a high section kick), and self defense oriented ones (leg check and flowing into attacks toward the opponents knee in one motion).

 We then did some Olympic sparring drills where we did roundhouse kicks toward the mid section with our back legs and front legs etc. When this section was finished we had covered the forearms, mid section and low section with dallyon.

Poomsae

The least experienced person there was a 2nd keup (red belt) so instead of nitpicking a few Poomsae we simply did taegeuk 1-8 without count without any rest or ready positions in between. This makes for a very good excersise and it is very "taekwondo specific endurance" in that we are only doing Taekwondo techniques. We had a short break before continueing.

Poomsae Eungyoung

After having some water we partnered up and started drilling applications to Taegeuk 1 jang. This took quite some time, but we did manage to cover the whole form. Those who have read my blog for some time know how much I love Taegeuk 1 jang and have seen a lot of the material that I covered in this session. We did essentually practise ho sin sul (self defense) against wrist holds (same side, cross grab), against haymaker punch, and against straight punch. We used forearm strikes, release techniques, arm bars, kicks, punches, hammerfist strikes etc. I also showed how the higher taegeuk revisits themes covered in taegeuk 1 jang and demonstrate follow ups, what to do if things go wrong, or alternative ways of doing things.

Soak Am Ryu

In the last part of training we did some more forms, but this time the so called "TTU forms". These are forms my teacher has developed for many years.

Stretching

We rounded up the session by some static stretching and then went on home. At this point we had been going for around 2 hours of training.


Next time I will see if I can get some video and share a few drills we use. Especially the forearm drills since this is pretty much a lost aspect of Taekwondo today.

I hope to provide much more video content to this blog in the future. I have therefore set up a GoFundMe page on www.gofundme.com/traditionaltaekwondoramblings which I hope I can crowdfund a video editing software so I can make good quality videos for the blogs readers. If you want to contribute please visit the link to my GoFundMe page. Every donation helps :-)