How the Sword has influenced Taekwondo

I have been playing around with the sword lately and I am having a lot of fun doing it. Sword training is perfect for the times we are finding ourselves in these days: you always keep at least a swords distance between yourself and your training partner, if they come to close you hit them. If you are practising alone no one will come close to the crazy guy swinging a sword arond and so it is also great at social distancing :-D 

This is not a post on how fun I am having or how I train, but rather how the sword is related to an unarmed martial art such as Taekwondo. It is now time to go back in history.

Basic Sword training; "Gibon Ta" drill, fundamental sword cuts

After the sword training we did a little while back I kept brushing off on my sword training, and part of that was the Gibon Ta or fundamental sword strokes drill that I learned a loooooong time ago. The drill is pretty stationary, and when you have done the sequence you have effectivly gone through most of the fundamental sword cuts in the system I practise. I filmed myself when doing the exercises so that I could look at the footage and find things to improve upon (and there was a lot). Practising on my own and with no mirrors video seems to be a descent way of getting feedback (by reviewing the footage).

The Gibon Ta consists of front cut, diagonal cut, wrist cut, thrusts, horizontal cuts, upwards diagonal cuts, and upward cut. 

Sword training again

I wrote a lengthy post on my experiences with sword training, some history and information on gyungdang (or Kyeongdang) a "short" time ago (2016???????? Damn where did all that time go??) which you can read by clicking here. A few days ago I got the chance to do some study time with the sword again because Joakim came to visit and he was kind enough to spend most of his Saturday teaching me and my teacher :-) Most of my sword training so far has been a seminar here, a training camp there, a short training session with someone here and there, looking at videos, reading books etc, so it was great to be a student and being taught again (thanks man if you're reading this :-) ). I realized to my horror that I haven't been writing much or publishing much on my blog lately so I thought I could share a little of my day with you guys and girls :)