News report from Denmark, Girl (15 years old) holds her own against 3 assailants!

I have talked a little about self defense before on this blog, and in the future I will talk a lot more about the issue as I see that many things related to self defense (not fighting) has been forgotten in the Taekwondo comunity in later years. Once we start exclusively focusing on the sport of taekwondo we loose the knowledge gained regarding self defense. Well this time I have translated a news story from VG: http://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/utrolige-historier/dansk-avis-jente-15-hamlet-opp-med-tre-overfallsmenn/a/23562528/ .

I might use this article later on to explain some self defense concepts but I think the story itself is good enough to be a blog post on its own as we so often read about when things go wrong. The article speaks about the girl having experience with martial arts but it does not specify which one(s) but I will bet Taekwondo is at least one of them ;-)

Training Video: Working on Taekwondo Makki techniques

It is not often that I post videoclips on the blog and especially not with myself in them. In the martial arts if you stick your head out it gets quickly hammered down by the "keyboard warriors". Also I thought I needed someone to actually film me, but I see that with my new phone I can do it myself when the conditions are right. This time I spendt a couple of minutes after work to show off a few drills you can use with a partner or if you are in lack of a partner like I was, against a stick.

Examining Poomsae Structure

Giles Hopkins might be vaguely familiar for my most hardcore readers out there. He has an excellent

blog og Goju Ryu Karate which despite not being one of the direct roots of Taekwondo is nevertheless an exciting and interesting style to look at as they have preserved a lot more of the holistic approach to their martial art, unlike how Taekwondo has in many places forsaken theirs in favour of sport. Unlike Taekwondo they have a very nice approach to "extra training" like the use of weights, and striking implements, and they often use their forms as the basis of everything they do, which is what I am trying to do with "my" Taekwondo too:-) Anyway, Giles has written a lot on applications and while I sometimes disagree or rather his approach to Goju Ryu does not fit in with my approach to Taekwondo (which is to be expected in some degree) his latest article on Kata (form) structure really made an impression on me. He said it casually in there somewhere but some forms where the same techniques are shown in mirror images the follow on technique is only shown once.
Here is a link to the article if you want to read it yourself: http://goju-ryu.blogspot.no/2015/10/the-structure-of-kata-putting-two-and.html

Traditional Taekwondo Union, Black belt seminar.

I just completed a weekend Judanja seminar (black belt seminar or training weekend) arranged by the

organisation I belong to (TTU or Traditional Taekwondo Union).

(Today/day of writing is the 27th of October)

The point of this seminar is to go through the whole syllabus for your Dan grading (from 1st gup and upwards), training with new people and to arrange the physical tests and theoretical tests required for grading. I often write about how diverse the training in a traditional Taekwondo Dojang can be but after completing the weekend seminar I thought it might interest some readers to know what we did so they can compare with their own experiences how their own syllabuses compare to ours. The founder of the organisation is one of my two primary teachers and he has used Matchoe Kyorugi (formal step sparring drills) to preserve many of the aspects that are now lost in mainstream Taekwondo. I will not go into detail of every drill here, but I might do so in later blog posts if there is any interest in them. If you do step sparring in your Dojang you might get new ideas from watching others step sparring so I might include more in future blog posts. Anyhow lets look at how my weekend was:

Searching out practical applications to Poomsae Part 2

Last time I presented the search and destroy  incorporate what fits into the Poomsae. I adviced that

you look into books, articles, seminars, videos etc from both your own style and others and take whatever you find that seems like Poomsae movements or sequences and see if they can really fit into the Poomsae as an application of the form. I used the first part of the sequence in Taebaek and demonstrated where I found them to underline that part of my method. Another aspect of this is researching history of Taekwondo and Poomsae to find both specific applications and more importantly identify application principles. This is where the application jurney can end even before it begins in Taekwondo, because doing it this way you have to acknowledge a lot of facts that have been supressed for decades by the leading organisations. One of the most important ones is Taekwondo`s "close" kinship with Karate.

Guest Post: The Secret to Winning All Your Fights...with Taegeuk Il Jang!

Intro by Traditional Taekwondo Ramblings:

Josh has a great blog at https://tkdfighter.wordpress.com/ which I full heartidly support and

recommend that you check out. Especially if you like my blog because me and Josh have many similar thoughts yet different enough that we also disagree on stuff. He has a bunch of interesting articles on his blog and is one of the few people on the world wide web that actually writes indepth articles on Kukki Taekwondo! Among all the blogs that pay lip service to Taekwondo being a martial art and not just a sport Josh`s blog is an oasis in the desert. That he now has written a guest post exclusively for Traditional Taekwondo Ramblings is a great honor for me and it is like all his usual blog articles a thought provocing read that I am sure many will apreciate. The post below is not going to be posted anywhere else so this is truly a special post to have here:-) Below is how Josh view his relationship with Taegeuk Il Jang :-)

Searching out practical applications to Poomsae? Part 1

Image Source: Karate Do Kyohan 1935
by Gichin Funakoshi

The last few weeks I have presented many practical applications to Poomsae. I have covered all of Taegeuk Il (1) Jang from start to finish, as well as a sequence in Taegeuk Oh (5) Jang and a sequence
containing similar techniques in Taebaek Poomsae. Some have asked me how I come up with these and I plan to share some of my methods of finding them in Totally TKD Magazine when I`m finished with rewriting the Taegeuk il Jang series there but as readers of this blog often the first rough draft of these articles for the magazine end up here. In truth I have some difficulty answering the question because despite what people believe I dont have a "fixed" process like others do. My process if I can call it that is very intuitive and sometimes messy. I hope that I can streamline it for better results in the future and putting my thoughts down on paper (digitally at least) will be a very helpfull first step in doing that for me.

So how do I find the applications? Sometimes I can read a book and see something that I recognize and then read another book that gives another piece of the puzzle and so on until I have a functional application. The start of the sequence I demonstrated in Taebaek is a very fine example of that so I will show you just where I found it :-)