About
This purpose of this blog is to organize and share the applications for the ITF/Ch'ang-Hon taekwondo forms that I have discovered. It is also to inspire others to search for applications within the forms. I started this blog because I liked the applications that Iain Abernethy was doing for Karate forms and Dan Djurdjevic was doing for Chen Pan Ling forms, and I thought I could do something similar for the forms I knew.
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Cool to stumble onto your blog, and quite a surprise to find some references to my own work. Keep up the good work. I look forward to reading more of your interpretations.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the kind words. Glad you're enjoying the blog.
DeleteGreat blog, I use a lot of your ideas in my Dojang.
ReplyDeleteI'm happy to hear that! Enjoy.
Deletei wanted to put a quote or two from you in an article on forms that i am doing but i want to know how you wish to be referred to--by blog name or yours richard conceicao
ReplyDeleteHi Richard. You can refer to the blog name. Thanks!
DeleteThank you for a really nice blog! I love to see that more and more people see the connections you are pointing at when it comes to analysis of patterns😊 Thank you for your work and dedication. Please PM me to share ideas!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the kind words Roy. Hope you're keeping up with your own research.
DeleteIt may be a silly question but why do practitioners have to guess what the movements in a pattern mean? For example, movement "X" could be a set up for a throw, or it could be a choke defence, or a wrist grab defence, or leg sweep or...Why is there no definitive guide from the governing bodies that are supposed to keep it members informed that unambiguously explains what each actually represents.
ReplyDeleteIt's not a silly question at all, but unfortunately it has to do with history and organization politics.
DeleteIn the case of ITF, Gen Choi was an organizer but the people who actually put the patterns together were various Korean commanders in the South Korean military, with often multiple commanders contributing to a single form. (Some people dispute this and say Choi did it all, but this doesn't fit the majority of interviews I've read, which stress that it was a collaborative effort). However, Choi lost almost all his senior black belts after the move to North Korea, including Nam Tae Hi one of the key organizers in Choi's Oh Do Kwan. It was only after the move to North Korea that Gen Choi started calling himself the founder of taekwon-do; before that he was a very important early organizer. (This is detailed in Alex Gillis' book "A Killing Art: The Untold Story of Taekwondo")
This means there were two key problems: (1) no one Korean commander knew the applications to every pattern, because different commanders worked on different patterns, (2) because Choi lost almost all his senior black belts, the applications may have left with them.
Beyond that, Choi was more interested in standardizing pattern practice than applying them. He was also more interested in promoting TKD as a fitness program and "moral culture" later in his life. If you read or listen to interviews with Choi late in his life, he barely mentions fighting as the purpose of TKD.
That doesn't mean anti-grapple applications don't show up from time to time. Choi's Encyclopedia of Taekwon-Do directly states that the self-defense techniques are direct applications of the movements in the patterns.
That still leaves the question of Kukkiwon patterns, which to me seem perfectly logical (I just finished an extensive analysis of modern Koryo) but the Kukkiwon doesn't seem interested in sharing practical applications. How come?
According to my friend Orjan Nilsen over at Traditional Taekwondo Ramblings, it's a result of (1) the intense sportification of taekwondo and (2) the 2,000 year history myth. Because of the former, self-defense training in general fell by the wayside, not just pattern application. The South Korea government was very investing in getting taekwondo into Olympics, and so sport ultimately became the focus. There is also, as you know, the McDojo phenomenon and the appeal to kids, which further hindered practical fighting knowledge. The end result is that modern taekwondo is quite different from early "hard" taekwondo. So it's not just pattern applications, the art as a whole got watered down and sportified.
(This isn't to say that sport is bad, just that taekwondo the olympic sport is something very different from the unarmed fighting system developed by the South Korean military)
(Part 2)
DeleteI also practice Tai Chi, and something I come to realize is that a near *universal* way of teaching in traditional martial arts is to the teach the form first without any application, and leave it to the student to discover applications on their own. This is, in my opinion, an awful way of teaching and it quickly leads to form applications being lost. Tai Chi does have applications, but you have to look hard and seek out knowledgeable teachers to learn them. If we were to teach forms alongside their applications, I doubt they would get lost as easily. But this was simply historically never how it was done. The idea was that you studied for a while and then once you gained your teacher's trust they would eventually show you applications. But what if a teacher NEVER shows you the applications, because the focus of the art has completed changed to sport or to fitness or "moral culture"? Within a generation form applications can be lost.
So then we have a generation of instructors who (A) do not know applications and (B) do not believe practical applications exist in the first place! and (C) are investing in teaching the way they were taught. Only a few people in the ITF world, most notably Stuart Anslow, are pushing back against this view. And in the WT world it's pretty much just Ørjan Nilsen over at TTR, Simon John O'Neill, and Richard Conceicao as far as I know.
I also just want to say from personal experience: if you want to discover form applications the best supplementary arts you can study are Wrestling and Muay Thai, and after that bouncer techniques. A lot of early masters of taekwondo cross-trained in Judo (there is a whole section on throwing in Choi's Encyclopedia of Taekwondo) and some Judo knowledge is clearly present in the ITF patterns, retrofitted to karate movements.