VITAL POINTS of the body : Part 1, Karate 77

JPeters said:

I won't get into details about my activities in TaeKwonDo, except to state I had a teacher many years ago that was a world champion, and his teacher was my boss, and practiced the art for about 30 years seriously hard, five a bit less hard as a teacher before I had to sort of retire, and used the stretching exercises I learned to be able to stay active in sports for many more years and the two important moves in TaeKwonDo are the drop down and foot sweep at the ankles to drop your opponent if you don't want to harm the opponent too much but need him or her down for some reason, like they have a knife. And the inside lower hand shot to the nose, if you are not worried about killing because the situation is that vital, and that same shot to either eye if it is vital but not a death threat situation.

Other than those the roundhouse kick is sometimes very useful.

But you sure better be positive you are in a threat situation or the law will step on you mighty hard.

Most other stuff was for patterns you used to have to do to qualify for a tournament, but I think they stopped that need to pass the patterns test. Or for demonstrations to get students. Or I guess for those movies. No wait, also good for gaining points in a tournament. Fancy kicks could work pretty good there, too. But that tournament stuff changed a lot since I was first involved in the martial arts many years ago.

EDIT: The thing is, most of the fancy kicking and punching stuff you see in demonstrations or movies are about useless in a street fight.

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In 1971, the South Korean government, afraid that tae kwon do would be used against it, refused to let General Choi's federation teach tae kwon do in North Korea. General Choi, angry that the martial art was being treated as a political tool, went into voluntary exile and settled in Canada. South Korea established a rival association, the World Tae Kwon Do Federation, based in Seoul. It uses the name that General Choi coined, but many of its rules and procedures are different.

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JPeters said:

I appreciate that you are not upset at the ramblings of an old man.

President Park ended up pretty much putting the administration of the TaeKwonDo teachers under government (military) control.

When General Emerson was sent into the 2nd Inf Div to clean that division up and get it back into a good fighting mode he decided to have everyone under his command learn TaeKwonDo up to the rank of blue belt and then they could stop, if they stated they wanted to. And that "everyone" order was literally everyone. That went along with the three-mile run everyone had to do and then the TaeKwonDo class was right after that. And in all weather conditions except for a very few winter mornings if this special group of doctors could convince the general that morning that the wind chill factor was below a certain temperature. Needless to say the medical unit commands and the headquarters people were constantly at odds with each other.

Because of something I did that angered the general during a chopper flight he was on he got angry at me and fired me from the aviation unit and stuck me in charge of the newly formed TKD Staff. That was where Major Kim came in, who happened to be a part of the Park Family running the country.

This was my first hands on experience at politics and it was no joy ride.

But firstly, this is an interesting read, if you really want a fast lesson about the history that you can actually find and keep in mind that some history has been sort of washed.

Choi Hong Hi, 83, Korean General Who Created Tae Kwon Do

And I want to quote a paragraph here from that New York Times article.



General Choi and General Park (before he became president) weren't exactly friends.

In 2ndDiv our two main rivals we had to constantly mediate between I'll identify after the link:

Kwan (martial arts) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Chung Do Kwan(청도관)
Moo Duk Kwan(무덕관)

It was a harsh environment for studying and administrating within and especially I was a super low rank in a group of major power players and had gotten pushed into it by an angry boss.

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