This is THE Taekwondo textbook! The main author was the man who was charged with demonstrating TKD to the world, organizing the TKD demonstration at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. He is now the head coach at the chief headquarters for WTF (the official South Korean) Taekwondo in Seoul, South Korea. You have in your hand THE book of Taekwondo. There is no higher authority!
This book actually has the ENTIRE syllabus of Taekwondo in it, not piecemeal. You can study ALL the forms and their contained techniques through this book. The explanations are crystal clear. There is no mystery. Every move's application is clearly explained for you! There are mnemonic diagrams at the start and end of each form so you can check quickly on things you forgot. I've never seen a better organized instructional book before in my life!
But the question begs itself - why Taekwondo? Why buy this book and learn this particular martial art? I think knowing what TKD is, through understanding where it comes from is crucial to understanding what you are purchasing:
Taekwondo had its birth during the Korean War (1950-53) when the leaders of South Korea's armed forces took notice of the desperate need for their troops to develop strong close quarters combat skills. Unexpectedly, the Korean War developed into a war of close quarters combat and trench fighting, more like World War One than the more recent and highly mobile Second World War. Training had focused on shooting, not on scrapping hand to hand. To remedy this problem, the president, Syngman Rhee, invited ten known martial arts experts to meet and devise a system of training for hand to hand combat to drill the troops in. Apparently these martial arts masters were teachers of variants on Karate, since during the Japanese occupation (1910-45) Koreans were able to travel to Japan to study. In some cases, Karate books read in Korea seem to have been the main inspiration for these masters to initially develop their skills. Karate was developed as the hand to hand combat skill of the royal guards of the king of Okinawa, who were banned from using weapons for hundreds of years by the occupying forces of the Japanese Satsuma clan. They had to arrest and police their own people and visiting sailors from other countries with their bare hands and sticks. Karate, out of necessity, had developed a uniquely effective unarmed fighting method because of this unique situation. The Koreans realized this and learned from it. The Koreans also shared the political situation of the Okinawans of the days of yore, since they too were a disarmed people, colonized by Japan.
Traditional martial arts in Korea had focused on weapon forms (for example, sword, spear, flail and halberd patterns/poomse/kata) done by soldiers on foot and horseback; archery was practiced by much of the upper classes as part of their Confucian cultural tradition of the warrior-gentleman. Ssirum, a kind of jacket wrestling, was a major sport, a staple event of fairs and celebrations, and hand to hand fighting method, basically identical to modern judo's standing phase, Kurash and other Eurasian jacket wrestling styles. There was one interesting sport called Taekkyon, popular around the capital city Seoul, which was a form of Ssirum wrestling but also allowed wins by either kicking gently to the head or push kicking so that your opponent had to step back at least three steps to stay up. Kicking someone down to the ground was of course a flat out victory. Korea, a very bookish and intellectual country, had codified many of its martial arts in a book called the Muye Dobo Tongji, which you can purchase in translation through Amazon, and it is a very interesting book too! This book contains a vast array of armed fighting methods, some unarmed ones, and instructions on how to use football games and polo as military training too! I should add that modern Korean soldiers are still made to practice a lot of soccer to develop their fighting skills, including full contact mountainside, in-the-depths-of-the-forest soccer! The South Korean flag depicts a yin-yang (um-yang in Korean) symbol representing perfect balance, surrounded by elemental symbols for earth, fire, water and air. From all these influences, Taekwondo was born. It has the no-nonsense techniques of the weapon-forbidden royal Karate guards of Okinawa, the intentions of the Muye Dobo Tongji for drilling an entire national armed force in hand to hand combat, and the balance and organization of the ying-yang national flag of Korea. It is a powerful, potent and emotional combination, brought about by a desperate situation in the middle of one of the world's most horrific and brutal civil wars, and you can feel it when you practice the forms in the book!
I really like some of the common sense and down to earth qualities the authors bring to bear on the subject. They are realistic about the limits of solo training in poomse, and also embrace each individual's personalization of the forms to suit their own needs, physical form and qualities. To explain it simply, poomse practice is excellent low-impact but high-yield exercise; it improves the circulation of the cardio-vascular system; develops a fearless spirit in fighting, since you ALWAYS WIN against your imaginary opponents and you soon begin to expect to always win against real opponents too; and of course, you develop a set of tactical moves to use against real opponents which in most cases either distract, entice or mislead your opponent into leaving an opening for you to exploit. A great many of the moves in this book are illegal in modern TKD competition. I'm actually primarily a judo practitioner, and I see more applications for the book's techniques in jacket wrestling situations (nearly every move involves a pull with the opposite hand to the one striking, on the opponent's sleeve or other part) and street-fighting (all the injury-producing moves) than in a modern TKD ring. The authors point this fact out for us, and let us know that the poomses contain a vastly more complete system of fighting than can sparring, with all its safety considerations. (In the military, however, TKD sparring and full-contact TKD football (soccer) is done full-contact, without safety equipment.) But the poomses cannot teach us distance and timing against real opponents, things that only sparring can teach us, in spite of its limited, watered-down nature.
One of the genius things about TKD is that it is designed to be practiced in a very limited space. I imagine the creators of the poomse devising them in their small traditional houses, or little courtyards in their houses, or even in their small apartments. But this is brilliant for a modern martial art. What I love about this book the most is that I can practice and hone my TKD skills in my own home, and not bother anyone or have to go out of doors somewhere to train, like a gym or something. I can do it all right where I live! This is why I think this book is among the very best BOOKS for martial arts. You can learn and do everything yourself, in your own house, in a small or moderately sized room! Get to it! I'm in great shape because of it! My judo fighting has improved tremendously. I'm much more healthy, alert, happy and feeling awake and alive! Also, my memory has improved tenfold from memorizing all the forms and drilling them. My mind is much sharper than it was before too!
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