I didn’t say it was. And any legit chool will teach you control, discipline, and focus. Heck any McDojo will. You seem to be missing the point of this pitting. Maybe TkD isn’t just about self-defense, but this pitting is about those McDojos who…well maybe you could read the OP and other posts because I am tired of saying it over and over again.
ETA: I also don’t try to imply that TKD isn’t a good art . What I was trying to say was that I am tired of McDojos.
Oh and also, this is age discrimination. I am not fully mature yet, but me not having graduated high school doesn’t make my McDojo pitting any less justified.
And don’t make assumptions. I learned that self control, discipline, focus, and let me add one, stress reduction are also a part of martial arts, a long time ago.
Yeah, that’s why I say just join wrestling.
You train around 5 times a week. You have a season where you compete in upwards of 30-50 matches, sometimes more. It’s free, funded by the school, and sometimes comes with perks. It can also help land you a scholarship.
Also, it’s better all around for self defense than any martial art.
I will say I have mad respect for those that can punch and kick effectively. I wish I could do that.
A long time ago? You are 17, how long ago could that have been?
And you blasting schools for a different schedule of belt advancement was also age discrimination. How can you, not an instructor, determine what the proper age or time frame for earning belts is? Are you in the instructor training path? And what makes you an expert of price points for classes? Your whole thread reeks of inexperience and a serious superiority complex. Plus you have been pitting so frequently it’s really hard to take you seriously.
LOL. You are talking about price, and you are getting a raw deal by your own admission. My husband pays $50/mo and gets unlimited classes. He can go up to 7 classes per week without any restrictions on the number you can go to.
For my children it’s $50/mo each with 4 classes per week. Their uniforms were no charge. Also, our head instructor offered to waive all our fees if we can get 5 people to sign up for classes.
You sir, are over paying.
Anonymous User, while I appreciate you taking the time to research this subject you are making some generalizations that I take exception to.
My instructor was Master Kang Rhee who is currently a 9th degree black belt in Taekwando and returned to Korea to receive this honor. My TKD and Karate magazines and manuals often use a photo of him to show a flying front kick. He was also Elvis Presley and Bill Wallace’s instructor. (whether you like Elvis or not, he was dedicated to TKD and those I know who trained with him said he trained hard)
At the time I was taking (1980’s) other schools derided our school saying it was “buy a belt” because he charged for a rank test. He also had 2 pay scales, 1 was a monthly payment of about forty dollars a month and was called the brown belt program and it was estimated that you could acheive this rank in about a year and a half. There was a black belt program that was a bit more and the a program was for 2 years. Once you paid for the 2 years you were a life time member and could take as many classes as you want for the rest of your life. Other schools also made fun of us for the discipline and honor we were expected to show at all times. I personally was about to test for brown belt when I had to stop taking classes and I was fitter and stonger than I have ever been in my life. I could defend myself and had even studied ways to disarm an opponent with a knife.
So by your estimation this school would have been a McDojo due to the cost of rank tests aqnd the estimated length to acheive a black belt. I so not believe it to be and hope that you will find a teacher that is as amazing as Master Rhee and a school that is as fulfilling as PaSaRyu Kang Rhee - World Black Belt Bureau as it will teach you the beauty of clear and perfect technique and the honor that should be taught with martial arts. I treasure the time I spent there and wish I had the health to go back.
So your assumption that promising a black belt in 2 years and what a rank test/belt costs makes a McDojo I believe to be incorrect, but I appreciate the enthusiasm you are bringing research.
Sun!
Ms Firebird
How neat Firebird! Master Rhee must have been a fascinating man to learn from.
I have never seen a fight, but I have run away from some doozies.
Or talked my way out of a couple that, I feel certain, would’ve resulted in some broken bones (yeah, you can bet on them being mine).
When I was learning judo* as a kid, I idiotically hoped for a good fight to show what I was made of. I’m convinced that the fact that I don’t have great fighting skills has saved me from a lot of fights, because this way I talk/negotiate/sprint my way out of them.
*btw, one of my friends, Ron Tripp, went on studying with Sensei Takagi, and ended up a Judo and Sambo champion (his controversial fight with Rickson Gracie was less than a minute, and still talked about).
Oh, Ron’s also general secretary of USA Judo, and on the board of directors of the US Olympic Committee. Maybe i should’ve kept hanging out with him, huh?
I started Tae Kwon Do in the 1970’s and eventually got a second stripe on my black belt before I went to college (where I got a third degree black belt in drinking). I’m old now but a lot of the physical confidence (and I’m not a huge guy).
My instructor was a 6th degree black belt who was a military instructor for many years before coming to the US. Looking back, he was a bit sexist and even a little bit racist but he was the real deal. I failed my black belt test once before I passed. There was an interview portion to my second degree black belt test (which wasn’t too hard if you knew the type of answers they were looking for).
McDojangs exist because there is a demand for them.
I disagree. You see a lot of barfights that drag out as guys pound away at each other. If one of them is a real black belt and the other doesn’t then the fight is very short.
Nope. We don’t hold back at tournaments (we wear protective gear (especially head, groin and kidney gear)) and frankly 90% of the guys you might get into a fight with isn’t what you would call a “streetfighter”
Yes and no. It was a unification of several fighting styles taught as several school thoughout Korea. The disparity between the fighting styles survived at least through the 1970’s when I was studying it. I learned hardly any grappling techniques while students at other dojangs focused a lot less on legwork.
While technically, it might be true that any master can make and endless stream of first degree black belts, they probably don’t deserve to be masters if that is what they are doing.
When I tested for my black belt, there were two other masters who were not affiliated with the dojang to witness the test. The minimum age was 16. I had to simultaneously spar two red belts. I also had to spar another black belt applicant. Full contact in both cases. There was the perfunctory strength test (board breaking), which often left you with bloody knuckles.
Physical maturity is really hard to achieve at those sort of ages.
YOU can charge whatever you want (my Master charged a month’s tuition for the black belt test and a week’s tuition for all other tests, the dojang daycare kids (under 7) paid a small fee so their parents could take their picture breaking balsa wood) but there are SOME standards to getting a black belt and a young child is simply not physically or emotionally mature enough to meet those standards.
Tae Kwon Do gets really philosophical at the higher levels but the basic black belt is achieved largely through physical ability. I suppose you can give anyone a PhD as well but there are some widely recognized standards for a legitimate PhD.
The problem is that you don’t get a consistent standard for black belts until you get to 7th degree which you can only get from a council in Korea. 4th, 5th and 6th degree black belts can be promoted by 7th, 8th and 9th degree black belts respectively. These guys don’t operate paper mills so there is a consistently high standard applied to people who make 4th, 5th and 6th degrees. 4th, 5th and 6th degree black belts can promote anyone to 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree black belt respectively and there is no longer consistency in the standards. But if you went to Korea, there would be a lot of agreement on the basic requirements for a black belt and they would include things like age, strength and sparring ability.
Yes and no. Taekwondo - Wikipedia
Its an amalgamation of several school of martial arts that were kinda sorta unified into one discipline but there are still several denominations of Tae Kwon Do depending on who taught your teacher.
You have a cite for that?
Now remember, some of these Dojangs are more food courts than McDojangs. They give real training to the folks that want real training and just sell different color belts to people who are interested in buying different colored belts. We used to call this Dojang Daycare, they never got a black belt but there were several red belts floating around that would have been better served by a dance or yoga class.
But if you see kids under 10 with black belts, these places are probably pure McDojangs. If they don’t have freestyle sparring and participate in tournaments, then it is probably a McDojang.
That’s really low.
Wait. You want a “serious” dojang and you went to one that has two 45 minute classes a week and offers one class a week if you like? No wonder it sounded so cheap, they’re not training you, they’re letting you visit them every once in a while. I trained one hour a day and few hours on weekends (a lot of it was just hanging our). I could possibly see three classes a week plus a weekend open session but two 45 minute classes a week sounds kind of light.
Well, avoiding UNNECESSARY conflict is taught by anyone that teaches a martial art.
One school of Tae Kwon Do is a lot like Judo with flying side kicks.
Goddamn. Reading that insufferable post made me want to drop-kick your keyboard off of Seoraksan.
What made it insufferable other than its length?
The training montage.
I study karate, and the part about running is one of the first things I learned. I was told “There’s no shame in running. Karate is what you do when talking isn’t an option anymore.” I also learned “You don’t learn karate so you can go looking for a fight.”
I’ll admit to knowing next to nothing about the martial arts, but it seems to me that the elephant in the room is whether there even is an objective standard of “worthiness” for a black belt, which one can compare a given school’s training regimen to and say that they’re giving them away inappropriately.
Is there any such thing as an official standard for taekwondo or any other martial art, or is it just an arbitrary standard set by the school?
I think the closest thing to an “objective standard” you can get is tournament performance of that specific style and standard’s practitioners within the martial art itself.
Obviously there are other metrics that are important (fitness gained, how much it helped in real life, discipline), but they seem somewhat fuzzy.
Caveat emptor.
Since Damuri Ajashi decided to reply to every post in the thread so far, I will repeat that there doesn’t seem to have been a team sparring competition at the 1988 Olympics, only one British competitor made it to the quarterfinals, and the page on UK’s 1988 Olypmics mentions nothing about it. Same situation with the 1992 Olympics, and 2000, and 2004.
I’m shocked that bullshit could sneak its way in to a thread on martial arts. I’m going to go practice my hadouken now; it’s currently so powerful I can kill someone by even trying to teach them the secret technique, and I must better control my chi.
[/exits after throwing smokebomb]
The U.S. Marine Corps official combatives program is the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program, or MCMAP. The U.S. Army has the Modern Army Combatives Program, taught at the U.S. Army Combatives School at Fort Benning. The training manuals for both MCMAP and U.S. Army Combatives are available online for the curious.
BWAHAHAHA! Well spotted 