Pursuing Martial Arts

I often think of the unique perspective I have of martial arts, that of not just being a student, but also an instructor and parent. It has its advantages and disadvantages. The largest disadvantage would probably be as parent, as while I know why things are being done as an instructor, it doesn’t change the way I feel as a parent. Sometimes I have to remove myself from one of those tags and separate myself, be it from instructor or parent.

The largest advantage, though, is when I get to experience something like this weekend. We’re having our black belt testing, and although I’m not testing myself, I’ll still be involved. My son is testing for his first dan after much perseverance to hang in there, waiting for the right time for him. There are three others that are testing along with him that I have been an instructor to, and four others that are testing for higher than my own rank. I am being asked to read the test, and extreme honor no matter how you look at it.

First off, it’s an honor just to be asked to read the test as an instructor and watch those that I’ve taught the past few years and that I have watched rise all the way up from white belts. I’ll also get to watch others test for ranks higher than mine and get a deeper perspective of what I’ll go through testing for the same. I’ll be bringing in that perspective as a student. All of these people are part of my martial arts family, so to watch any and all of them advance to an important step in their martial arts career is heartwarming. But to watch my own flesh and blood test for this honor is the biggest honor of all. At times I have felt I was working harder than he was to reach this goal, so to now see him finally be able to apply himself and work so hard to achieve this at times feels unbelievable.

Because these people are all my friends, it will be hard to watch them go through the test as they struggle, as everyone struggles at some point in it. I did. My jumping and spinning kicks on a bag were atrocious, and I didn’t have a clear understanding at that time what vital points were. And after a summer of spending so much time trying to fix my work with weapons, it certainly didn’t show. It will be hard to watch my friends go through some of those same struggles.

But outweighing the difficulties of watching them struggle will be sharing in their joy as their training comes to a culmination. I can remember the feeling I walked away with two years ago, shaking my head. I wasn’t upset with myself for those bad kicks, the weapons mishaps or the misunderstood vital points. I was shaking my head that I had actually done it. I had earned it, and I knew it.

It’s that that I can’t wait to share with all these people at the end of their test. And because I share duties in our dojo of being an instructor, student, and parent, it will make all of it just that much more special.

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Sometimes I think I could spend the rest of my martial arts career just correcting my front stance (mountain climbing stance, bow stance, whatever). I think now that I probably didn’t take it as seriously as I should have back when I was a white belt, and really didn’t begin to until I was an advanced color belt. By then, I’d formed some really bad habits.

You can get by in class with bad stances, depending on how bad they are, but in reality, if you were in a real fight, if you were doing a bad stance, you wouldn’t be rooted well enough and would be leaving yourself open to easily lose your footing, or be swept. Knowing this, though, it’s still hard to fix.

I guess I’m thinking about it now more often, now that I’m also learning tai chi, after working so many years on tae kwon do. My instructor with that is attempting to correct those bad stances, and sometimes I just wonder if this old body is ever going to do it the right way. It’s hard to tell whether those things that are wrong are there from bad habit or because it’s less painful.

At any rate, in tae kwon do your feet need to be both pointed towards the front, but in tai chi, your back foot has to be at more of a 45 degree angle. The hardest part of the proper stance for me seems to be rolling my tail bone in, and not sticking my butt out. I never even realized I did that until it was pointed out to me. But now when I see others doing the same thing, I can’t help but correct it, as it now looks so wrong, even if I still do it, probably far too many times to admit.

My best advice, then, for anyone just starting out in martial arts is to take the time to ge the stances right from the beginning, as it gets harder and harder to fix it the longer you go through it, especially if you’re not exactly a spring chicken anymore.

Check out my other today.com blog, What’s Hot On TV .

Every once in awhile, you just need to get out there and show people what you’re made of. Our martial arts school got a chance to do that this weekend. Our community has a yearly Riverfest, and this time we thought it would be a great opportunity to put on a demonstration to show everyone just what our school, and martial arts as a whole, is all about.

Master Kera Radke started planning for this event early this summer, choosing a selection of our students that she thought would represent our school well. She chose people from 7 years old to 50. She incorporated two different martial arts, both tae kwon do and hapkido, and used groups that showcased technique, forms, weapons, breaking, and self defense.

After a quick introduction by Master Donald Moore, the nunchaku group was up featuring three of our green belt students. They displayed a choreographed set of movements with their nunchakus, incorporating blocks and kicks. They did amazing, considering this was all of their very first weapon! There was also a bo staff demo by one of our young students showing how it could be applied to our crane form.

One of our younger black belts, Ted Huelsman, demonstrated the same form empty hand, and when he was done, showed off his expertise with the sword form, Jung Gum Hyung. What amazed me most about this was looking at the pictures after the fact, Ted is holding his sword so level in one picture and because of the thinness of it, you can barely see the sword in front of him.

A group of our advanced students showed off the smooth, slick snake form. They moved on after this to choreographed sets of moves they put together on their own. They named these with some funny names of their own, like “flying monkey” and had a lot of fun putting a stereotypical kihap into a crane stance that had them each looking like The Karate Kid on the rock at the beach.

A set of board breakers really wowed the crowd with their breaks. The first three did a series of three to four strikes and kicks, including front kick, side kick, mule kick, hammer first, and elbow strike, to make their breaks. The fourth breaker, who happens to be my son Mike, did power breaking on tiles. With a group of tiles set up on top of cinder blocks, he hammer fisted the tiles to the ground, and with the one surviving tile that broke into the largest piece, he set it up again and finished it off. Maybe they were trying to avoid cleaning up, but the breakers scooped up their broken boards, signed them, and handed them off to the audience.

Rounding out the day, we had our advanced hapkido students showing off their best techniques, defending against such things as chokes and grabs, and even Master Moore got into the act showing all his prowess and exactly why he is sixth degree black belt. He even took on two defenders at once, causing them to actually strike each other instead of him!

We definitely showed the community that afternoon what we were made of, raising interest in the end in not just our school, but martial arts as a whole. When they drive by and peer into our windows, now they’ll have a much deeper understanding of what we’re doing and what we’re capable of.

Check out South Elgin Martial Arts online and my other today.com blog, What’s Hot On TV .

If you would have told me even ten years ago I would not only be into martial arts, but would be a black belt and instructor, I would have told you you were nuts. I was never an athletic person, to the point of flunking out of gym class in my junior year of high school due to non-participation. So how did the person I am change so much in that time?

The answer is something I found the closer and closer I got to my black belt. I wasn’t changing the person I am, but becoming the person I should have been before. Fear kept me from participating in life, and I learned there was another whole world out there for me if I just opened myself up to it.

My son, Mike, was the first to jump into martial arts, and I say jump, because he never had the fears that I once had. Despite this, the road hasn’t always been easy for him. I like to say he’s on the nine-year plan for getting his black belt in tae kwon do, which is far from the norm. Today, he would be the first to tell you he didn’t always put as much into his training as he could have and ultimately paid the price. Nevertheless, he is finally testing for his black belt next weekend, and if all goes as planned, I think it will mean more to him that he is earning it at this point in his teenage years, rather than as a tween with no understanding of what he was doing.

A few months after Mike joined martial arts, I started a kickboxing class just for the workout benefits. I didn’t realize it, but martial arts was already changing my life. A few years later, when kickboxing had become more important to me than I cared to admit, the class was discontinued. They couldn’t be blamed for this, as often as I was the only student. I would watch my son take his tae kwon do classes and wish I could do it, too, but that old fear ruled me.

I conjured up the courage and joined the tae kwon do class once the kickboxing class ended. I had no intention of pursuing martial arts at this time, and just thought I was there for the workout, figuring I’d progress a few belts then taper off. But something interesting happened here. With every belt I progressed to, I wanted to earn just that next one, then be done. I’d earn that next belt, and then want to earn the one after that. I then brought my daughter, Lizzie, in to join Mike and I in our pursuit. She was 6, and I wanted her to know how to defend herself by the time she was a pretty teenage girl.

Looking a few belts past my own still scared the hell out of me, but somewhere along the way I stopped thinking I would plateau off and started realizing I would at some point face my fear and just do it. As an adult in the program I was asked to start helping out with the lower ranks and renewed an old passion I had for helping others. I tested for my first dan black belt in the summer of 2006, and it was then I realized I hadn’t become a different person, but was uncovering the person I was all along.

I’m currently an associate instructor, and instead of pursuing my second dan this summer, I started exploring Chinese martial arts, learning tai chi, with the hopes of teaching it someday. There are a many similarities, as well as a few differences between the Korean and Chinese martial arts, and it’s that that excites me as I go through this training. Yet that’s the whole point of martial arts. You’re never done learning. There is always more to learn and discover. Perhaps I’ll always be pursuing martial arts … or at least as long as this body will let me.