Pursuing Martial Arts

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 .

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