bloodyrosemccoy | Keep Track Of Your Kicks

One of my chief embarrassments as a black belt—aside from the fact that I now look more like the Pillsbury Doughboy than, say, one of the Furious Five—is that I have never, ever been able to master the Taegeuk poomsae.

A Taegeuk poomsae is the tae kwon do equivalent of tai chi chuan: a poomsae is a sequence of movements from one pose into another, and these particular ones employ the tai chi philosophy of yin and yang. However, unlike that tai chi you’ve probably seen, it’s not done in slow motion; usually it’s done in sharp movements, with quick exhalations for every kick, punch, and block. There are also set moments where you get to kihap.*

And for me—kinesthetically, spatially challenged me—they’re murder to try to remember.

I tend to start in one and end in another—or end in a completely different, non-Taegeuk technique. Or I get stuck like a broken record in the middle, or just generally forget what I’m supposed to be doing next. I could commit them to short term memory for belt tests, but they tended to empty out of my head once I’d actually gotten the belt.**

But as I was looking forlornly at the diagrams of each form a few days ago, it hit me: if I associated each form with something my brain can differentiate, I may be able to remember which is which.

Which is why I’ve been out on the lawn for the past couple of days, picking one song a day from the new Taegeuk playlist on my iPatch, setting each form to music.

I think it’s going to work, you guys! After spending half an hour blocking and kicking with “Ghostbusters,” blasting into my head*** and if I don’t have flashbacks to Taegeuk Ee-Jang every time I hear that song, I will eat my belt.

Now if I could only get control of my roundhouse kick again.

*Yell.

**Don’t ask about the black belt test. You have to remember all eight. THIS IS HARD, OKAY?

***Note I didn’t say they were good songs. They are memorable, though, and that is the key to the whole strategy.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You know, right before you said that you were using music, I was going to suggest it. I was having a similar problem oh these many moons ago, and my teacher stuffed my iPod into my ears. Magic.

...of course, now the downside is that I'm humming cheerily in the middle of sword kata, something along the lines of 'slice slice slice stabbity doo doo dooot do doodoo slice slice choppy YELL.'

In my style? For our black belt test? You need to be prepared to perform, masterfully, any one or more of five basic kata, plus any one or more of seven advanced kata, plus one black belt kata, plus a weapons kata if you've had training in that and want permission to teach it as a sensei rather than a sempai. The test administrator chooses which basic and advanced kata you perform, so you need to have mastered all of them. And sometimes? He might ask to see a second black belt or weapons kata. So you need to know a minimum of thirteen, fourteen if you're a weapons geek, and that's only if you're very, very confident.

Don't get me started on the physical requirements.

Sounds about par for my tests. This is just the Taegeuk. There were also eight hand techniques, self-defense moves, some weapons, and of course the smashing of several boards. All on top of the basic kics, blocks, and punches and the fancy running and/or jumping techniques.

And they'd just yell out random forms for you to do.

And don't get me started on the sparring.

The test lasted a good six hours. God, I could barely move the next day.

We kick ass. What's your style?

Japanese karate. Hayashi-ha shito ryu. Offshoot of the shito-ryu style.

I dunno what a hand technique is, but if it's anything like our moving basics (it's like shadowboxing, but with another person: one person is the aggressor, the other is the defender, and the aggressor attacks with certain set movements while the defender blocks and counters with certain set movements) they are FUCKING FINALLY phasing that out of the official requirements.

HA HA HA BLACK BELT SPARRING YEAH. Do they make you take on multiple opponents? Because we do that.

I don't think there is a single martial artist who hasn't gone before the promotion board and thought "Don't call out the form I'm bad at, anything but the form I'm bad at, please, just not the form I'm bad at - " *form is called - it's the one they're bad at* " - DAMNIT!"

I don't think there is a single martial artist who hasn't gone before the promotion board and thought "Don't call out the form I'm bad at, anything but the form I'm bad at, please, just not the form I'm bad at - " *form is called - it's the one they're bad at* " - DAMNIT!"

At the school I was at (Okinawan Go-Jyu, if you're curious), that didn't happen. You simply had to do all the kata.

And the free-form and preset sparring, both one on one and multi-opponent.

No matter how you slice it, high level belt tests are going to be tough. And they should be. That's a big honour, and it's important to make sure that candidates are truly worthy.

Yes and all that. But I'm still going to moan and complain about it. Just not where sensei can hear.

Yeah, we wound up doing all the forms by the end. Sadly, I had trouble remembering almost all of them, anyway.

I was always pretty sure it had something to do with the guy teaching you knowing very well which one you thought you were bad at. It seemed like my black belt test was nothing but the ones I was bad at, and surely, statistically, he could only have done that if he knew.

And they seem to know even if they're a master from another town.

Your sensei tells them. Only explanation.

Gotta be. Either that or they can read minds. (And I'm going to believe the former because the latter scares me.)

Oh man I suck at sparring. And I do the only style of Aikido that does it.

Fortunately the black belt testing requirement is that you participate, not that you win.

See, watching my siblings do forms/kata was one of the few reasons I wanted to learn karate.

It's like dancing!

Dancing and fighting use the same skills. It makes sense.

I actually found that, after having done Aikido for a number of years, swing dancing was pretty easy to learn.

Ditto. I still think of all the swing moves I know as specialized, swordless kata.

Haha! That's awesome. I'm working on mastering the 4th poomsae for my blue stripe(I can't remember the name in Korean *shame*) and when I work on my previous ones I keep confusing Sam Jang and Il Jang for some reason.
Also, a couple years ago the higher belts put on a demonstration instead of the traditional testing and some girls did their poomsae to Eye of the Tiger (it was either that or Jump, I can't remember either. I blame exams.)

Brilliant! You know, there's some good ass-kicking music in cartoon theme songs... (I'm thinking "G-Gundam," "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles"...)

Hee hee! This is the single from the movie's original soundtrack, too.

I also have "Kung Fu Fighting" on there. Because OF COURSE.

Keep Track Of Your Kicks

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