Preparing for US Nationals

I was at the Apex Tigers Tae Kwon Do dojang yesterday as part of the New Jersey Tae Kwon Do team that is going to the US Nationals in June and July in San Jose, CA. While I was there, I met some of New Jersey's best and most talented masters - the State team's coaches - and I trained with one as I worked on my latest form and as we helped some Junior Nationals black belts work on their form, Koryo. I also discovered how much I've been out of the Tae Kwon Do loop.

The last ten years or so, I've always been involved in Tae Kwon Do and martial arts somehow. I'd read and keep up with the general and popular news. I'd chat with fellow black belts. I'd even train at one school or another, some owned by former instructors, and work up a good sweat. However, I haven't been  in the thick of things since the 1990s - and the early 1990s at that.

The last instructor I was training with seriously - Master Levy Diogene - was current in how things are done in Korea and the information that is passed down from the Kukkiwon (the headquarters of Tae Kwon Do in Seoul, South Korea) and the World Tae Kwon Do Federation (the world governing body of sport Tae Kwon Do). He taught me the new way to get into the ready, or joombi, stance. He taught me the updates on how to chamber kicks when doing some of the black belt forms. They were new to me then, since I had learnt my forms originally from Grandmaster Kwang Jae Lee, then Grandmaster Ik-Hwan Kim, and they were a little more traditional, more 'old school' (although Grandmaster Kim was already showing me some of the newer short front stance, known as the walking stance).

Yesterday, I saw and was taught even newer ways to do some of the techniques in some of the black belt forms. Now, instead of keeping a hand out as you kick, you bring it in. Instead of putting your closed fist under the other arm's elbow, while doing chops to the face, you bring the hand down by your belt. The changes are subtle ones and they'll be relatively easy to learn and it'll be relatively easy to fix my poomse (forms). What's going to be hard are the nuances. It used to be such that you tucked your arms here and there as you performed the technique and got into the finished position. Now, there are very specific nuances that help you get there. It's nicer, to be honest, the way the forms look now because it makes the poomse whole - complete - and it's just simply nice to look at. And, they are nice to look at but the master I was watching, Master Sang Hee Kim, made them look effortless and beautiful. As I watched him, I could only wonder if I could get to that level. Was I ever at that level - even before I stopped training and put on all the weight I have to lose, even before I became stiff and lost a lot of the flexibility I acquired that allowed me to break a board that was held directly above my head with a front rising kick?

Master Kim was very helpful and pleasant as he helped me with my Sipjin form, the fifth degree black belt form I may need to do at Nationals. I taught the form to myself from videos and texts figuring, as an experienced master and martial artist, I could learn the whole as a whole. I have but it's the details that make the form.

I said what's going to be hard is to relearn, or even learn for the first time, the nuances of the poomse I know. That's true. What's going to be really difficult is to learn them in the next twelve weeks before Nationals.