Among martial artists, there’s sometimes a perception that modern Taekwondo isn’t a “real martial art,” that its sport focus makes it unsuitable for self-defense and ignores cultural dimensions that give martial arts depth and meaning.
River Valley Taekwondo’s training evokes the way Korean Masters practiced before the sport of Taekwondo existed. This older version of Taekwondo is based in technical excellence and practical self-defense. We celebrate its Korean roots, providing a cultural perspective that makes our school feel like a martial art instead of a sports gym.
In the 1970s and 80s, the Kukkiwon (World Taekwondo Headquarters) led a movement to transform Taekwondo, previously a self-defense focused martial art, into a competitive sport. This evolution accelerated when Seoul hosted the 1988 Olympic games and introduced Taekwondo as a counterpart to boxing, wrestling, Judo, and other combat sports.
To succeed in competitive Taekwondo, the “athletes” have almost abandoned punches and strikes using the hands and adopted specialized kicks that are perfectly adapted to the rules and scoring of Olympic sparring but of dubious value for self-defense.
Common Perceptions of (Modern) Taekwondo
In the popular imagination, Taekwondo is:
- for children
- a sport, not a “serious” martial art
- unrealistic for self-defense
This conception isn’t entirely wrong, because all of those things are true in many contemporary Taekwondo schools. It’s not just true in the US, but in countries around the world—even in Korea, Taekwondo’s country of origin.
Look for Taekwondo online, and you’ll probably find two things:
- Olympic style competitive Taekwondo, where practitioners in the familiar blue and red 호구 (Hogu) trade tricky kicks that are the spiritual kin of Olympic fencing: athletic, impossibly fast, and impressive. . . but with little relation to practical, realistic self-defense. You’ll notice there are long intervals of bouncing around, feinting, and almost no techniques using the hands. This has earned sports Taekwondo a deserved reputation as a “kicking only” style.
- Displays by demonstration teams, with spectacular aerial feats and group poomsae or techniques, often choreographed to music. The athleticism is remarkable, as practitioners are boosted twenty feet in the air, performing twists and rolls like gymnasts or divers, and sending showers of (paper-thin) broken boards fluttering beautifully to the ground. Near-vertical kicks show impressive flexibility but don’t show the martial arts ideal of graceful effectiveness.
These popular expressions of modern Taekwondo don’t fit most people’s mental image of “martial arts.” It’s hard to imagine relying on any of the above when confronted by an aggressive opponent who means to do harm.
An Alternative Taekwondo Ideal
There’s a small but growing movement of “Neoclassical” schools around the world, which emphasizes the self-defense foundation of Taekwondo’s not so distant past. The techniques, targets, and applications are meant to stop attackers, not score points. These dojangs also tend to put Taekwondo’s Korean origins in the foreground, contrasting East Asian values with certain aspects of Western culture. They show an alternative way to experience the world and get along with people—one that doesn’t replace, but complements social conventions many take for granted in Western nations. Their goal is to deliver an authentic martial arts experience, not a sport or hobby with a veneer of East Asian atmosphere.
River Valley Taekwondo shares these priorities and offers an experience different from the mainstream of contemporary martial arts culture. We train our students to stand alongside practitioners from any martial arts tradition, earning the respect of their peers through unmistakable skill and character.
How River Valley Taekwondo Is Different
Our dojang is, in some ways, a time capsule that shows what Taekwondo was like before the transformations described above. If you watch old black-and-white video of Taekwondo masters and practitioners, shot between the end of WWII and (roughly) the early 1980s, you’ll see Taekwondo that looks a lot like what we practice in our dojang today. This isn’t because we want to preserve history for its own sake, like a Civil War reenactor, but because we value the values and techniques of this older way, before Taekwondo’s transformation into a sport and form of popular culture.
The short version of our values:
- Self-defense plausibility is paramount, and beauty and internal cultivation are next most important. Sports and public performance are not relevant, and we spend no time on either. We compete with previous versions of ourselves—not with each other, not with strangers.
- We embrace difficulty in seeking skill and knowledge and test ourselves through traditional methods with clear and meaningful applications.
- We respect the Okinawan origins of many of our techniques and applications, the transmission through Japan, and the Korean innovations that stand upon that solid foundation. In so doing, we discard the trendy and preserve the timeless.
Taekwondo for Self-Defense
The foundation of our practice lies in technical training, much like the structure of a ballet or classical music conservatory, or a high-end restaurant. We drill basics, combine them through study of poomsae (formally arranged patterns of techniques and footwork, called “kata” in Japanese), and develop a profound understanding of how and why these techniques work. Only then do we
Because our techniques have the potential to cause serious injury or death, we don’t have beginning students spar until they’ve demonstrated skill and control in the basics. Our students spar for years without wearing protective headgear, chest protectors, gloves, or pads for the feet and shins. This teaches exquisite precision, as well as mutual respect between opponents. It may seem reckless to an outside observer, but the care and accuracy unprotected sparring cultivates results in an almost total lack of injuries, beyond the occasional bruise, and even those are rare.
After years of unpadded sparring, intermediate students may begin to spar with pads and increasing levels of contact. Contact sparring can be a useful step to understanding the consequences of our choices when sparring. There is no scoring in these sparring matches—it’s acceptable to just hold one’s own, and when a technique or combination works, it’s clear to both parties.
When we work with target pads and heavy bags, speed and accuracy are important (of course!) but we place equal emphasis on power and balance. A pretty kick is a lovely thing to see, but it’s incomplete without decisive power, and it’s reckless without ensuring balance both before and after its delivery. It entertaining to see some MMA fighter show a clip of a “secret signature kick” that boggles the minds of opponents, which has been a staple of our practice for as long as our Jidokwan style of Taekwondo has been practiced in the US.
Our style of Taekwondo balances its repertoire of beautiful and powerful kicks with an equal array of hand techniques using fists, knife edges, and more specialized striking surfaces. We train students to use these strikes not just as abstractions, but as powerful, effective weapons. To that end, we condition our hands through repeated impact with surfaces that offer increased resistance and toughness. We then test the applicability of these techniques by breaking wooden boards and concrete blocks. These breaking challenges aren’t designed to test the effectiveness of techniques, not to impress the uninformed on Instagram or “empower” the practitioner through the illusion of difficulty.
By focusing on what is authentic, training in ways that have stood the test of time, while carefully vetting modern techniques from Korea and elsewhere that supplement these old-school methods, we have confidence that our Taekwondo training is good, yes, and timelessly meaningful. This is true for all the reasons that people have traditionally been inclined toward the martial arts, which includes self-defense as a crucial element in its foundation.
The vast majority of people who practice Taekwondo do so in a school influenced by modern competition-oriented values. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and the success of sport Taekwondo means that many people obviously enjoy it. It’s just not what some people have in mind when they seek martial arts training, and they don’t have enough perspective to know it’s not the only way to practice Taekwondo. We offer the alternative, respecting the accomplishments of Taekwondo leadership in Seoul, while preserving that which is valuable from earlier ways.
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