Teacher once told me his frustration with earning a black belt was that it didn’t come with a bag of magic tricks. I think he figured he’d be able to to jump to the second story and be able to single handedly defeat multiple magical warriors or something. Well, that’s my take on it anyway.
Since he told me that many years ago I’ve managed to keep my realistic hat one and not get too worked up about what would happen about achieving the belt. Mostly, I’ve felt that I haven’t deserved it or felt ready for it, but I did get to experience a little magic last night.
I noticed in the last two weeks that I’ve been able to pick up techniques after one exposure without any real difficulty. So I’ve decided to attribute this to the magic of the belt rather than the fact that I’ve been doing this for 8 years and that all the building blocks are in place to grab the pieces from other lessons and tons of practical experience. It’s totally the magic.
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Storm, our black belt via TKD, has been studying our katas/hyungs and has pretty much memorized them all in about two months. He’s now on to the Black Belt ones that I’ve only recently dipped my feet into. Teacher asked us to try them together and we definitely had different impressions of what we seen. I went back to the tapes and had to correct a bit. We are both now on the same page.
Question – how long do we keep practicing basic katas? I stick with the more advanced ones so I don’t forget them, but when we go back to the first couple I stumble around because I forget them. Derp!
1 comment:
Since retiring from TKD in 2008 I still practice my forms. I'm fairly proud of the fact that three years later I still review them.
That being said, it's half of them once per week. So if I'm lucky I visit them all twice a month. Not even close to keeping them tournament or test ready!
How long do we practice basic katas? Probably forever.
Doing them the way they are intended is hard enough. If you get bored with that try slowing any kata down into a tai chi-like form. Or, if you are studying a second martial art, start improvising.
I will never like doing them for competition but I do like doing them.
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