what do you guys study?

From my limited experience of TKD. I would say that they have great power in their kicks, but its not 100% a good idea to attempt to kick with your instep if your actually fighting somebody in mma for example you are more likley to hurt yourself than if your trying to kick with your shin. Particularly if your throwing a leg kick.

It suffers from similar limitations as Kyokushin Karate with the stance, in that protecting yourself from head punches is not high up on the agenda. Mabye TKDfighterJoe could tell me about this, how much leg kicking do you do? Obviously none for compitions but for say self defence.

I think it is as effective as any art that is not full contact kickboxing/muay thai in terms of stand up.

 

instep vs shin is really a horses for courses type thing. instep is fine if you're not risking hitting it on a hard bone. if i was aiming for the liver id be fine using the instep/lower shin. with leg kicks i'd have to agree that the instep would be a good way to get your foot broken. one checked kick and i could see the kicker limping away in pain. instep offers speed though, and as they say..speed kills. the people i know who are proficient with tkd can really light it up with their feet and are real mofos at range. the problem with tkd is once you get inside of kicking range a lot of their options get taken away.

as far as the karate stance i'd also have to agree. but a stance is easily remedied with a little cross training. if you saw me sparring you'd see my upper body in a good boxer's guard from the time i spent doing that, and my feet would be similar to a karate stance that i'm comfortable with from my time with that. i always felt that the traditional stances were too rigid and the head was too upright, and never used them sparring. it made a lot of people fun targets though.

 

Eddie Bravo said this. I think it was an interview with fighthype.

On Joe Rogan's skills...

"Joe Rogan is a bad motherf^@ker and I’m not just saying that. He’s one of my best students. He is a brown belt and he is just a nightmare in the gym."

"He’s swole and very athletic and very flexible. He did Taekwondo his whole life, Kickboxing and Muay Thai and he hits really hard."

"He hits harder than anybody I’ve ever held mitts for. If he wanted to do MMA, Joe Rogan could go straight to 170 and f^@k up a lot of dudes. He can for sure."

 

I'm glad you acknowledge the power, many people think we are 'slapping' with the kicks because they are so fast.

Truth be told the instep is the end of the whip, which is moving the fastest, and therefore will do the most damage. The pre-step (Idk the technical term) that muay thai fighters often do I feel is to compensate for the distance lost by the part of the body they are striking with (and by managing the distance, they can add power to what it would have been had they not moved in). While Taekwondo fighters might do this on a situational basis, it is considered bad practice, an indicator.

It will increase the time from the initial movement, to striking the target. Giving the opponent a larger reaction time window.

A classic example of this is poor ol' Nicolidus. Fighting in the final match in his own country against a korean fighter in athens 2004.

Watch his lead leg before he throws (blue). Had it not been for that, the counter would not have landed.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCm_H-Psmt8&feature=related[/ame]

Striking with this shin muay thai fighters aim at more targets which are larger. The hip, shin, knee, because accuracy suffers. Coming from someone who has sparred with many elite taekwondo people, the accuracy (mid-kick accuracy) that people develop is astounding. Arms and legs flying all over the place and they still manage to land a shop where they intended.

And if someone is contemplating 'blocking' the kick, they have already lost. For the same reason taekwondo fighters don't usually block eacothers kicks. It is that you cannot find a happy medium between head & body block when someone is kicking as fast, deceptively, and in as many combinations as elite taekwondo fighters do.

As far as face punching goes, we develop a powerful straight punch to the body as a counter. Once you are excellent at controlling footwork, timing and distance, raising the punch up 6 inches to the face is not very difficult. thats offence.

Defence is very complicated, I may have typed it out before, I'm not very sure. The question lies here, would greater boxing skill have been displayed in the pac-cotto fight if they were allowed to kick eachother in the balls?

no leg kicking in shi-hap (olympic sparring) kyorugi. However, a person adept at striking the far away targets of the solar plexus/head will have little problem kicking the knee if he wanted to. I might throw a kick to the back of the knee if the opportunity arose. But I'm not a big fan of kicking the opponents shin.

Think about it, fighters can throw triple rondhouses alternating between the head, body, and finish it off with a hook-kick. It wont be too difficult to hit a different spot. That is like thinking floyd mayweather would not be very adept at punching someone in the balls.

he did not do taekwondo his whole life. He didn't even do olympic-style taekwondo.

If he thinks joe rogan hits hard he should go hold a shield for our national team.

but in all fairness, anyone is going to suck up to joe to try to validify him in his position which he is far underqualified for.

Inside fighting is probably the hardest part. There are techniques which I see effective on a regular basis, but they are rather advaned and hard to pull off.

IMO the footwork of taekwondo is truly perfection itself, and any non-taekwondo person who tries to move around with them will find themselves too-far or too-close at all the wrong times. This is why cage/ring fighting is a disatvantage for the taekwondo fighter. The olympic ring is 10mx10m for a reason.