There are many parts of Taekwondo that as a whole become the art form. I believe there are 6 main areas although I must admit I cannot remember what they all are but 2 of the most common I would say are “Fitness” and “Self Defence”. I must admit that when I started Taekwondo I did not know what to expect and assumed it to all be punches and kicks and was shocked when we were doing Patterns and a lot of fitness as well.
CLasses can vary quite a lot where some are more fitness and some are a lot of pad work with kicks and punches, even including flying kicks etc and then there are times when there is a lot more stretching to try and help people be more flexible and complete higher kicks. One section though that does come up more often and is often the odd 5 or 10 minutes in a session is the Self Defence.
This confused me originally as the first time we did it my thought was “Taekwondo IS self defence” but there is a separate definition within Taekwondo. In the class when learning Self Defence this is about learning close hand to hand moves that are maximising the use of holds, pinches and turns to get out of grips and inflict pain to the opponent without using much force. This is the stuff that you see a lot of with films with people such as Steven Segal where he grabs a person by the wrist and inflicts pain and controls most of their body movement.
This is a great part of TKD to learn as little bits of manipulation can give you so much power against an opponent and can in many ways take away any benefit of size that they may have. One of the other students I train with that is quite new is just shy of 6 foot (I am 6′ 2) but he is a really heavy-set bloke with arms like tree trunks etc.. This is someone you would see in a pub and avoid, but when we try this moves you can move him an easily as anyone as his weight affects his movement when you force him against certain joints and muscles.
A sample move may be that someone has grabbed your arm and so you can grab the skin between the thumb and forefinger to lift the fingers, bend back the wrist to force the release and then turn the arms to turn the body and them facing away from you, then giving you the option to run, hit or do whatever is required in the situation. The problem of course at the moment is that when learning you need 20 seconds after they have grabbed you to think about how the move goes to get out of it, but hopefully that will come with training 
I tried to find a video on YouTube to show some of the moves we were learning that were simple and easy but very effective but I could not find any and so may try and make some up with our school but if you would like to learn this kind of thing then why not head over the Martial Arts Info and find a school near you, we are loving it.
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Apr.29,2012
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