Re: Taekwondo dying in America

In my experience, what Sifu Freddie Lee said that Taekwondo is supposed to represent more of the true way of the martial arts is true.  Most of the time you will see Taekwondo teachers talking about values, about discipline, about being a good person. I have seen a quite a bit of teachers of TKD talking about morals and how one should be committed to training in order to develop as complete human beings. However even though a lot of TKD instructors might do that, what most of the TKD gyms that train the pro athletes do is that they teach ONLY what is used in competetition, meaning they teach poomsae (forms) and combat sport. Where I live my cousin entered a gym that belongs to the WTF, and is certified to train competitive athletes that want to compete in TKD, infact you cannot take a belt test unless you compete. They promote the competition, and in TKD that means they don't train their hand techniques nearly as much as they should for real self defense, they train kicks,all kinds of kicks and poomsae and that’s it. So current taekwondo training is not real taekwondo, UNLESS you learn directly from a korean master, and they are the real masters. I feel there's a lot of TKD gyms that are way too focused on competition. I saw an exhibition of TKD, they had a korean master, and a lot of the students were also from korean descent, the skills they showed were from a whole new level, all of them were black belts and all of them had amazing kicking techniques, they demonstrated poomsae, traditional techniques and stances, self defense techniques, punching techniques, strikes with knees and elbows, throws, wrist locks, basically everything that Taekwondo is supposed to have as far as techniques go, so if you want to learn the real thing, train with a Korean master. Also saw footage of some Taekwondo gym on my country, they had a Korean master, somebody from the US had shared the content on his fb page amazed by the techniques. So learn from Koreans if you want the real deal.

And since Taekwondo has been so corrupted I prefer that the the american schools with amrican teachers close and the ones with korean masters endure. Just like how America corrupted the martial arts from Brazil to the US, that also includes taekwondo. And to  alot of people's eyes WTF TKD is already a corruption of TKD, and that might be true, however you will see a big difference between old school WTF and the current one that has all kinds of 5 year old black belts.