Black Belt

A while ago my son  and I received our black belts in TaeKwonDo which we worked so diligently for.

My life took a funny turn several years ago…into a Dojang! I took my son to TaeKwonDo and being a Karate old-timer, I found that I didn’t like being a spectator. And now I too am wearing a black belt.

The testing was 3 hours long. It was fun and hard, but frankly, there were much harder days of training along the way. Master Fong had prepared everyone well.

I have been working on my black belt preparation since last summer. Since then TaeKwonDo has been a significant part of my daily schedule, consuming several hours of my week. Due to many “pre-tests” I feel like I’ve been preparing for this test for a year now.

The session starts with a warm-up that consists of a serious of push-ups, sit-ups, stretching and so on. Then we move on to various group drills demonstrating our abilities to effectively kick and punch various moving targets. Once everyone is pretty sweated up, it’s individual time to demonstrate to the judges our technical abilities. For starters its another round of kicks — from the basics to the very advanced. Then it’s Poomsae time. There are 8 poomsaes total that one must know in order to pass the test, but you are only tested on 3 or4 of them (8, 7, 6 and one of the others picked at random).

Then it’s one-step non-contact sparring, and then we move to a 2-minute live sparring session with a partner. Finally, it’s board breaking time where you have to break 2 boards with our hands, and 3 boards with our feet using different techniques.

Well, it’s official now; we have our black belt in TaeKwonDo! Celebration time! Now the big question is:  what to do next?

Tags: Martial Arts

Category: Lifestyle