Jinyoung Ssangkum Ryu Haedong Kumdo
Essay writing assignment for dan candidates
1. If you can have Good skills & abilities of Jinyoung Ssangkum Ryu HK well in Kumbups, cutting, sparring etc., what will you do next? How will you develop yourself for your next level in martial arts?
After gaining proficiency in many aspects of martial arts, it is often believed that the next level should be teaching. However, this traditional notion on the evolution from student to teacher has somewhat changed the past few years.
It is not uncommon for many students
to become a teacher in certain fields, while remaining a student in other fields. Smarter and better ways of training and working out means that the “shelf life” of many martial artists has been extended by many years.
Teaching becomes an invaluable tool not only to the students, but for the growth of the teacher as well.
For me, this is the same for other martial arts I practice. For example, my time spent training Hapkido or Thai boxing versus teaching it is about 90%-10%, and I have no intention of changing that soon as there is still so much to learn.
On the other hand, I train Haedong
Kumdo for about as much as I teach it. Specifically, after my transition to Jinyoung Ssangkum Ryu my focus has been on the double sword forms which were absent in my previous Haedong
Kumdo style. Sparring has always been near and dear to my heart, and it is my intention to develop these skills in Jinyoung Ssangkum Ryu too.
However, it is not only enough for me to
get proficient in these techniques, but also to hand them down efficiently and correctly to my students.
There are many motivations for becoming a teacher: feeling fulfillment of watching
dedicated students grow and sometimes even surpass the teacher is a beautiful, but sadly very rare emotion. Personally, I can count these occasions on one hand so far. So secondarily, I must admit to a more personal, somewhat more selfish reason: my own personal growth as a
martial artist. One of my professors in university hinted towards this form of learning in one of his lectures back in 2008: “if you are trying to study this matter, imagine you are trying to
explain it to someone who doesn’t know anything about it. If you can successfully do that, you have mastered this course.”. I have taken this advice to heart whenever I try to learn something.
Along the years, I have discovered that, in order to learn and master any kind of matter, be it practical matters such as sports, or purely theoretical ones such as a course on Japanese History, there is a hierarchy to efficient retention of information. Surprisingly, the least
efficient one is listening, as you would do in a lecture. Ironically this is the most practiced form of teacher-student learning across the world. Second, there is doing. You retain a much higher
percentage of the things you want to learn if you actively practice it, such as repeating the same kumbob time after time. We often apply this method when teaching martial arts.
However, the method that makes you retain the highest percentage of information, like my university professor claimed, is teaching it. It is only by explaining that you are seeing the structure of the matter and where possible problems might arise for future students.
This is why in our Hapkido club, we emphasize that future black belt candidates can explain the reasoning behind a certain technique, and not just perform it. The “why” becomes equally
important as the “how”.
This thought has been with my ever since. And it helps me in my day job as a
schoolteacher as well. It is not good enough to be proficient in English. I need to know the reasoning behind it, and in doing so, I become better at it myself. I would have never known the intricate details of certain English grammar, or the finesse of various Kumbob techniques,
if I hadn’t had my students asking questions about it. I learn from them as much as they do from me.
2. In your personal opinion, what is the most important part and the favorite one in Jinyoung Ssangkum Ryu HK for you.
Having only experienced the Jinyoung Ssangkum Ryu Haedong Kumdo style for a short time so far, I can confirm that for me it was the clear structure and systematic organization that attracted me to this style and eventually made me switch to this new way of Haedong
Kumdo.
For too long traditional martial arts have been fragmented and suffered under the
proliferation of hundreds of different styles and schools within the same martial art. This, in my opinion, has contributed to the downfall in popularity of traditional martial arts in recent
years. As we look to more modern martial arts, we discern the same recurring aspects: clear heritage, systematic organization and relevant real-world experience (i.e., “does the martial
art work?”).
I long lamented the loss of interest in the traditional martial arts and its values. Having been raised practicing Taekwondo, Hapkido and Haedong Kumdo, I was saddened to see it
being passed over in favor of MMA, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Kickboxing in mainstream media.
But as I started training in Thai boxing and MMA, I realized that these martial arts do not need to compete with each other in order to shine in their own right. Every martial art has its own attraction, and it is the responsibility of the practitioners to keep the spirit of the martial art alive, while adapting it to modern times. A clear system is all it takes. No more, but no less.
So I am grateful for modern martial arts and the rise of a new consciousness which demands a martial art with rich history, but which is also rooted in real-world experience. I believe that this can only be achieved by having a solid curriculum that is taught the same way
across the entire organization, and a systematic structure that streamlines communication and the flow of knowledge. This way, the individual does not only learn exclusively top-tobottom, as was often the case with many martial arts schools. Too often, students and teacher were left to their own devices in the absence of a teacher. With the right system, such as I believe Jinyoung Ssangkum Ryu to have, it is possible to also learn laterally from each other or
engage in longer periods of self-study to maintain and sharpen their skills, as was often needed these past years during the global Covid pandemic