Soar Training: Promotions and Creative Applications

Posted on 13 December 2020 by Calvert

Merry Christmas to you all. I pray and hope your are enriched by the celebration of Christ’s light entering the world (The Gospel of John, Chapter 1). This will be our final week of training before Christmas break. We will not have class 21 Dec through 1 Jan. Classes will resume on 4 Jan, and we will begin our next testing cycle for a belt-test in mid-March.

Of first priority for this week is belt promotions from last week’s test examinations. All testing candidates passed, but I did notice some training gaps I need to shore up with each of you. With that said, we only have class twice a week, which is far less than a commercial school. This means each student must dedicate training time outside of class; I recommend at least two times for one hour each.

We will promote 14 individuals from our Little Dragons class (17:30) and our Adult Warriors Class (18:00).

This week I also want to demonstrate some of the “Do” or art aspects of Tang Soo Do. We will examine a variety of applications from our hyungs. I have three purposes in this: 1) each student must understand that Tang Soo Do is a traditional martial art with forms as the basis of primary instruction, 2) each student will be introduced to interpretation and application of the various hyungs, and 3) martial arts is creative and energetic in its application in self-defense and violence. As Tang Soo Do practitioners, we train for Battle (Code 4) – non-consensual violence.

Bunkai, literally meaning “analysis” or “disassembly”, is a term used in Japanese martial arts referring to process of analysing kata (hyungs, forms) and extracting fighting techniques from the movements of a “form.”