While I know I cannot articulate my thoughts as well as many well spoken individuals on this forum, I can't help but respond. I think it is this exact rhetoric that many find so damn appaling about Kuk Sool Won. The anything and everything martial art. The "we have it all so why do you need to go elsewhere" martial art. Do you know why you don't hear BJJ schools bragging about their wrist lock instruction? Because it is not a core part of their curriculum. Yes, there are wrist locks in BJJ, but they know full well that these are not the core of their curriculum and they aren't going to SELL you on it. Why do you feel the need to sell Kuk Sool as the everything art when you know full well that your statement is undeniably false? I understand that after 39 years of drinking Kool Aid it can be difficult to move on or admit, "hey, maybe these ground techniques I am learning in Kuk Sool are utter crap!" or, "you know, there is no takedown defense in the Kuk Sool curriculum". What no takedown defense? But wait, Kuk Sool has "every type of martial arts technique". The claims made by Dragon Karma do nothing to help the art, only hurt it. Why? This isn't the 80's or early 90's and there is far too much information freely available to the public for tired claims such as these to hold any water in todays society. You are not Mr. Miyagi and your students are not Daniel. Your art is derived from Hapkido, live with it.
Isn't ssireum, traditional Korean wrestling, therefore Kuk sool could have a more grappling focus if it wanted without having to derive techniques from a non-Korean source. Does anyone know why the solution to everything seems to be a wrist lock?
Who said the solution to everything was a wrist lock??? Whatever happened to a simple smack in the face or poke in the eye?
Motor Skills Rather than take the time to write the following in my own words, I did a quick search and this is what I came up with: "Motor Skills Classification "Motor Skills is a fancy name for physical actions or techniques. They can be divided into three categories: "Fine Motor Skills - are actions involving small muscles, dexterity and eye-hand coordination. The ability to perform fine motor skills deteriorates at low to moderate levels of stress. "Complex Motor Skills - are actions that link three or more components in a sequence that requires timing and coordination. At moderate to high levels of stress, the ability to perform these skills is also impaired. Many martial arts techniques are complex motor skills. This explains why techniques that may work fine in low-stress training fail in a high-stress street-fight. "Gross motor skills - are simple, large-muscle group actions like a squats, pushups and push/pull-type movements. This includes basic fighting skills like a straight punch, a hook punch or a Thai boxer's knee strike for example. Unlike fine and complex motor skills, gross motor skills DO NOT deteriorate under stress. In fact, they are enhanced by the affects of fear and stress. "http://www.protectivestrategies.com/kyss.html" The rest of what he/they have to say on that page also makes a lot of sense.
I think we should go back and give more serious discussion to the shiny silver/red/gold trimmed uniforms! Any takers? :banana:
Indeed. But it's not like Kuk Sool (formally) promotes that sort of simple approach. If Kuk Sool promoted simplicity and directness, then it wouldn't be promoting how it has 3608 techniques in its curriculum. Where's the simplicity in that?
Fancy uniforms, Marketing....Makes KSW stand out.....Does nothing for function or quality though. Not to mention the $$$$ that Suk Hui Suh makes from the sale. OOPS ! You were just being funny Huh?
If you read the line about closed and open hand techniques at http://www.kuksoolwon.com/kuksool01.html and take what you want from it then yes it does promote simplicity. One thing that Kuk Sool Won does is market itself extremly well in the extent that if you read the advertising blurb on most KS websites it has something to appeal to most audiences. When a customer is looking for a product they will have a set criteria for what that product must have A/B/C, with D/E/F being an added bonus. If this matches up to what a company advertises (even if the companies advertises A to Z) then the customer will usually buy that product and ignore features G to Z as they are not important to their needs/requirements. What I'm trying to say is that people see what they want to see, and read what they want to read and ignore the rest so long as it satisfies their needs/wants. When I went along to my first Kuk Sool class its simplicity was what appealed to me. Everyone is different and will see things differently.
A bit like the menu in a McDonald has too, eh! Doesn't necessarily mean that what either of them offers is going to be the best for everyone in the long term though.
I agree, but how many customers look at something from a long term perspective. 99% of people buy on impulse to satisfy their current needs. Very few will go to a martial art school and go with the mindset of picking an art to train in for the long term (i.e 20 + yrs)
I added the bold emphasis above. I'll come back to that. Let's look at that same page from the WKSA website. It says: and then goes on with a long list of all the things in the curriculum. Then: Looks to me like Kuk Sool Won is trying to be everything. How is that simple? Their own word choice betrays any notion of simplicity. How is promoting 3608 techniques in your system the promotion of simplicity? It might be, if it was stripped down from 10,000 techniques and there was nothing left to discard, but as I've pointed out here on MAP in the past, IHS is about amassing techniques (see his interview with Marc Tedeschi... it's all about who has more techniques in his repertoire). How is having multiple technique sets about wrist locks, so many just being variations on the same theme, simple? Kuk Sool is not about simplicity, at least as the art itself is put together, taught, promoted, run as a business, etc.. You see it differently, please enlighten me. But what you wrote above -- to take what you want from it -- yes, that's simplicity. The whole Bruce Lee "take what is useful and discard the rest" approach. Can an individual that studies Kuk Sool strive to be a simple martial artist? Yes, that's well possible, and so what you wrote above isn't off-base. But what you wrote above is not how the art itself and those that run the art promote it. That's the difference that I think you and I are stumbling over: I'm talking about the organization of the art: both organization in a curriculum sense and organization in a Won sense. You're talking about what an individual can do with the material presented. However, I will say I think it may also be difficult for a student of Kuk Sool Won to become a truly simple martial artist. If you really want to discard what's not useful, then you should be able to discard it. Unfortunately, the structure of how KSW works doesn't allow you to discard anything. As one example, you still must know and perform everything in order to test for rank and promote. You can't really discard anything... at least until you discard the structure of the Won. I guess maybe that's why I left... the Won was no longer useful to me so I discarded it. Some curriculum still is. I've still practiced my empty hand forms because they're good exercise and good for body mechanics. A lot of the technique foundations are still solid and within me. Anyway, I do think that how an individual studies the Kuk Sool material does have potential for simplicity. But as for how the Won and the formal art/system are dealt with, no... it's about having as much as humanly possible... there's no stripping away, just about collecting more and more and more. Tho some could say, you have to collect first in order to have something to strip away, but then we're back to the individual and not the Won. But then as well who knows... maybe this franchise situation is the Won's way of stripping away lots of schools and income.
For the average guy/girl turning up at class once or twice a week Kuk Sool Won will be the all emcompassing martial art system it claims to be. very few will ever call upon the skills they learn in a real life situation and even fewer will look to make a profession from their art. i like to call these "casual martial artists" if you consider this, then KSW is a good way of learning "enough" of most aspects of martial arts to enable you to perform in public, show your mates or just practise at home. Should you wish to move deeper into particular areas i.e. grappling, wrestling, boxing, then as many people have done in the past you can leave KSW and persue whichever avenue you so desire. although KSW has some rules to be followed it is not a cult (some would argue) and you are free to leave whenever you want.
coc716 It's down to individual perception. My perception is that the art is simple (not easy by any matter of means). Your perception is that it's not. Fair enough. The points that I made were my own personal views as an instructor/student and not that of the Won. If we take the Won (i.e IHS and the others that help run it) as a restuarant, they are simply offering a large menu, giving prospective customers a choice. That doesn't mean that every meal will be of the same quality. So while the ground game in Kuk Sool isn't anywhere near as strong as BJJ for example it does still offer some basic training in it. False Advertising, Misleading, too vague......again its what you take from it. What is the Association, is it not the students? With them there would be no Association so yes while we have KSN IHS at the top running it, the students still make up the majority of the Association. A good friend of mine referred to the techniques in Kuk Sool as being like a stamp or coin collection. And yes the while the collection is many, if organised appropriately then it is simple to follow the path of each set. If it was just one large set of techniques then yes it would be complicated but its not. To me they aren't techniques as such, more about priniciples and suggestions/ideas as what to do in a set situation as well as teaching you how your opponent's body moves/doesn't move. I remember a seminar a number of years ago where one of the Korean Masters (Master Moon possibly) was helping out with techniques and I remember him talking about throwing your opponent and what to do if they don't land exactly as is taught and his answer was simple, "forget wrist lock or pins, just strike". To me this is a the simple approach and again it all depends on how each individuals looks at it. You mention how Kuk Sool is run as a business. Do you mean WKSA or how school owners run it? Of all the instructors that I've learnt from, they all teach it differently and in their own style but still teach Kuk Sool. Each has their own take on it.
Complex vs. Simplex Although understanding the form of something as simple as a brick is so easy as to not need any explanation, pretend that it's structure is a bit more complicated and not so easy to grasp (even more so than say, a dodecahedron). Now, using this as an example, one can analyze the structure of different buildings/houses to see how the function of a brick is used in different applications. Is each course even with the one under it, or are the ends of the bricks offset? Are the bricks laid flat or vertical? Are they chipped at 45° along one edge to form the corners of the building, or interleaved using their innate oblong cuboid structure? The more you analyze how bricks can be used in various ways when building a house, the more you begin to understand how bricks work in general, both independently as well as grouped together in different patterns. Now, bricks aren't joint-locks or pressure points, and buildings/houses aren't self-defense techniques, but hopefully this little analogy helps me explain that using the same joint-lock (or brick) in different sets when teaching the curriculum, eventually helps down the road when analyzing underlying principles within all the techniques taught in the curriculum. So whether it's the physical techniques that are complex and the underlying principles that are simple, or the other way around, it's easy for people to look at one instead of the other when discussing them and tend to disagree. Anyway, I just thought I'd throw that out there for all to chew on, as perspective isn't always so easy to corral into the subject/discussion, but often needs to be. Another aspect that I have seen diminish over the years is that more advanced versions of certain joint-locks which are supposed to have little *extras* that the more basic versions lack, are no longer taught with these small additional tweaks. These little *extras* aren't necessarily all that difficult to apply, but more practice IS needed to better understand how the joints work, how the attacks on the joints work, etc., in order to execute them correctly. And they don't all transform a joint-lock into something devastatingly superior but most get a quicker reaction to submit, which is the objective. Pugil mentioned something (post #25) that's pertinent to what I've noticed about applying these little tweaks, and I've discovered that sufficient practice makes adding them part of how you automatically apply the joint-lock, regardless of whether the motor skill to employ the tweak is fine, complex, or gross (so stressors do not factor into the equation WRT a S/D situation). The fact that in recent years some folks in KSW have reached higher BB ranks while being totally unfamiliar with these miniscule manipulations of the joints, should be noted. It gives rise to accusations that masters aren't much more knowledgeable than chodan or eedan, as well as suppositions that the art is being "watered down."
Fair enough. I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on this, and that's fine. What is simple to one isn't going to be simple to another. We have different experiences, different goals, different perceptions. It's all good. I don't think the analogy is good. At a restaurant you can choose to have this dish, but you can totally avoid that dish if you so desire. In KSW, you can't avoid anything. If you hate sword, tough... you MUST do sword work if you want to achieve black belt ranks: it's part of the formal curriculum. KSW does offer a very broad menu, but is it deep enough? are 10 cane techniques really exploring and covering all and everything about cane... as WKSA's own curriculum description leads you to believe? Semantics. Without someone at the top giving direction, there's no association to begin with. Someone has to organize it, else you're just a bunch of people. When I say "the Won" I mean the formal "heads of state" here... IHS, Sung Jin Suh, Barry Harmon, In Joo Suh, etc.. The folks that are the "senior management", the executive staff, if you will. Oh no question there. The organization and formalness of the curriculum is a huge strength of Kuk Sool as a system. I agree with all of you here. It's not meant to be memorized as a series of dance steps (tho certainly your body will become conditioned to certain movements), but a discussion of principles and concepts. But you see, this is one person teaching. Unfortunately this aspect of the art is not formalized enough and so there's too much emphasis placed on memorization and regurgitation of curriculum. In the post prior, Unknown KJN hits it just right... that so much is getting lost at the higher aspects... people just aren't learning the subtle details any more. So if you're fortunate enough to have a good teacher, great. But if not, then you're really going to be at a loss. It comes back to a different argument that it's not really the style that matters as much as the teacher. I mean WKSA... that "executive staff" comment above.
I would like to correct Dragon2 on some false information regarding Grandmaster Moon on thread # 19. Gary Goodridge only had 2 lessons in Kuk Sool by an independent KSW group out of Barrie in 1996. Grandmaster Moon was murdered in 1991 and did not give out 4th degree belts for show !
