Despite of what many thinks - tehniques people outside of Taekwondo commonly know as Taekwondo tehniques are those seen in competitions, both WTF and ITF style. Those tehniques are just one part of Taekwondo tehniques. Rules for sparring were designed to make sparring safe and adoptabler to big number of people, including kids. Again, despite of what many says, Taekwondo contains tehniques like varioations of roundhouse kicks, knees, flying knees, elbows and so on, INCLUDED in original curriculum by General Choi Hong Hi. I personally trained with most respected masters in the world today, and by them, so as by my coach, i was shown knees, elbows, and many other stuff that you can't see in Taekwondo sparring. Today it is mostly rare, especially in WTF style, because most of clubs emphasis to tehniques used in sparring. But, there are also many clubs that teaches all tehniques of Taekwondo. So please, understand that Taekwondo teaches most tehniques you can see in muay thai. Just, it is more rare than clubs that teaches sport only. About Kwonkicker, he is really good mash - up of two style, but i rather say he do more Muay Thai, not because tehniques that ''can't be found in Taekwondo'' - but because the way he does them - stances and his roundhouse kick for example which is clear mt..
Well i think he executes his kicks very good, he is supple and can do a variety of kicks. Also as i said i think a good practicioner of one style would beat an average practicioner of another just my opinion of course.
Judging from his fight he's not very good. At Muay Thai at least. Definitely has more attention than his talent deserves.
Hey not been on in a while - moved back to the UK and my connections GASH! A couple of things: 1) he does muay thai. it's that simple. "blablabla TKD has all the same techniques blablabla" it's the same tired old bullcrap. He's training in muay thai at a muay thai camp (fair enough, they're possibly the most gash touristy gym in the whole country but it's still one nonetheless) and his 1 fight in thai boxing he used thai boxing against some guy who is quite clearly not even close to a professional fighter. Indeed tiger are famous for matching moron farang with tuk tuk drivers and the like. 2) not being as arrogant and being slightly more quirky in real life as opposed to the crap you put on your profile descriptions does not make you a nice guy - having never met him but only heard a bunch of crap from him I'll stay open minded but leaning more towards the "he's being a total tool" stand point. 3) His kicks are very good? really? based on what? him stopping some non fighter with one? or his kicks on BOB? lol mate gtfo. sigh.... it's good to be back.
I'm of the opinion that while he does have a fierce defense of TKD, he has acknowledged that what he does is a mix of the disciplines. Sometimes it's not about technique. It's about how you apporach what you do. Lyoto Machida has taken Muay Thai before, but that doesn't make him a Muay Thai guy because of it. In my case I am similar, and I have now reached a point where I have more experience in Muay Thai and Western Kickboxing then I do in Tae Kwon Do. So am I Muay Thai guy? At the very least I am hybrid guy as I always try to incorporate everything I have learned into my own piece that works for me. Now I don't claim to be an either/or but I feel it is necessary like Cyrus Washington for example to acknowledge that I am both.
Is it just me or is anyone else bothered by this supposed visit to learn Thai-style conditioning, then a spontaneous seminar? For one thing, I'll wager he could learn a hell of a lot more than just conditioning from a decent Thai camp. For another, if you're there to learn, learn. I don't know the whole story, but why is he teaching in the first place?
No what would make you a thai guy is if your open striking style uses a predominantly thai base. Which is what inevitably happens when people cross train in thai boxing seriously. The issue people (and definitely myself) have with kwonkicker is that he DOES claim to fight using predominantly TKD techniques etc. His initial videos claimed to be a mix whilst showing mainly TKD style crappy kicks etc. Then he says he's gonna "go to thailand and fight the thais". Which, I suppose if your standards aren't too high and you consider going to the most rampant and least respected tourist muay thai gym in thailand and fighting a tuk tuk driver to be the same thing then, yes he did indeed go to thailand and "fight the thais". What he didn't do was go somewhere serious people go to train and get matched against someone in a respectable match which he wasn't expected to automatically win. Most of those thais who fight Tiger Muay Thai's guys literally take one hard knock then stay down because they're only in there to get paid. In the end, his claimed "pure TKD" gets put to the lie when he goes to thailand, trains in muay thai then fights in a style which is clearly muay thai. And i share ap oweyns misgivings on the seminar. If that was any other muay thai gym in thailand they wouldn't have given a crap because they already know every aspect of striking far better than kwoncrapper does.
The thing that struck me about some of those videos was the cost-benefit ratio. The cost in energy that you're putting into some of those jumping spinning kicks versus what you're getting back out of them. I watched a video with Cyrus Washington and Kwonkicker (I can't believe he allows himself to be introduced that way) going through various taekwondo techniques at that Thai camp. And I kept thinking that Washington, in particular, wasn't hitting nearly as hard with these elaborate jump spinning things (despite the assertion that spinning adds all this momentum and force to a kick). KK was actually better and clearly hit a lot harder. But, for all that, he didn't seem to hit harder than he would have with a regular old, feet-planted kick. I actually somewhat admire the impulse to work adapt your existing style and make it do what you want it to do. I just don't get the resource allocation I guess. Why put effort into something that's so very unlikely to pay off?
I dunno, loads of the people I know in person who take TKD have this thing about proving it's effectiveness.
I can understand that to a degree. I did taekwondo myself for 5 years. And I do believe that there are some fundamental things to be gained from it. But I also think that there's not a whole lot that's distinctly taekwondo left over after I've finished discarding the stuff that I don't think is worth it. It could just as easily have come from a dozen other sources. It just happens that, in my case, it came from taekwondo.
I found the same thing myself when I did it - it's why I dropped it in favor of another sport which provided all the same gains with a whole lot more benefits!
I think what most people don't like about tkd is that it takes an incredible amount of skill to use it effectively. There's no point in trying to counter with a difficult technique if you can't do it perfectly, you'll either miss every time or when it does hit there's no power at all. Go to any taekwondo school and you're likely to see 90% of the students doing most of their techniques incorrectly. It's sad to say, but most of the art's practitioners make the art look like crap. The complexity of some of the techniques, especially spinning kicks(which are by the way excellent for counter-attacking IF you can do them right), means that a lot more time will be spent just getting the techniques down correctly than if you're using a more straight-forward simple style. Once that is complete, the long process of figuring out how to apply it effectively is initiated. One truth about taekwondo is that belt advancement is typically way too short. The techniques are just too difficult to consider a person proficient in less than 5 years practice. BTW you're kidding yourself if you don't think spinning adds power.. a spinning kick done correctly has tons more power than its non-spinning counterpart.
Re: spinning kicks, some of them will benefit from the momentum. A spinning hook kick is certainly stronger than a regular old hook kick. I'm far, far less convinced that a ump spinning round kick (hurricane kick, etc.), for instance, is stronger than a regular standing round kick from someone who knows what they're doing. And I'm not going to blindly accept that it's more powerful simply by virtue of spinning.
Sorry but this post reads too much like the usual "yeah but TKD just uses huge amount of skill whereas kicking low etc. doesn't" type crap that a lot of TKD guys have been spouting for a long time. Bottom line is that spinny kicks etc. don't pay off 99% of the time. Sure, if you throw them often enough you're bound to see a result every now and then Ie. serkan yilmaz, but like serkan yilmaz, you'll also fail miserably every time you're faced with a half way decent fighter who knows what you're about. The same kicks all exist in muay thia syllabus as well as a lot of other martial arts. In thai bocing the guys fight for a living, if those spinny kicks paid off often enough in the long run, they'd use them. It's nothing to do with skill and everythign to do with flawed techniques.
I love the jump spin back kick to the liver,especially after a left hook to theliver,but I dont teach it to my Muay Thai students as it takes a lot of work to land it right. At last nights Muay Thai Premier league show in USA Zidov was stopped in Rnd 1 with the spinning back kick to the body by Baxter Humby. Ive said this so many times to people its the best kick in the book(that and the running side kick) if you can land it asyou cant condition against that much force against the liver/ribs. Im not making a case for Tae Kwon Do(just that kick) as I dont like it,in fact I call it Tae Kwon Dont!
