I have been thinking about how I have changed what I have been teaching in my Taekwondo classes over the last 20 years. I think one of my biggest mistakes was focusing too much on self-defence training and I started to lose focus on what really should be teaching. I have found that there must be a balance between what you are doing; if I focus too much on one area then I may lose too many people.
My solution is to keep belt requirements to a minimum and offer more “theme” classes so people have more freedom to choose what they will be training.
The biggest change which occurred in the mid 90’s, was the introduction of boxing techniques in my Taekwondo training. I think this was one of my most important decisions in my Taekwondo career.
In one way it’s quite funny; the teaching in my classes is closer to ITF-Taekwondo but my style is WTF.
Another change which I have achieved in the last 10 years is that I actually teach less material and we focus on more repetition. This way my students’ technical level is much higher than if I compare how it was 20 years ago.
Today one of the biggest problems is that people generally don’t have as much time as they would like and this just has to be accepted. What or how we did it 20-30 years ago is not working in today’s society and so we must accept that we need to change with the times.
OK, this was all today!
Yours,
Coach Markku Parviainen
Tags: blog about taekwondo, boxing, korean martial art, kukkiwon, markku parviainen, mma, olympic taekwondo, poomsae, self defense, strenght training, taekwondo, taekwondo competition, taekwondo master, taekwondo training, training at age +40, ufc, ultimate fighting championship, wtf-taekwondo
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