For anyone who came up through a traditional system of the martial arts in the 1960s and 1970s, you will understand how different the traditional martial arts are today compared to yesterday. Back then, it was very intense, as much of the training was at least marginally full-contact. It was not unusual to come home from a class bruised and battered. I know I did.
 
Even in a system like my main focus of the time, Hapkido, where there is a lot of throwing involved; those throws could become very extreme.
 
Back when I was a twelve or thirteen years old, I had this one instructor, who, for whatever reason, decided I was the perfect patsy. He would toss my ass through the air at virtually every class. Which, as I trained daily, was every day. Even some of the other students wondered, and would ask me, why I was always the fall guy. I had no answer. But, I truly learned what taking a fall felt like from that style of training.
 
I’ve never spoken too much about this instructor, as I only spend maybe a year with him. He was a Chinese-American man, who had progressed up to the third-degree black belt, which was a very high rank at that time. He had been trained here in the United States, under the direction of one of the first Hapkido practitioners to come to America. Plus, he held a black belt in Judo. So, he knew his stuff. The thing was, he was very old-school in his training methods. He mostly worked with Hapkido hand-techniques and the throws, teaching only the most basic of kicking techniques. But, what he taught was intense.
 
Like many instructors of the era, he would sit at his desk by the big windows of his studio, smoking his cigarettes, and hoping for new students to join his school. Of which, there were many.
 
I actually learned a lot from that man and his method of teaching. Techniques and ideas that have stayed with me to this day. My reason for leaving his school was much the same as most of the advanced students who moved on. We wanted to stay closer to the source, so we only desired to train with Korean-born, first-generation instructors.
 
After my time with him, I bounced around to a few different schools, just to stay in the game, and keep my learning curve moving up. I did this until I met an instructor in Korea, who came to America, and we operated a couple schools.
 
The thing that I have witnessed, through the years, with each new generation of instructor moving farther and farther away from the source of the various traditional systems of martial arts, is how the training has diminished and become, for lack of a better term, softer.
 
I get it. Times changed and you no longer can send your students home with a bruised-up body and/or even some broken bones. I can’t even remember how many bones I’ve broken via training. But, that was then. This became now.
 
Certainly, with the introduction of first Full-Contact Kickboxing, then Brazilian Jujitsu and MMA, again training was taking to the level of, “Hurt,” orientated. But, this is not the case with the traditional forms of the martial arts. They have, at least seemingly, been diminished. This is ideally illustrated with a system like traditional Taekwondo. Once a fully actualized system of self-defense, which later moved towards being solely sport orientated, with an ever increasing level of limited techniques.
 
I believe this becomes a question of life/in life, is change and evolution always a good thing? Or, with change is something lost in the essence of the original?
 
This is just something to think about for you marital artists out there and for the everybody else, as well. Does change always make things better? Or, is change simply change? And with change, is something always gained or is something always lost?