Olympic Taekwondo Sparring Tips and Techniques

Jonathan Reff: Hi! Jonathan again here at Somafit; we were going over Olympic Taekwondo and right now we're going to go over Sparring.

Sparring really encompasses everything of what we just went over. You have your roundhouse, your cut kick, back kick, double kicks, a wide variety of double kicks and my intent is to kick as many kicks above the waist, either in these scoring targets, these blue targets here or to the head. Now, obviously, we want to be able to use Sumir for the duration of the sparring, so I am actually not going to kick him in the head because, with just one that will be done and we'll have to pause to find someone else. So, for our purposes here, we are just kicking to his chest today.

Now, as I face my opponent, you will see that again I am in my guard; so my weight is distributed a little more on that front leg. We are both on the balls of our feet and we have our guards out. Now, I am going to do, what's called footwork and I am moving again to a kind of entice my opponent or throw him off of this game, getting his head. So, I don't want to just throw kicks like a robot, but I am going to set them up and I am going to trap them. So my feet are moving so faster, he really doesn't know what's coming next and so again sparring is a kind of in and out kind of dance, so that my opponent and I are trying to figure out where we can trap each other and land the better kicks. He can also attack and come forward, but who get a back kick, which again is a defensive kick. As I offset that that sets up a whole slew of a kick. That's our sparring section for this segment and that concludes Olympic Taekwondo here at Somafit. Thanks very much.