I Want to Fight Bad Guys!

Hold on there superman! What do you mean you "want to fight bad guys"? If you want help with that you're going to have to elaborate.

Let me back up. Recently I got a new student who wanted to learn taekwondo so he could become a superhero. After that class I started thinking about it. What did he mean when he told me he wanted to learn how to fight bad guys? My mind went so many ways. Did he mean he wanted to learn self-defense? Did he want to learn choreography? Or did he actually believe that he wanted to become a superhero?

To be completely fair, this new student is a smaller child, and therefore not necessarily set on their career path. Though props to this kid for his ambition!

After giving it rather a lot of thought, I decided to write out a post detailing how one might go about learning taekwondo to "fight bad guys." There are two main ways that I believe people can interpret this phrase. In the case of this small child, it might be interpreted as they want to learn how to do the tricks they see in superhero movies. Fair enough. Those are pretty cool, and fun to learn! The next one is self defense. Certainly a good skill to have in my opinion. Thankfully taekwondo, particularly a really well educated instructor, can teach you both skills!

Fighting Bad Guys on TV

We see a lot of fight scenes. Particularly with the comic book superhero movies and TV shows that are on streaming services now.. I'll be honest, watching these is a guilty pleasure of mine. Yes, they are often horribly unrealistic, but so good.

A good Taekwondo education can help one learn how to do fight scenes like these! Yes, really. In fact, a friend of mine ended up working as a choreographer and stunt double for fight scenes when she was in college. Choreography was a skill we learned as part of our demonstration team training. See, we know people like these, so we would happily do shows in public where we would choreograph fight scenes. Some of our best had dialogue in them. We would often drag these out and put in as many stunts and cool techniques (such as tornado kicks, jumping kicks, quintuple kicks, etc.) that we could realistically get away with. Would these skills work in reality? No. Would these skills work on the stage? Absolutely (we actually had a bit of a fan base at one point)!

Fighting Bad Guys in an Alleyway

This should be blatantly obvious; you shouldn't fight someone unless you absolutely have to. Even then, you should avoid hurting someone.

That said, it is still a good skill to know how to defend yourself. A good taekwondo instructor knows this, and knows at least a few different ways of how to handle certain situations. As a student, my instructor had us learn self defense drills where we learned how to defend ourselves against kicks, punches, and knives (among other tools and techniques). Our instructor was quite proud of himself when he found out that one of his students used one of the drills in real life and it worked for her!

Typically for us, these drills were not complicated. They were extremely simple and focused on a series of very specific circumstances. The reason is because, unlike the movies, self defense circumstances are meant to be fast and efficient. Not long and elaborate. Sure, tornado kicks are super cool, but they're not always the fastest are they? The truth is, when it comes to self defense, the longer it takes, the more likely your opponent could hurt you. You don't want to get hurt, do you?

In summary, fighting bad guys in reality is short. Fighting bad guys on TV is super long, super elaborate, and (in my opinion) super fun to learn. The main difference is that one uses amazing music and is done by movie stars, and the other is extremely less entertaining and typically not done by movie stars.

Which do you think this student meant? Do you have an opinion on it?

Disclaimer: This site is for entertainment purposes only. All martial arts techniques and exercises should be supervised by a trained martial arts instructor in order to prevent injuries and to ensure the proper technique is utilized. The information on these pages and videos is meant only to entertain and not to educate. To properly understand these techniques, you need to learn them from a martial arts instructor who can provide you with an in-depth explanation of the technique, help correct your mistakes, answer your questions and detail how the technique should be utilized. In addition, all martial arts techniques and training should be used safely and responsibly.