Practicing Poomsae: Best Practices🥋

Like anything else, practicing Poomsae involves working on it over, and over, and over again!

This can get quite mundane and it’s easy to lose motivation or focus over time…

Enter: The Best Practice for Practicing Poomsae!

Chunk it out

I’m an educator at heart, so this form of practicing Poomsae is near and dear to me! Take the poomsae and divide it into manageable chunks to practice bit by bit. This will help you track your progress and also keep the motivation up! A good example would be Taeguek 1 Jang. It has 18 motions, so what I like to do is break it up into three parts of 6.

Practice slow

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Slow allows you to put together the chunks and work on setting up each individual motion properly. Slow allows us to make sure our stances, blocks and strikes all line up in the right positions.

Only upper body

So stay in the same spot, practice performing all the upper body motions of the poomsae. In sequence, perform blocks and strikes with full power. Make sure the upper body techniques are crisp!

Only lower body

Perfect not only the length, but also the width of your stances. Practice pivoting properly and setting your hips into the larger front stance (Ap ku bi) 앞굽이 and back stance (dwi ku bi) 뒷굽이.

Practice fast

Will your mind and body keep up to the need.. for speed? In all seriousness, this method of practicing makes sure you really know the poomsae well.

Practice mirrored

This really gets the mind going! Instead of turning right, turn left.. and vice versa. This will activate more parts of the brain than doing the poomsae normally.. which will help get more of the brain involved in your training!🧠

Blindfolded

This is one of my favourites.. Performing the poomsae while blindfolded let’s you feel different parts of your body instead of just relying on sight. Over 80% of our surroundings are taken in by sight alone.. so remove that and we can suddenly feel our toes gripping the ground in front stance.. or we can really feel the kinetic chain as we block and strike.

In your head

Sometimes when we’re dreaming, we’ll jolt awake! This is because in a deep concentration (like a dream) our mind can’t tell whats physically real or not.. this is great for practicing our poomsae. It means if we sit and perform our poomsae in our mind while on the bus or relaxing at home.. anywhere could be our dojang!

In your regular clothes

This is more of a novely, but hey—novelty triggers dopamine.. and dopamine helps with memory retention!

Use training equipment; with a partner

So when we block or strike, we’re hitting actual equipment. This will desensitize us to actually using the individual techniques!

We can also practice different parts of our poomsae in a real or practical way. Striking ‘Bob’ or heavy bags while be struck with equipment by a partner. Anything to make our training actually USEFUL!

Practice each move 100 times (18×100=1,800)

That’s a whole lot of Taekwondo! It’s also a great way to keep track of how much you’ve done. Plus, after 100 low blocks… it’s sure to be much snappier!

Practice the poomsae 100 times!

This one is not for the faint of heart.. Even myself I’ll rarely do this, unless I’m competing at a tournament or learning a new poomsae for the first time.

Whichever way you to choose to practice is great.

Do you know why??

BECAUSE YOU ACTUALLY PRACTICED!

The only way we get better is to actually put in the reps; put in the work.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” — Archilochus

Archilochus

Train hard, and see you on the mats.👊

Check out this video about practicing Poomsae