Learning martial arts is important for everyone. It helps people to defend themselves from harmful attacks. I have been learning Taekwondo for 6 years and this December 2021, I had my black belt exam. For the same, I had to increase my physical strength and flexibility to learn new kicks and self-defence techniques to attain a black belt degree. My training went for a month, from Nov 19th to Dec 19th and throughout that month I learned a lot of new techniques.

In this month I learned a lot of new things and identified my strengths and weaknesses. I found out that I am good at agility and self-defence but I lack stamina and flexibility. After that, I focused on my kicks to increase my flexibility. Then I increased my stamina by running 40 rounds of academy each day and doing 3 sets of 15 pushups with 4 sets of 15 sit-ups. With this, I focused on my weaknesses and made them my strengths.

The challenges I faced in this experience was that some kicks were difficult to learn, like the 360 roundhouse and the spinning kicks. I was never taught these kicks before and I had to learn them within one month. It proved to be quite difficult and through intense training, I was able to overcome these challenges.

I am not an organized person and for this training, I had to make a lot of changes in my schedule. We had 2 hours of training 6 days a week for a month, which amounted to an approx. of 52 hours of total training time. I come from school at 4:20 PM and I had my training at 5 PM. Because of the short time interval, it became pretty hard to organize my routine and for that, I had to take leave from my other extra classes. This is how this experience was hard and organization wasn’t easy.

Taking a single day for rest was not advisable, this is because every day we learnt something new. This activity required me to be consistent with my training and show commitment to it. It isn’t easy for me to be committed to something and that made this experience difficult to manage.

After learning Taekwondo, I was told not to use it for hurting people and this is how ethics comes into picture. With this I understood that hurting others with your strength comes with consequences and that it can be dangerous, that’s why through this experience I learnt the ethics and consequences of our actions on others and ourselves.

A video from my final exam in which I am breaking a wooden slab using a back kick.