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Comment by terryjsmith | Hacker News Reader

I would like to get my black belt in Taekwondo by the age of 30 (turning 23 in August) and fight at a Canadian national or Ontario provincial competition. I am currently a yellow belt (started about a year ago) but have won a gold and a silver at two recent invitational competitions.

I had an excellent teacher in Thunder Bay, but just moved to Toronto a month ago to be in a more tech savvy town (I'm a developer) and am having difficulty finding a dojang that I like and that gives attention to nurturing their lower color belts.

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If you are getting into competitive martial arts, I highly recommend that you read The Art of Learning (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Learning-Journey-Optimal-Performan...).

I just read that last week.. great book! The end is absolutely riveting.

I've considered joining Taekwondo for some time but worry that the lower belts will be to caught up in teaching very basic moves and the traditional aspects of the sport.

I understand the need to learn the basics just wondering if you found this time a drag at all or it was all interesting and I'd have nothing to worry about?

It's definitely not a drag! If you're anything like I was when I started, it will take a lot of work to get the basic moves right. There are reasons for how each technique is performed, so it's important to understand them. Your form noticeably improves the more you practice. Martial arts are one of those things that you naturally improve at the longer you do it.

Plus most classes will mix up the basics with other stuff like forms and different kinds of sparring, so you won't spend the whole time doing repetitive exercises.

It's really important to have a great teacher and find a decent school. Find a school that divides it's classes into beginners and not and then go watch a beginner class. The basic moves are important and actually quite fun (front snap, sidekicks, etc.) and really hone your core, leg and hip muscles that you'll be using as you learn more advanced techniques and it should always be a challenge. Once you get to the yellow stripe/yellow belt level you learn your roundhouse/turning kick and back kick which are the biggest staples in competition and by far the most used techniques at all level of sparring.

I also recommend finding a school that does multiple form of martial arts. Not only can you attend a variety of classes, a lot of masters will incorporate aspects of the other martial arts into each other for a more rounded course. Right off the bat we learned basic technique, self defence moves, patterns and traditional movements such as one step sparring.

If you show an interest and find a good school, there's absolutely nothing to be worried about on the boredom front.

To be honest, in martial arts, the basics is really all there is. You don't tell a novice from an expert by which katas they know, or even their belt.

You tell them apart by their attitude toward training (patient, calm, focused) and their mastery of the basics (accurate targeting, completely relaxed body, powerful delivery).

One thing I've enjoyed in martial arts training is that taste grows faster than ability - which means that subjectively you get worse the more you practice. To compensate, training teaches you to be more patient with yourself - when we screw something up, we just do it again, there's no need to say anything or get annoyed.

Attitude is the biggest thing to focus on in the early grades (the technical stuff can only be learnt by repetition, so it's not that hard - just repeat). I don't think it's a drag at all.

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