Third pattern (Sam Jang) is complete!

Just put the finishing touches to Sam Jang. This one is the "final" word on how they are all going to look. The main image no longer than 4 lines, so it should all fit height wise on most screens (at least 1024x768 and up). Will probably start on Pal Jang next as my stats tell me this is the next most popular one people search for. On the off chance someone other than me is reading this, check it out - the link is right above you in the "Taegeuk" menu.

Self Defense for Women - One Day Seminar

This course is designed for mums, daughters, sisters, aunts, nans, friends
and girl friends. You do NOT have to be fit and active to take part or have
any knowledge of self defense.

During the seminar we will cover basic principals of avoiding dangerous
situations and how to best use the abilities you already have to defend
yourself, perhaps with a few new skills and tricks.

Saturday 16th
June 2007

Time:
11am to 2pm

Venue:
Madeira Hall
Canons Leisure Centre
Madeira Road, Mitcham
CR4 4HD
(Free parking available)

Price:
£20 per person (Pay on day, advance booking required)

Age:
13 years to 113 years.



What do I have to bring with me?
Wear comfortable clothing that allows you to move freely.

I'm not young and fit. Can I still join in?
Yes! This course will be tailored to suit all ages and abilities.

Who will be running the Seminar?
The course will be led by both male and female qualified self defense instructors. Course leaders Mr Dean Gibbs and Miss Katerina Gross.


For more information or to reserve a place contact:

Cathy Gibbs on 020 8642 5136 or 07740 09964

E-mail gibbs@bluedragon.fsworld.co.uk

Course hosted by Chung Yong
Schools of Martial Arts & Self Defense

Slight change tonight

Unfortunately, as I work on the third pattern, a useability problem came to light. The whole purpose of the patterns pages is to enable the visitor to see the entire pattern at one, yet be able to hover over each move and get a blown up picture with a description of the move in English and in Phonetic Korean. The third pattern (Sam Jang) has so many moves, this isn't possible. The main pattern image will disappear off the bottom of the visitors screen, ruining the entire concept.
I mulled over a couple of possible ways to sort this out, but the only viable option was to stretch the size of the page widthways. The site effectively won't work that well now for visitors with an 800x600 screen resolution and is now really for those using 1024x768 or higher. The stats aren't all that high yet (not really a surprise as there is still a lot of the site unfinished!) but they do tell me 800x600 resolutions are becoming rare. Apologies if you are at that resolution - horizontal scrolling will come into play.

Flexibility in Taekwondo

Time to admit something. The thing I enjoy the most about Taekwondo is the flexibility exercises. I'm lucky in this, being naturally flexible. Most people don't have such luck, and flexibility can be a major sticking point. To execute a side kick (dwi chagi) effectively at waist height or above, you need to have reasonably flexible hips. Side kick is probably one of the most effective techniques Taekwondo teaches - do it right and your opponent/attacker will go down and not get back up (at least not in a hurry) and it's based on flexibility at the hip.
If you're not taking cod liver oil yet, start now. It's great for maintaining joint flexibility, and strength in your bones.
Stretching exercises shouldn't hurt, but you should feel a slight pull. If you don't push slightly beyond your current limits, you won't improve. To understand what is going on from a biological point of view when you stretch:
Voluntary muscles are elongated fleshy sacs. As a result of nervous stimulation, they contract and produce movement Their force is transmitted through inelastic strips of specialized connective tissue (tendons). The ligaments support the joints and are made up of a more flexible form of connective tissue. The tension condition of the muscles & tendons is monitered by proprioceptors, which are highly specialised structures found in both muscles and tendons. They are comprised of a great many nerve endings ( hence the feeling of pain when stretching beyond their current physical limits).
The important thing to be aware of is that your tendons, right now, have a natural limit on how far they can be stretched or extended. This is based on your current lifestyle, and genetic characteristics. You can't change your genetic makeup, but you CAN alter your lifestyle, and most importantly, the amount of effort you put into your stretching. If you really want to improve flexibility:
1) Stretch EVERY DAY. Initially, touching your toes every morning if that's all you have time for, but do more when you can and get into a regime where you perform 3-4 different streches every day.
2) Push a LITTLE each time you stretch. Pushing it to far can result in temporary, or even permanent damage. The nerves in your proprioceptors will let you know when you are going slightly beyond your current limit, and will scream at you when you go too far. Listen to what they are telling you!
3) Perform some stretches after any physical activity. I do quite a few stretches at the end of a Taekwondo lesson. It's a great time to do it as your muscles are very warm, and succeptable to that extra stretch.

Missed training

Due to various factors I missed training tonight. I hate it when that happens and at my age missing lessons tends to mean more of a shock to the system when I finally get to go. I'm going to make a big effort to start making two lessons a week the absolute minimum, and ideally get to four a week where possible.
I'll use the time to do some more work on the site, but it's just not the same :(

Sweaty, very sweaty

Looks like summer is getting close here in the UK. Tonights lesson was hot, sticky yet as always enjoyable.
Mr Gibbs brought in the big impact pads tonight so we got to put some work in on our side & back kicks. I don't know why, but for me back kick (that's "dwi chagi" in Korean) is by far my worst kick. I'd like to think I understand the "mechanics" of how the kick is done. My legs just don't seem to want to co-operate. Doing 10 in a row makes me dizzy so the last three are usually somewhat comical.
Hopefully with my wife returning to work shortly I'm going to have more time to train so I can up my game. Hoping to get to three lessons a week on a regular basis. Did I mention Taekwondo is addictive?

Image loading

Solved a slight issue with the design of the pattern pages. Because the image of the entire pattern is a background image, loaded via CSS it was loading AFTER all the rollover images. As a result, the odds are people on slower connections gave up as the main image was taking too long to appear, so the page looked rubbish.
The answer turned out to be simpler than I thought. Obviously, the main image needed to be loaded via HTML before the rollover images start to load. Because the rollovers load in the order in which the user is likely to be looking at them, even if they have not all yet loaded, the page is effectively "operational" because the first rollovers have loaded by the time the visitor hovers over them.
I added a new element to the CSS:

#preload {
display:block;
position:absolute;
margin:0px 0 0px 0px;
overflow:hidden;
}

And then used that to load the image before all the others by placing this DIV at the top of the containing element code:

div id="preload"
img src="il-jang/Taegeuk-Il-Jang.jpg" alt="Taegeuk Il Jang"/
/div

(Please forgive the omission of the opening & closing brackets - blogger wants to display output, rather than raw code!)

Of course, this means the main image is called twice, once through the HTML, then lastly through CSS, but because it's the same image, any half decent browser will make the second call from it's own browser cache so it works virtually instantaneously.

Incidently, anyone viewing the pattern pages and not able to see the entire pattern on screen should try one of my favourite browser shortcuts (it works in IE and Firefox). Just hit the F11 key and your browser will go full screen, showing you more of the page at once. Hit F11 again to close full screen mode.

Black Belt

The Black Belt (or first Dan) is for the outsider, always seen as the ultimate goal in a martial art. Black belts are invincible fighting machines and live lives similar in style to what we see Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Segal and Chuck Norris doing on the silver screen.
I've trained in Taekwondo for something like seven or eight years and don't own a Black Belt as of yet. To an outsider, and possibly to a lot of people inside the martial arts world, this could be read as a sign of failure. However, I don't personally hold any particular relevance in the colour of my belt, and I am going to try to explain why.
Many years ago, when I first started training, there was a guy at the club at first Kup grade (Red Belt with Black tags - one grading away from his Black Belt). He continually asked when he would be allowed to grade for first Dan. Make no mistake, this guy was an able fighter with competition wins by the dozen. He was precise and realistic in his patterns. He could break anything he was asked to, with any body weapon. Yet the instructor would not grant him the grading he so obviously craved. At one particular training session where he was asking over and over when will I get to take the grading for first Dan, the instructor gave a reply I have never, and will never forget.
He told him, "If you want a Black Belt so badly, go out and buy one. You can wear it in the lessons if you like. No-one will mind."
He didn't do that of course. What value is there in something that can be bought so easily?
Now, there is a lot of feeling around the world that martial arts schools are simply run for profit. That Belts are just something you get because you paid the money to take your grading. I'm proud to be at a club that has a Master with integrity and a respect for what the first Dan grade means, and when you are ready to grade for it.
If I ever to Dan grade, I'll certainly know it's something I have earned, as opposed to something I bought.
My children often ask if they can grade, and encourage me to ask the instructors that question. It's not easy to explain to them sometimes, but it's a part of any serious Taekwondo students lifestyle to excerise modesty. This means you NEVER ask your instructor whether you are ready to grade. You wait patiently for them to tell you the time is right.
Just as a footnote, and despite the fact they are listed on the front page of my site, I think this would be a good place to list the five tenets of Taekwondo:

1. Etiquette
2. Modesty
3. Perseverance
4. Self Control
5. Indomitable Spirit

Spam

OK, this isn't strictly speaking a Taekwondo topic. Ever do a Google search and end up looking at a page that doesn't help you at all and is just there to show you a bunch of ads? Since redesigning the site, traffic has dropped right off, and it seems to be falling lower and lower for the keyword "taekwondo" in the Google results pages. It did get as high as page two, but the redesign has obviously had an affect as I'm now hovering at about page 6. Nothing to worry about - I fully expected a drop in SERPS as a direct result of completely remaking the site; things WILL improve when I finish getting the site put together and then work on a few more important backlinks. I also made the mistake of getting too many backlinks too fast when first putting the site online (sounds mad, but that's how it is - Google punishes "obvious" attempts to get high positions in it's index for competitive keywords).

What's bugging me is two of the sites that Google returns on page one for a search of the keyword "taekwondo". The taekwondo.com isn't a website at all - it's just ads and no content whatsoever. A real shame that the domain is in the hands of a spammer when someone could make good use of it. The taekwondo.net site also lands on page one. At first glance, it looks to be a fairly relevant result. An online community for Taekwondo practitioners. Looking at it with a critical eye though, this looks like a commercial venture, rather than a legitimate attempt to provide a useful service to worldwide Taekwondo practitioners. There is nothing on the site to let you know who is actually running it, and what affiliation they have with Taekwondo. My guess is that there isn't any. The WHOIS info for the domain is hidden - I wonder why. The site itself encourages people to basically populate the site with Taekwondo relevant information, which in turn will presumably strengthen it's page one position on Google, keep the hits and (more importantly of course) the AD revenue Dollars rolling in. A close inspection of taekwondo.net revealed it doesn't allow you to backlink to you own website/blog either on their forums, or even in your profile page. An important consideration as basically they will only get links in, and never link out. From a Google perspective, this adds weight to the value and relevance of the site. Wikipedia basically works that way (although I am NOT saying Wikipedia is an irrelevant result for any search engine to show on a topic).

While I'm on the "internet" thing...this Blog page is a pain. I can get every other page of my site to validate on the w3 validator except the blog. Blogger be damned, sort out your code!