Different Arts offer different benefits. Chinese footwork, Korean kicks, Japanese & Western hand techniques, brazilian groundfighting, Jun Fan trapping, grappling, and entering techniques. When you feed your body, do you eat one food? No, you get a blanaced diet of varied things. Martial Arts is the same way. Over specialize in one area and you breed in weakness. Balance in training gives you balance in defence.

Lets try this Analogy ...

Your writing an essay in high school. It's about, Hell I dunno, Calculus. You know calculus like the back of your hand. If someone asked you about a calculus problem, you could show them the proper way to do it in 3 seconds flat. But, nobodys asking you to make a speech, or a presentation about it. You have to *Write* an essay. Sadly ...Your grammar sucks. You don't know where to place punctuation, and your dog spells better then you. Therein lies that all important "GAP".

So, what do you do? Well, you either go to after school tutorials, or stop skipping english. The point being, you take alternate classes to fill that gap.

When whoever invented, or discovered calculus did so, he didn't think to himself "Man, I better add a How To on Essay Writing." Because it has nothing to do with Calculus. Same goes for TKD, or whathaveyou ...They didn't think to add a bunch of ground-fighting techniques in there, for probably various reasons. Maybe the japanese of chinese didn't do much ground fighting? Wars generally aren't fought with thousands of people on top of each other, doing choke-holds and arm-bars.

Nor is there anything wrong with being well-rounded ...with anything! whether it be Martial Arts, Academics, whatever. For some people its merely the pursuit of expanding ones horizons.

There are gaps ..But that doesn't make something incomplete. It only makes it incomplete depending on what you choose to incorporate it in (i.e. UFC where ground-fighting is commonplace).

uuuuuuuuh .... I lost my train of thought.

-Ket

[This message has been edited by Ket (edited 01-19-2005).]