Taekwondo helps to improve IQ and mental capacity
This is an observation rather than being of any scientific study (at this point in time). There’s also a game at the end of this article to help those of you who are injured and sidelined from physical activity.
As a parent, would you agree that you would want your children to excel to the best that they can be? Do you want your kids to be the smartest in the classroom? Apart from enrolling them into an educational institution (ie. school) there are several other ways to get your children "thinking". One of them being the obvious private tuition. However, did you know that other extra curricular activities such as sports and music can give the brain a workout?
I think that most parents may already be aware of the benefit of playing a musical instrument has. Many kids are enrolled for piano lessons, whether that choice was made by the child is highly doubtful. Yet, for those who pursue and continue to learn and play the piano, the benefits are 
outstanding. Not only do they learn a skill of playing music, their academic ability improves. They generally do better at school! Why is that?
Now, I cannot say there are the same level of benefits (intellectually) for those who play sports. In particular, different sports will provide different benefits. What I am trying to convey is that sports can improve your mental capacity to some point also – maybe not as well as playing that piano though. Some sports can also provide negative impact too, I’m thinking of those that are full contact that have direct physical injuries towards the head. Luckily for us (Taekwondo), in Australia at least, head contact is off-limits for under 14 year olds.
Why do I say this and how have I observed it? Well, I must say that it is not a definitive "Yes, Taekwondo improves your Intelligence Quotient!" I am merely saying it "helps". I have noticed that those who practise Taekwondo martial arts (and are generally good at it) are also generally good at their academic abilities also. Those who also continue to practise Taekwondo continue to improve academically also. I believe, it has something to do with memory.
To progress to a new belt level, there is a new poomsae (or pattern of techniques) to learn. It is a particular sequence of actions that needs to be remembered and executed properly. Similarly, with playing a musical instrument to play a piece of music, you need to be able to read the notes and transfer that across to your fingers, arms, lungs, body posture and whatever else is needed for that particular instrument. To play it seamlessly, memory is also utilised so that there’s no pause when turning pages. Passion and feeling can only be conveyed when the sheet music is memorised also. It’s the same with Taekwondo patterns. When you learn a new poomsae, you generally follow step-by-step (that’s reading the music note-by-note). As you get better, you memorise and perform it yourself without assistance (without the sheet music). This may be the stage where the pattern may look a bit robotic and sometimes with a few pauses while you "think and try to remember the next step". Then after many, many numerous repetitions of that particular pattern, you may start to develop a different tempo to personalise it a bit. It’s this memorisation that helps with improving your IQ and mental capacity.
I’ve recently had a friend throw a rubik’s cube at me. This fad/craze seems to come and go, a bit like the yo-yo. Having the mixed up coloured squares in front of me, I tried numerous turns, twists and rotations to get the colours lined up. Unfortunately, I did not complete it. However, in observing how my friend solved it – I noticed something (I thought was) quite unusual. There were times when my friend did not even look at the cube and just started twisting things all over the place. Why? Because there was a particular sequence of rotations (they call it an algorithm) to get from Point A to Point B. I found out that it wasn’t just the one sequence, there were several different "patterns" to memorise. Each pattern to be utilised at different times depending on the colour/square formation. Now, I’m not sure about you – though I am thoroughly impressed every time that rubik’s cube is solved; and I attribute a lot of that to being "smart". More
Now, those are just "normal" sports. What about our sport? What about all the combat sports out there? I can’t say that we definitely repeatedly get hit in the head, but I’m pretty sure we aim to do that to the other person! I can name an obvious combat sport that their athletes are in a high risk of getting concussions – and therefore the possible long term effects that the article was writing about; BOXING!
The WTF has proposed a series of changes and amendments to the WTF competition rules. These had been proposed from the session held with the Joint Technical Committee in November and approved by the WTF Executive Council in December.
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