I counted 30 juniors and 29 seniors at the WA State Squad Taekwondo Training today at ATI Malaga. Seniors being the ones who are allowed head kick (14yrs and up).

I'm not sure how the seniors trained today, I was looking at the juniors pretty much the whole time.

One thing I'd really like to emphasize is – tournament sparring is all about winning!!! How do you win??? By scoring more points than your opponent. By scoring 12 points before your opponent. By being 7 points ahead of your opponent. By not getting disqualified.

It doesn't matter how good, fancy or professional you look. You don't get points for doing more complicated maneouvres or looking "pretty". You need to score points!!! Judges score those points!!! You need to make it so blatantly obvious to ALL FOUR corner judges.

If you can't manage to practise scoring points with full sparring gear on in training – with say 50% effort/power. How do you expect to score points when you're in the ring for real??? You need to manage and be aware of when you're giving 100% effort or just 50%. Know that when you gave that 50% effort and it was almost a point, all you need to do is give that extra bit more next time to get a score on the board.

We go to state training for practise. We go, to go up against other people. Everyone else there is expecting the same thing. They KNOW they're going to get hit when they're there. SO HIT THEM!!! You youself need to be conditioned to take some of those hits too!!! SO TAKE THEM!!!

Having said that, we're also not there to kill each other – to get each other injured. So at the same time, we need to display caution and control. Enough to score that point, yet not enough to injure them beyond the point of competing/continuing.

Play friendly. Play smart!!!

I counted 49 students for sparring practise and 7 for poomsae this Sunday that just passed.

I was more focussed on the Junior sparring side on Sunday and I have to reiterate the note above in the first post in this topic. Scroll up to it.

I saw a few players try fancy stuff that just did not work. Then they tried it again, still didn't work. And again, and still didn't work. Then again!!! You'd be surprised to know, it STILL didn't work!

I think in the 1 hour 15 minute session you have with the state squad, try to utilise the time well. You have your own classes that you attend during the week. Use that time to experiment and try out different things. See if they work during that class time. Refine it, even, during class time. Then when you come to state squad training – you can see if it really works against a wide variety of fighters – good and not-so-good. Refine it even more then.

Once you're in the tournament ring, you'll want to use what works! You'll want to win as quick as possible with as least energy expended as possible. There will be other matches to contest. You want to come out of it with minimal injuries also. It's okay to go all out in the final – there's no more after that one!

There's only one more state squad training before the Nationals. Keep your fitness up and build it slightly to peak for the first week of September. See you there!