Intermission - A look at difficulty in forms.

Before moving on to the next forms I wanted to talk a little about difficulty.  Several comments hit on themes I wanted to talk about in a summary I planned to write after I completed the look at the first 9 forms (white to black belt).  I am realizing though, that the various themes I wanted to discuss at the end could be quite lengthy so I will address some of these points ahead of where I will delve into them.

Difficulty in the Chang-hon forms is complicated but somewhat systematic.  I find that when dealing with forms a good starting point is the difference between physical and mental difficulty.  On the physical scale, we look at how hard the form is on the physical body.  Though the number of movements is in play here, the demands of the movements in the given form are much more important.  Yul-gok has considerably more movements in it than Chong-moo, but I think it would be hard to find someone who says that Yul-gok is the harder form.  The systemic repetition of Yul-gok,  and only a few new techniques for the practitioner pales in comparison to the things asked of the practitioner in Choong-moo. 

The other side of the scale is mental difficulty and this side of the scale is affected in my opinion by two main things.  First is the number of unique moves and second is the types of turns a student is going to make.  Unique moves is pretty easy to quantify, namely how much of the form repeats?  If nearly the whole form repeats as it does in Yul-gok then the form tends to be easier to learn.  Forms where there is no sequential repetition are often the harder forms to learn. 

It is not just sequential repetition though, the types of turns you make also determine how mentally challenging a form is.  Forms that have a lot of turning in place are often times harder for students to learn than forms that have direction changing turns.  A good example of this is found by contrasting Ge-baek to Kwang-gae.  These two forms are similar in total movment and similar in placement (in my system anyway).  Students tend to pick up Kwang-gae much faster than Ge-Baek mainly I believe because the turns in place in Ge-baek are just much more mentally demanding than anything in Kwang-gae. 

Of course, there is more to difficulty.  Perspective is going to dictate a lot of what feels difficult for the learner and by this I mean that the combination of a physically and mentally demanding form can make certain forms at certain times seem harder than they are.  I always like to say that Choong-Jang was hard until I learned Yoo-sin, and Yoo-sin was hard until I learned Moon-moo.

Next time I'll continue the Macro series with Yul-gok and Joong-gun, and begin to look at the blue belt plateau.  Thanks for reading!