Yesterday, we were honoured by an informal visit from Grand Master Choi Jung Hwa, Grand Master Han, Master Michael Muleta and Mr Spiridon Cariotis to our new lab to talk about our martial arts research program. So far, we have published a paper on the impact of marketing a martial art as a sport, and we have considered the curriculum of taekwon-do in terms of its structured development of 4D spatiotemporal awareness (3 dimensions of space, plus a fourth dimension of time) and its role in the development of expert skilled performance. We discussed the potential of using our Qualisys motion capture system to capture kinematic information for use in research and in training.

While one primary focus of interest is with respect to the force and velocity generated by different techniques and different ways of moving, we also discussed research on decision-making and “reading the play” in sparring and self-defence scenarios, including in terms of judging and refereeing tournaments, and in the context of evaluating threats and interpreting aggressive intent.