Whatever martial arts you do, a rigorous work on suppleness is essential to acquire ease in your movements and prevent injuries. In taekwondo, being supple in the hips and in the legs is a decisive asset, even more so since the points gained by hitting the head have been increased. Continue reading →
2012 has been a fantastic year for taekwondo, marked by a successful competition in the London Olympic Games. In 2013, Taekwondo fans will also be able to witness great fights. Here is the list of the events that you must put in your calendar, right now: Continue reading →
World number 1 in the -68kg class (WTF ranking), Servet Tazegül has been reigning supreme in his weight category for the last two years. See for yourself: 2011 World Champion in Gyeongju, then 2012 European Champion in Manchester, he landed the Olympic gold medal in London last summer. Here are some pictures of this great champion. Continue reading →
I stumbled upon a very interesting question on Quora, which is: In a sentence, how do you define martial arts? Answers range from very cliché, to pretty well-argued. The most popular definition so far is the following:
“A martial art is a system of personal combat with a distinct syllabus of techniques, fighting strategies, and physical training methods, designed to enable a practitioner to physically overcome larger, stronger, heavier opponents and meant to be practiced over the course of a lifetime.”
As I concluded in my previous post, free fighting games on the Android platform are scarce and their quality ranges from decent to awful. One alternative solution is to use emulators in order to have access to the numerous fighting games available on the other platforms.
There are Android emulators for virtually any game console ever released on earth, yet not all of them are stable and easy to use. I chose to present the Neo Geo case, an arcade console of the last century, host of many legendary fighting games. Continue reading →
In case you were wondering, no, KO Podium hasn’t been abandoned! The beginning of 2013 was quite eventful for me, so I just couldn’t write much. This year, the focus on this blog will be the same: general articles about martial arts, some movie reviews, some interviews, one or two infographics, and most importantly, a fine analysis of the results of the main taekwondo events!
I also intend to add a new martial art in the trend monitoring tool in the next few months. By the way, thanks to all the readers who sent me their suggestions or identified some bugs. I will do the modifications as soon as possible.
Like many martial artists, I have always been a fighting game enthusiast. Game consoles, arcade machines, computers—combining all the platforms, I must have spent hundreds of hours on them.
Today, the device I use most is my Android smartphone, and I finally decided to look for a nice fighting game for when I wait in the subway or at the dentist. After all, there are hundreds of thousands of Android applications, so there should be one or two decent, free fighting games, right? Continue reading →
Former Karate World Champion and 9th dan, Dominique Valéra is an important figure of martial arts in France. Die hard Full Contact Karate evangelist, he gave to the blog Au tapis! an authentic and striking interview, especially for those who don’t know about him yet.
Extract: “Sports and martial arts in particular, allowed me to stay on the Sports page of newspapers, instead of ending up on the violence-related section.” Continue reading →
Combining the two notions seems obvious. When we talk about martial arts, the image of a zen master, sitting cross-legged and meditating in front of the rising sun isn’t far off. The history of martial arts has its share of legendary heroes and fabulous myths, yet there is one fundamental truth: doing martial arts helps one to become a better person. Here is a review of some of the positive effects practicing a martial art has on our personal well-being. Continue reading →
These past months, the ergonomic updates on the website have been focused on the competitions and nation overview pages. However, the first page, where you can choose what event or what national team you want to look up, stayed a bit… well, really out of date.
This has been fixed. The home page now shows:
thumbnails linking to the last two competitions;
a clearer and more concise list of all competitions available;
a selection of the most watched nations, in addition to the drop-down complete list.
