Back to the sources: The relaonship between sparring and forms, a Taekwondo perspecve By Ørjan Nilsen In many Dojang around the world today free sparring is almost if not entirely equal to competition sparring. Typically free sparring in the Dojang today is done to get some excersice and to prepare the student for competition. If you go to a so called «WTF Taekwondo Dojang» you will expect students who free spar to use 99,9% kicks, if they do use hands they will only punch to the body, there will be no grabbing, low kicks or sweeps of any kind. If you go to a so called «ITF Taekwon-Do Dojang» you will see more punching, and a greater variety of techniques, but it will still be kick heavy, and have most of the same constraints as in a WTF Taekwondo Dojang (no low kicks etc). Typically the free sparring done has no apparant overlap between what is drilled in basics, forms or self defense. In this article I want to look closer on what the «sources» of Taekwondo say about what forms are, as well as the relationship between forms and sparring. Perhaps doing competition sparring for free sparring is not the way the founders of Taekwondo envisioned the art to be practised? Since modern Taekwondo comes from the same organisation namely the Korean Taekwondo Association no matter what lineage you hail from I will look into sources from the Kwan era, as well as more recent sources from both a Kukki Taekwondo view, and a Chang Hon Taekwon-Do view. Before we start to look at how Taekwondo sources define and view forms and sparring we should establish if there ever was a precedence in Taekwondo in favour of a relationship between sparring and forms. Both Hwang Kee, Choi Hong Hi, Son Duk Sung and others clearly states that there is a relationship between forms and sparring. The degree of direct overlap in this relationship between forms and sparring depends on the author however. Hwang Kee states very clearly that: «DaeRyon (fighting/sparring) is inseperatly connected to Hyung (forms/poomsae)» (Hwang 1958 p 166). We will see that this is a common view when looking at Taekwondo litterature, but we will also look a little deeper on what this relationship is. Let us look at how Poomsae is described in various Taekwondo books. Choi Hong Hi, founder of the Oh Do Kwan and the Internation Taekwon-Do federation describes forms in the following quote: «The «pattern» is thus a set sequence of movement of attack and defence in a logical order. Imaginary opponents are dealt with in sequence logically and systematically under the assumption of various situations.» (Choi 1965 p 173).