For many societies the new year is a time of rebirth or new beginnings but in the late Joseon period it was often a period spent in combat either with the evil spirits or those who had wronged you the previous year. Combat was everywhere including the sky and involved not just men but children as well.
“Small boys were encouraged to take part in battles of their own believing that it would make them strong, brave and fearless. Mothers brought their young sons, some as young as eight, and divided them into two teams of equal numbers, usually neighborhood against neighborhood. The fights lasted for hours and only ended after one side forced the other from the field. Like the adults’ battle there were injuries: broken bones and noses, shattered teeth, and badly bruised bodies. The victors were cheered by the crowds of onlookers, given presents by their parents and treated as heroes by their peers, while the vanquished made their way home and licked their wounds in humiliation.”
You can read the rest of the article here.
To the old timers – apologies for recycling but thought some of the newer readers might find it of interest.
{ 34 comments… read them below or add one }
Very interesting, thank you.
Wonder if these great high-school battles you see in Korean movies take inspirations from those times
Screw you Mao — and I suggest you had better consider this glorious warrior history of ours before messing with a korean face to face. Unless, of course, following the practice of this one real tough guy here on MH, you pump iron daily under a training regimen specifically designed to make you look twice as big as the average korean.
I always thought it explained Korea’s great success with pitchers
thanks for the article robert neff. I remember reading about the fighting tradition in the peruvian andes and thought it was very strange. Didn’t know Korea had it’s own tradition. Keeps things in perspective for me.
Yes Mao, you may want to reconsider before messing with the current crop of Korean warriors, as they just may gore you with a sheep hat or claw you with their fluffy mittens.
that was too much even for a Hallyu junkie like me (my girlfriend is trying to convince me i actually do not look like Lee Jun Ki at all and it’s not a bad thing)
We really don’t have one. I blame the Joseon Dynasty.
Wangkon, Choi Hong Man might be the exception
Puah!
Not when you lose to a guy three feet shorter…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKAFcp0F0PU
I heard Manny Pacquiao is a closet Korean…
What the…Choi was obviously paid off by those dirtbags
I recall reading about these stone battles in one of James Gale’s books on his experiences as a missionary in Korea, but I hadn’t realized that these were annual events enacted to welcome the new year . . . or, rather, to say good riddance to the old one.
Jeffery Hodges
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i dealt with quite a few kickboxing and MMA promotions for business…the cleanest one has lice (Italian say), no more real than pro-wrestling but hella more fun.
I had seen the same picture from the Harvard collection and when I asked Koreans about new year’s rock battles or saving hair to burn out in front of homes, no one had any idea about such.
Playing detective to how people thought and felt during these times is always very intriguing to me and is a worthy topic for anyone to write about.
I just remember my childhood back in Korea, I was engaged in this new year fight with neighboring kids at street of Seoul downtown. Didn’t realized this was tradition.
Koreansentry, what year was that stone fight?
Jeffery Hodges
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around 1920. i’d never heard of this tradition (which was last outlawed by the japanese and never came back) and i am sure most koreans nowadays have not even heard of it either.
koreansentry is either around 100 years old, or he just grew up rough..
I was “twice as big” as the average Korean [5x if you want to get down to particulars
] before I started working out. And you flatter yourself/Koreans if you think my working out has anything to do with looking anything vis-a-vis Koreans. And no one who knows what they’re doing slings iron “daily”.
Better watch out WK, Pawi and JW will be gunning for you with their tongues next.
Really? I used to do it daily, just different muscle groups — Monday, chest; Tuesday, back; Wednesday, shoulders; Thursday, bi/tri; Friday, legs.
God, I really need to work out again. Need to drop about 15 pounds and generally need less fat/more muscles before the wedding….
I’ve done rotating muscle groups like that. Actually, it’s mostly what I do now. But the best lifting, the real, kick-your-ass stuff, is compound lifting. Olympic-style lifts, dead lifts, squats, multi-phase exercises: this is not stuff you can do every day. Not if you’re doing it right (and if you’re doing it wrong, I hope you have a good chiropractor). I like to throw in a couple of weeks of compound lifts every so often to change things up, but it’s hard to find a partner in my area who knows what he’s doing. And with this kind of lifting, you don’t want to wing it.
but you’ve all seen this , right?
with muscles if you don’t exercise it’s too easy to let go into a 복어. maybe he dined in hell too much.
‘I was “twice as big” as the average Korean [5x if you want to get down to particulars ]….’
i suppose we’ll be seeing this ’5x’ sometime in the future on your blog. just aim lower. your pictures were disgusting. act your age.
as for me, in my early 50s and body still tight. also got a deep voice. you know what that means
..
You don’t have to remind me. I was a beautiful 175 lbs mound of muscle during my heyday in law school. Now I am a 195 lbs fat ass 아저씨 with a gut that rivals a belly of a seven-month pregnant woman. (I’m serious. My friend’s wife is pregnant, and we compared bellies.) This needs to change.
until you tie the knot you’re not a 아저씨, just a 늙은 오빠 (why does that sound like a room salon 아가씨 talk)
usually men blow up *after* they get married so if you’re already a pregnant woman then, it might be a serious problem.
it happened to my brother. he was a nicely toned 180cm and it used to be a pleasure buying him clothes. now his wife’s nickname for him is “gym ball” for obvious reasons.
Well, if I’m reading you right, you did lay off on the weekends, and you basically wasted two days on small stuff like shoulders and bis/tris (which are better hit at the end of the days on which you work the major muscle groups with the compound exercises that also involve the smaller one. e.g., tris after chest; bis after back.
Anyway, recovery time is critical to making and, especially, keeping any muscle gains, avoiding injury and maintaining your sanity. 5 days on 2 days off is workable if you’re doing the sort of splits you outline AND aren’t pushing the edge of the weight and volume envelopes.
If you ramp up the intensity to the limits of your ability and/or do the same or anywhere within 80% of the same with the big compound exercises [squats, deads, Olympic Clean & Press, snatch], you need to take off every other day off — unless you want to get on the juice and not do anything else every day except train and rest. I tried doing otherwise for awhile about a year in and ended up over-training to the point of physical exhaustion that put me in bed for a week; luckily I didn’t otherwise hurt myself. The only upside was that I got down to ~9% body fat – which is very lean, especially for someone who doesn’t juice and weighed 225 at the time; but the trade-off was that a lot of the muscle I had spent a year and a half putting on also evaporated (although I was still light years ahead of where I began and hard and cut).
If you want to lose fat in the short run, it’s all about diet and intervals. Diet is, imo, very individual – I generally don’t eat any grains, e.g., really nothing but meat, milk, non-white vegetables and a little fruit – so I won’t say anything on that score (other than that you probably know what you have to do). Intervals can be of the aerobic variety but you need to follow something like one of Lyle McDonald’s Body Recomposition protocols. If you’ve got the guts for it, and know how to do them correctly, you also can go with the compound exercises at light weights using the Tabata protocol, as that also will at least tone up the muscle at the same time. You could lose 15 pounds in a month with the right attitude and the right program.
You’re an uncut tranny? My, my!
I love how seriously everyone takes the comments here. I haven’t seen anywhere else on the Internet where people were so easily drawn into the most ludicrous flamewars.
You know what else, yuna, I can’t use the word 착하다 without getting images in my head of Gravia pics that they have on Chosun.com all the time. I mean, I don’t care about things like 꿀벅지, but messing with a common good word like 착하다 I don’t really agree with, though I do agree with the images very much.
Yuna @ 23. Hadn’t seen that picture of Butler, but what do you expect – he’s just an actor. It does go to show you what a well-designed exercise program can produce though; I think the trainers who worked with the cast for The 300 only had about 6 months to whip Butler et al into shape.
This, on the other hand, is really disappointing:
Arnold Before and Now – (click and scroll down)
http://kroppsbygging.wordpress.com/page/2/
I’m with Sperwer: it’s all about diet. The working out part is fun: fills you with adrenaline and endorphins, lets you feel like you’re accomplishing something. Trading pizza, chips and beer for boiled chicken breasts, spinach and water is considerably less rewarding in the immediate sense, but it matters a lot more in the long run. Abs are made in the kitchen, not the gym.
Granfalloon:
It’s true that you have to avoid a lot of junk to which we sadly have become habituated (addicted?), but the alternative doesn’t have to be just boiled chicken – at least unless you’re aiming to put on the posing trunks, in which case you don’t even get to eat that – it’s just tuna, tuna, tuna.
I actually have a very savory diet; I just have to work at it, do most of my own cooking and can’t eat out much (shouldn’t at all, but gotta have a cheat day once a month or so – although nowadays most restaurant food – even the best – makes me quesy, because it’s so rich and calorie-laden.
It is fun, but let’s be honest: pulling 100kg off the floor into a full clean, descending into a squat and rising to a full overhead press is also an acquired taste. One reason it gets your adrenaline up is because of the fear factor. And that’s a pissante weight compared to what the big boys (and girls, e.g., Jang Mi-Ran) pull and push.
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