Taekwondo

Taekwondo (Hangul: 태권도; Hanja: 跆拳道) is a real-life martial art that appears in the Street Fighter series, developed in Korea in the late 1940s. In Korean, tae (태, 跆) means "to stomp" or "to strike or break with the foot"; kwon (권, 拳) means "to strike or break with the fist"; and do (도, 道) means "way of life". Thus, Taekwondo may be loosely translated as "the way of the foot and the hand." The name Taekwondo is also written as Taekwon-do, Tae Kwon-do, or Tae Kwon Do by various organizations.

Description
Taekwondo combines combat and self-defense techniques with sport and sparring. It is characterized by its emphasis on speed and agility, with head-height kicks, jumping and spinning kicks, and fast kicking techniques. To facilitate fast turning kicks, Taekwondo generally adopts stances that are narrower and hence less-stable that the broader, wide stances used by martial arts such as Karate.

Characteristic of Taekwondo, all kicks can be executed as jump kicks, spin kicks, jump spin kicks or multi-rotational spin kicks, and also can be performed by both the front or rear leg in a given stance. Hand strikes are performed as a close distance in a number of ways: from standing, jumping, spinning and rushing forwards. Various surfaces of the hand may be engaged as the striking surface depending on which area of the opponents body which is being targeted.

Known practitioners

 * Juri