Bradly Sinden “I’m gonna give everything I got to make sure I get to where I want to be”

Bradly Sinden is the first Great Britain male World Champion. He made it on the last World Taekwondo Championships in Manchester.

Before it, he also won a bronze medal in Muju 2017 World Championships.

Bradly is really mature for his young age and an example of determination. Weeks before to win the gold medal in the World Championships, he was so injured that he couldn’t even kick.

Hearing the interview with him you can learn:


What can children learn from other sports that can help them ih taekwondo?

Why do you have to focus on your performance and not on the results?

What facilities does a world class training center have?

How he and his team managed months of injuries before his participation in the Worlds?

Why should parents not push a lot of pressure on children growing in the sport?

How to fight against taller opponents?


His first steps in taekwondo and multisport past.

He started doing taekwondo at age 4 in his hometown Doncaster. Along with taekwondo he practiced other sports like football and running.

He considers that training other sports improves your overall fitness and learning the basic tactics of other sports can help you as a sparring athlete.

His club instructor and Sarah Stevenson’s instructor were friends. Sometimes he went to trained to her club when she was already a national team member.

When Sarah’s Stevenson won the bronze medal at Beijing 2018 Bradly was just a kid. But he thought that Sarah’s, a person like him, coming from his same small town, could achieve any dream as she put her mind set on it.

Great Britain Taekwondo’s success and the importance of patience for young athletes.

Sarah’s bronze medal at Beijing 2008 was of big help for British taekwondo, because it was their first olympic medal in taekwondo.

The funding and support that came after that olympic medal was one of the keys to the later success of GB Taekwondo program.

Creating a synergy that was increased later with Jade Jones later Gold Medal in London 2012.

When he was 10 and he started in competition and watching the top performers of the sport winning big tournaments like the Olympics made him to decide that taekwondo was what he wanted to do in his future-

At the beginning of his career he usually did well in training but sometimes it didn’t transfer to performance in competition.

He considers patience is very important for every athlete. “The time clock is different for everybody”. So, there is no need to rush.

If you work hard your moment will come.

International take off and how to learn from every experience

He won his first international medal as a cadet in the 2012 Belgium Open. In 2015 he won the European Youth Championships. He considers that tournament a breakthrough moment in his career.

His coach as a youth was Martin Stamper, a former World Bronze medalist who started his career as a coach with the GB Junior team.

In 2016 Martin Stamper started to train the senior team and Bradly had to train a lot and prove that he deserved a place in the GB taekwondo academy.

With less than a year in the academy he achieved a bronze medal in the Worlds of Muju but he still was not happy with it.

He is a perfectionist so it took a while for him to digest the bronze and realize that it was not a negative experience.

He had to learn from the experience and take the positive things.
How to learn from events when you don’t medal?

In events that you don’t win a medal you have to look at how you perform.

Sometimes you don’t win the medal but maybe you fought the best person in that weight class in the first fight, and maybe you had a great fight, and just lost for a few points or certain action.

You don’t have to focus on that you didn’t win the medal.

Bradly analyzes his performance in every tournament with his coach, focusing on what he did well and things that he needs to improve.

Resilience, teamwork, ability to adapt and the World Championships in Manchester

Bradly is usually a mentally strong athlete. In high performance sports, that strength is necessary to overcome difficult moments.

One characteristic of high performance sports is that you demand the best from your body and your mind.

You will train very close to the edge between top performance and injury.

Before 2019 Worlds. Bradly faced months of constant injuries that didn’t allow him to train in an ideal way.

Starting the year he won the Presidents cup but he got injured in his first fight and could not train for a few weeks. After recovery he came back and was injured again.

GB had a big training camp that was an opportunity to train and do test matches with some other top athletes like the french team and Amhad Abugaush. By that time Bradly was injured.

He comments that you can’t miss those opportunities. So his team decided not to train because he was severely injured but to do the test matches.

Another important point is that weeks before the Worlds, he was so injured that he could not even kick.

What can you do when you are facing a World Championship competition of taekwondo and you cannot kick?

Do you just go home, rest and hope for the best?

That’s not an option.

The solution in Bradly words was to smash conditioning.

If you stop training kicks for a small period of time you won’t forget how to kick.

But you need the confidence of knowing that your body will be prepared for the demands of five or six fights that going for the gold medal implies in a World Championships.

His World Championships gold medal proved that the strategy worked.

Even he faced really difficult matches. For example, he stopped the winning streak in the World Championships of Lee Dae Hoon, one of the top performers in the history of taekwondo.

Please enjoy the interview.

You can hear it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Overcast.

Adalis Munoz is 3 time World Champion in Freestyle poomsae. She’s been Female Freestyle MVP in 2014 and 2018 World Championships and Bronze in the Summer World University Games.

The first World Poomsae Taekwondo Championships was celebrated in 2006. But freestyle poomsae had to wait until 2012 to make its first appearance in World Championships.

Probably if we see Poomsae in the Olympics, we’re gonna see it in a Freestyle way.

Because it is the most popular for the audience and is one of the sides of taekwondo growing most.

The competition consists of a “free” routine with certain compulsory elements, some moves, acrobacies, jump kicks and sparring steps.

Is an evolving discipline with a higher level each year. That’s why being a world champion must be a very hard achievement.

To be a three time World Champion must be quite harder.


Adalis is a sport lover. She started playing soccer and karate when she was younger and the moving to taekwondo.

Her first taekwondo class in life was with a Grand Master Myong Sok Namkung Mayes who was a very influential person for her taekwondo life.

She enjoyed so much her first class, that when it was over she didn’t want to get back home.

She loved so much all the kicks that the class was doing that she wanted to go straight to the advanced kicks and drills. That was her first contact with taekwondo.

GM Myong Sok Namking Mayes was a very strict instructor.

Adalis remembers when she was asked to do a technique 100 times as homework and she only did the half thinking her grandmaster wouldn't notice.

For her surprise she noticed it and made her do the 100 techniques plus another 100.

Self funding, self training, and self studying as an opportunity to grow.

For certain new disciplines, is hard to find support from governments and sports federations. So, the career of Adalis has been family funded.

Adalis beginnings in freestyle were not easy and of course not comfortable. She had to train outdoors in her home dojang.

A lesson for all of us. We don’t have to wait until we have the conditions.

We have to create the conditions.

And they also have made important decisions.

One thing that Adalis considers influenced a lot in her results is that she did homeschooling. That let her train the hours she required for high performance.

But that home schooling was not an obstacle for her future studies.

She is about to graduate from college and she says that self training and self studying make her more disciplined to do necessary stuff when she has to do it.

How to manage what you can’t control?

You can plan everything. You can think that you are ready for your competition. But you can’t control everything.

There are always things outside our control.

In her first World Championships Adalis injured her wrist at one of the first practice before the competition.

What would you do then? Start to cry?

She thought of all the people that trusted her. All the people that put that effort for her in the fundraising.

She modified her routine to perform with the injured wrist. And she won the first place. The World Championships.

Back in the US she had her wrist checked by a doctor and realized that it was broken.

To do that you must have certain adaptation capacity. Bravery also, that’s one of the strengths of Adalis that she is not afraid to perform certain acrobacies.
An usual common thing in successful athletes… Family support.

But there is another very important thing. If you are not an athlete with a multidisciplinary team behind you (and sometimes even if you are): Family support.

Like in our interview with Nikita Glasnovic, Adalis sport psychologist is her mom.

Always pushing her in a good way to be brave and to accomplish the goals she dreams of.

For example, for her first National Championships she didn’t want to do freestyle, even when she loved it.

She was afraid because she didn’t know the rules quite well.

Her mom convinced her to participate and she ended as 1st place earning her spot for the World Taekwondo Championships.

With her family, Adalis also teaches taekwondo in their dojang Texas Forge Taekwondo wand she also recently launched a YouTube channel where she teaches and share her World Class Poomsae experience.

I hope you will enjoy and learn from the adventure of Adalis. As you would hear, she is always looking for the next challenge.

Enjoy the interview.

Jan-Eric is a Finnish taekwondo black belt and founder of Kick.ai, a martial arts wearable that allows gathering data from your kicks.

Using Kick.ai you can see the effect your training has on your speed, stamina, and reaction speed.

With the app you can track your kicks and enhance your reaction, speed and stamina.

The software included has different training simulations designed by martial artists with decades of experience.

It is very useful for high performance athletes, but also for practitioners and club owners.

Through the app you can also win digital trophies and compare and share your progress with other Kick.ai users.

Remote coaching reliable information

Kick.ai also have an amazing feature for dojang owners.

With their dashboard you can coach your students remotely, motivate them and keep control of their performance.

Remote coaching is becoming a reality, and gathering data from your students it will surely improve the quality of the training.

With this option for clubs you can connect many Kick.ai devices to a single dojang screen and use it for different training modes.

Where it all began

Jan-Eric started practicing taekwondo in a son-father class.

He was looking for a way of helping his child to gain more self confidence. But soon he was attracted by the speed and flashy kicks of taekwondo.

When he was solo training for his black belt test the idea of an implement that could allow him to measure his progress.

He surfed the web in search for something like it and didn’t find anything.

He was a digital designer, so if he wanted it so bad he had to create it.

That was how Kick.ai started

What benefits can you get from using Kick.ai?

The main point of the interview was to talk about Kick.ai.

In Jan-Eric words. Is basically a tool to measure your progress.

You train as you would train normally. But using this wearable device you will receive a lot of information.

As I wrote in the first lines of this post, with Kick.ai you can measure your Speed, Reaction Speed and Stamina.

Kick.ai also has simulations of training designed by experts. So, if you don’t have a trainer you can use their app and challenge yourself.

Kick.ai will give you easy to understand reports.

Personally I think that to see the progress in a number can be a great way of motivation.

Also you can compete with other Kick.ai users of your level all over the world.

Today’s role of technology in taekwondo.

Jan-Eric talked with us about the role of technology in modern taekwondo, and how it could evolve in the future.

As a real passionate martial arts lover. He took some time to tell us about some dream like features that technology could give us in the future.

Other topics that we talked about were: Education, Early specialization and his favorite metal bands.

Enjoy the interview!

Hello taekwondo lovers.

Paige McPherson is an USA national team member. She won the bronze medal at London 2012 Olympics.

She is classified to Tokyo 2021 that makes her the very first american female athlete with three appearances in olympic taekwondo.

Paige started practicing taekwondo as a child. The way she started was completely focused on the more traditional way.

Start in competition
Learning poomsae, breaks, and not only focusing on sparring. In fact, she did not sparr to much. Until her instructor had the idea of taking her to a state championship.

She did it quite well. So why not go to nationals?

And for being someone that had never trained the sport way, she did it also a great job.

Even her instructor was not very involved in the sport side of taekwondo. He saw the potential of Paige. So he started to focus on her training and helping Paige.

He contacted Master Juan Moreno, from Peak Performance. And that was the way she moved from her hometown to the city of Miami.

Out of the comfort zone.
Obviously that wasn’t an easy decision. She had the support of her parents who even traveled with her one week in order to see the values and philosophy of Master’s Moreno taekwondo program.

For them, the performance was not the more important thing but the values. And they found what they were looking for in Peak Performance, which is more like a family.

The Olympics.
Her first olympics were a whole new experience for her. Having special clothes, meeting other athletes and in her first fight she was against the local star Sarah Stevenson.

Obviously all the crowd was against her but she won the fight. After it she could not make it to the final but she had the opportunity to fight for the bronze medal.

For many athletes that have the focus on the gold medal is very hard to recover from losing and then to go and focus on the bronze.

The taekwondo bronze medal in the olympics is a very hard mental challenge. You’ve lost the gold, you’re probably thinking more in going home.

Paige managed that and refocused on getting the bronze.

The Rio Olympics were not what she expected. But the interesting part is that she considers that difficult moment helped her to improve in the next years.

Achieving her best result in World Championships the next year in Muju. Where she get the silver medal.

Focus on the tatami not on the surroundings
In the interview we talked about Paige’s career and she gave some advice for young athletes. When she was young she had a crush on a certain guy and in a fight she noticed this guy was watching her fight.

So she started to do flashy things that she did not normally do in her fights and that make her lose. She learned to focus on her and not on the crowd.

Paige is a person of faith, focusing on being not just a great athlete but also a great human being.

Enjoy the interview!

Hello taekwondo lovers.

Samery Moras is a full time taekwondo lover. She has a very successful taekwondo channel on YouTube, an online academy, she owns also two dojangs, has a podcast also and she’s been part of the USA National Team traveling around the world for competitions.

Samery started practicing taekwondo at a very young age. All her family practice taekwondo.

In May 2020, she graduated with a Master of Business Creation degree from the University of Utah.

She is from Peru but she’s been living on the USA since she was 5 years old.

Changing the mindset.

She’s always enjoyed the practice of taekwondo. But there was a point when she finished high school that she nearly abandoned the practice.

Around that time she used to lose most of her fights. Almost 90%. She decided that she wanted to change that.

And that she would do the necessary to change it. First thing she did was going to a training camp for three weeks to La Loma. A high performance center in San Luis Potosi, Mexico.

There she could train at a higher level of taekwondo but mainly to train with another mindset. The mindset of competition.

When she get back to the USA she started to win.

At her second try she made it to the Collegiate National Team. That allowed her to participate in different international events like the World University Games and to train and learn taekwondo in different places like Korea.

Starting on YouTube

When she was traveling as a competitor, Samery use to share pics and videos on instagram.

Her YouTube channel started with the only purpose of sharing the videos that were too long for instagram.

She always like to improve so she started doing some tutorials and to try to make better videos. Now her channel has more than 100K subs and recently received one of that famous play button.

Learning from Samery

On the interview she talked us about how she made that turning point from just doing taekwondo for fun to take her level to another place.

She gave us also some marketing tips for a taekwondo school. She’s studied marketing and recently finished her master degree.

We also talked about how she scheled her time, upcoming projects and with all that hard work what’s her strategy to charge batteries.

Samery loves to speak in public, that made the interview very interesting.

Enjoy the interview.

Hello taekwondo lovers.

Our guest for the first english episode is Nikita Glasnovic.

Nikita Glasnovic is a swedish born taekwondo fighter. She won a bronze medal in the Muju 2017 World Championships.

She started practicing taekwondo very young. Her father Mario Glasnovic started a taekwondo club in Sweden where he trained his brothers. She was familiar with taekwondo since she was born. Taekwondo was always here environment.

She’s always liked the sparring side of taekwondo. She suffered poomsae because it was hard for her to learn the poomsaes, but with a lot effort she achieved her black belt.

Focus: Nikita’s first taekwondo competition.
Attending her first competition of taekwondo. She remember that the first thing she saw when entered the place of the competition, was a huge trophy and she thought “I want that for me”.

After the day, she won the trophy. And she remember it as a revealing discovery at her young age. If you want something and you really try to get it, of course you can get it.

That discovery helped her forward. For example when she won the world’s bronze. It was not her best day. But she focused in her goals.

Starting competition internationally
After winning her first European Youth Championships she realized she wanted to achieve bigger goals in taekwondo.

Results and the sparring experience are important in memories. But sometimes when you are young the things you remember more are the travel.

She told us about her experience in the World Youth Championships in Tijuana 2010. Arriving to the Los Angeles airport, crossing the border and the welcoming people of Mexico.

Road to the world’s bronze medal.
After not winning a medal in Rio Olympics. She lost support from Sweden Federation. So the road to Muju 2017 World Championships was not easy.

She and her whole family put a big effort in the preparation. Sometimes having to train outdoors because the impossibility to have a gym.

Even with a great preparation for the day of the competition. Things were not going like her wanted.

Sometimes you prepare for something but you don’t feel like your performance is the way normally have.

The competition day in Muju Nikita didn’t feel that she was having her best day. But anyway she managed to reach the medals stage.

That give us an idea of her mental strength.

Origins
Besides taekwondo. Nikita enjoys literature. Reading help her to disconnect from taekwondo. She likes Mario Vargas Llosa.

She is a person who study a lot of different fields, literature, language, rethorics, sports science, sport psychology.

She is not worried about not having a diploma, the important thing for her is to enjoy learning. Personally I agree with her, first you have to enjoy learning.

She is very interested also in ancient ingredients. Like Maíz (corn), Mole, and Mezcal. She was planning a trip to Mexico to discover this kind of flavors.

Full interview on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Enjoy!

Share us your thoughts on the interview in the comments section.