The Martial Body as Measure: Proportional Precision in ITF Taekwon-Do and Its Roots in East Asian Body Culture

By Roy Rolstad, 6th Degree ITF Taekwon-Do

Over the years, one of the most powerful lessons I’ve taken from my martial arts journey is that the human body is not just the tool of practice, it’s the standard by which the practice itself is measured.

In ITF Taekwon-Do, we use our own shoulder width to determine stances, our own height to define technique levels, and our own reach to calibrate range and power. This isn’t just practical, it’s profound. And for me, that depth became clearer through my studies in acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which I undertook more than 20 years ago with a specific interest in how these ancient systems relate to martial arts.

What I learned then, and what continues to inform my training and teaching today, is that body-relative measurement is not unique to ITF Taekwon-Do. It’s a foundational concept across East Asian movement and healing systems.

The Body as the Ruler

When students first learn a walking stance, they’re taught it should be 1.5 shoulder widths long. That shoulder width isn’t measured with a ruler, it’s based on their own body. The same goes for the height of a middle punch (shoulder level) or the width of an L-stance (one shoulder width). Instructors often say, “Your body is the ruler,” and that’s exactly right.

This system of proportional measurement ensures stability, balance, and functional power, tailored to the individual’s structure. A tall, long-legged student will naturally have a longer stance than someone more compact, but each can achieve biomechanical efficiency by following their own proportions. This keeps the art effective across body types and ages, something I deeply value as both a practitioner and an instructor.

TCM and the Principle of the Cun

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, this same idea is embodied in the cun system. The cun (pronounced tsun) is a unit of measurement used to locate acupuncture points, but it’s not a fixed unit like a centimeter. It’s relative to the patient’s body: the width of their thumb at the knuckle is 1 cun, the width of their four fingers together is typically 3 cun, and so on.

This proportional system ensures that acupuncture treatments are individualized, just like martial arts training should be. You wouldn’t locate an acupoint using someone else’s measurements. The same is true for a punch or a stance. Each body has its own structure, its own optimal alignment.

This perspective has stayed with me since those courses two decades ago, and I continue to see the parallels between how we heal the body and how we train it.

General Choi’s Classical Chinese Education and Philosophical Influences

It’s also important to recognize that General Choi Hong Hi received a classical education in the Chinese literary tradition, which included Confucian texts, history, and philosophy. This background likely gave him deep exposure to East Asian ideas of proportion, order, and the human body’s symbolic and practical significance. In Confucian and Daoist texts, the body is often used as a metaphor for social harmony, natural rhythm, and personal cultivation.

This classical lens may have influenced Choi’s decision to use body-relative measurements in codifying ITF Taekwon-Do. In traditional Chinese and Korean thought, measurement is not just about precision, it’s about alignment with natural principles. The idea that a punch should rise to your own shoulder level, or that a stance should fit your frame, reflects a view of the body as the basis of both discipline and insight.

By grounding the art in self-referential measures, Choi created a system that harmonizes personal adaptation with universal standards, a hallmark of East Asian intellectual culture.

Philosophical Foundations: Harmony, Flow, and Structure

Both ITF Taekwon-Do and TCM draw from deep cultural roots, not just in technique, but in worldview. Confucian philosophy emphasizes structure, discipline, and proper relationship, between people, and between body parts. Daoist philosophy emphasizes balance, natural flow, and energy dynamics.

These principles are alive in our practice. A well-aligned stance is not just a structural achievement, it’s a statement of balance. When we speak of the “sine wave” motion in ITF, we’re referring to a dynamic movement that flows naturally, like Qi in the meridians of Chinese medicine. The concept of Yin and Yang also mirrors martial ideas: hard and soft, advance and retreat, attack and yield.

When I learned how TCM views the body as an integrated system of energy, movement, and structure, it made perfect sense to me as a martial artist. We train not just muscles and bones, but energy, timing, and awareness, qualities that live in the spaces between form and feeling.

A Shared Culture of Measurement Across East Asia

This principle of relative measurement is not limited to China or Korea. It runs through East Asian martial and medical systems alike. In Taijiquan, each movement is scaled to the practitioner’s reach and center. In Japanese sword arts, a cut is executed at an angle and height determined by one’s own frame. The principle is universal: know your own body, and act from it.

General Choi’s brilliance, in my view, was to systematize these intuitive principles into a structured martial art that still respects the individual. ITF Taekwon-Do gives us a scientific framework, down to the shoulder-width measurements and degrees of turning, while honoring the deeper tradition of working in harmony with our own body’s nature.

Measuring from Within

Two decades after studying acupuncture and Chinese medicine, I see more clearly than ever that martial arts and healing arts are reflections of the same truth: the body is not just an object of training, but the instrument of its own calibration. In both fields, real mastery comes from knowing ourselves, not in abstract terms, but in physical, measurable ways.

As ITF practitioners, we don’t just train movements, we train relationships: between our limbs and our center, our breath and our rhythm, our technique and our intent. And the ruler we use to measure it all? Ourselves.