I did a lot of tae kwon do and branched off into other stuff later on, but tae kwon do is great. It was my equalizer. That was how I was able to survive in the land of the giants. Thank God for that.
When you're a child, you take things for granted. For instance, my mum didn't have a lot of money, but I went to piano, ballet and gymnastics lessons, and tae kwon do.
When I first started training Tae Kwon Do, it was more just for discipline. My brother and I were two knuckleheads and my mom being a single mother wanted us to get more discipline somewhere other than her yelling at us. But I had no visions at all or aspirations of going from Tae Kwon Do into mixed martial arts.
I'm a black belt in tae kwon do.
My martial arts background is Tae Kwon Do.
I don't know if there's anything intrinsically funny about Tae Kwon Do.
When I was in my early 20s, I studied tae kwon do and hapkido. I earned brown belts in both of them.
When I tell people I'm going to the Olympics, they're like: 'What do you do, track and field? Pole vault? Are you a volleyball player?' No one ever guesses tae kwon do.
When I was growing up, there were times I had to compete against boys in tae kwon do, and I'd show them right away that I wasn't someone to mess with.
I'm a 3rd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and 2nd degree in karate, and I'm a licensed bodyguard.
I belong to an improv group, I play cello, I have these phases - fencing, tae kwon do, baseball, ice hockey, boogie boarding in the summer, snowboarding in the winter.
When most people think of Tae Kwon Do - which, in the United States, is not all that often - they think of sparring, a form of competition that both men and women perform at the Olympics.
For the most part, I do a lot of my own stunts. On 'The Final Destination,' they kept pulling my stunt woman in, and I'd shoo her away. I'm a black belt in tae kwon do, so I was adamant about doing stuff myself.
When I got the script for 'Winter Soldier,' I was so excited to see that my character finally gets to punch somebody! So I took tae kwon do three times a week. I wanted to feel like I could hold my own in a roomful of superheroes.
I have dabbled in martial arts all my life, since I was 7, maybe - tae kwon do, capoeira, Muay Thai. It's always been an interest because in martial arts there is a mind/body relationship.
I think gymnastics trained me as a person, too. Without the lessons I learned in gymnastics, I would be crushed.