Packing a punch: Carmen Marton, 29, taekwondo

I didn’t have much choice in taking up taekwondo.

My father introduced us to the sport as soon as we were old enough. I was eight, my sister was 10 and my younger brother was three. He believed there was a lot of opportunity in the sport and he wanted us to do the same sport he did growing up. He was originally a basketball player in Poland’s college league and travelled around Europe, but taekwondo was his passion.

Taekwondo is a really tactical sport and I guess you could compare it to fencing, except we use our feet. It’s very dynamic and explosive. We do a lot of spinning kicks, a lot of head kicks. You try to score points without having them scored against you and the aim is to finish the three rounds with more points than your opponent. There is the possibility of being injured, or in extreme cases knocked out, but it rarely happens these days.