# What makes hapkido hapkido?



## Humble artist (Sep 16, 2002)

What makes hapkido unique?
In terms of technique or other things.
Just thought about that,probably a bit hard question as arts share things,making them universal but...


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## strider (Sep 17, 2002)

I think that the mutiple ways that you can defend yourself is what makes Hapkido what it is.  The way you use your pponents energy against them, and the use of joint locks, pressure point attacks, throws, kicks, and strikes when it is nessasary.  You really dont have to hurt anyone to end a confrantation,  although you can if you have to.  Thats what i think but im still new to Hapkido,  only been taking it for about 2 1/2 months.


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## Humble artist (Sep 17, 2002)

Thank you.
That was sort of what I might have been looking for.
Anything else,anyone?


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## strider (Sep 17, 2002)

hey NP im really interested to see how others reply its a hard question to answer for me any way.


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## Eraser (Sep 17, 2002)

Humble...

Well.. to generalize Hapkido .. and what makes it good.. its kinda hard.. because there are different branches of Hapkido as well..
Our style of Hapkido is very unique becaue we use principles from Kosho Ryu..  We put major focus on body positioning.. you would be amazed on how much more power you can get from your body by simply turning your body 45degrees......  Its actually mind blowing.. we also do ground work not so much grappling.. but how to get the person off of ya.. its really cool when you learn what to do to make a persons freeze in place.. we do skeletel freezing..(i know sounds like an Arnold flick eh!!) which is sooooooo awesome!!
Most all MA do kicks, punches ect.. but its the inbetween stuff that makes it different..... :asian:


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## strider (Sep 17, 2002)

hey thanks eraser i forgot about that part of our style,  brings out my point alittle better.  or i hope it does?


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## H@pkid0ist (Sep 20, 2002)

What makes Hapkido what it is, is its diversity. You train to defend against trained fighters, so in turn you have to be able to cover all the aspects of fighting that all other systems use. As well, it is a Mixed Martial Art in one school, with nonconflicting Idealology and principals. All these different techniques are taught as a single uniform art. There is no nesesity to go from school to school to school to school. As well, we train in each area to a great proficience to equall that of the arts that specialize in their specific techniques ie.. striking, grappling. kicking,whatever. Becouse of all this we in turn have to have the aspects off all other systems without conflict and maintaining fluidity. Transitions from soft to hard to soft ect. Also, we must keep up with the ghanges and advancements of all other systems to stay true to our purpose as a combat art that defends against other systems. This and much more that is hard to put into words. This is HAP KI DO.


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## strider (Sep 21, 2002)

nice reply h@pkid0ist that is what i think i was trying to say but you said it better.:asian:


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## Humble artist (Sep 25, 2002)

Thanks for the replies.
Even though the "DO" really shines into my eye every time I think of this art,some sources (which I refer to as web) give me the idea that hapkido would be "entirely self-defense" art or something like that,quite different to what I´ve read in other sources then.
Must be a matter of school,but it´s still a way we are talking of,right?


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## Eraser (Sep 27, 2002)

Well, I believe that all MA.. is some type of self defense...
Our school, is a true self defense school..  but our kicking style is based on TKD.. and we also study.. like I said above Kosho Ryu.. so our school isn't really a true "Hapkido" stlye school..
We are Hon Sang Mu Sa Hapkido.. this is now a registered style of MA.. its sooooo cool to be part of somthing that's new.!!!

hope this helps out!!  and doesn't bring much confusion.. lol:asian:


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## Humble artist (Sep 28, 2002)

Thanks


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## MountainSage (Nov 3, 2002)

I am not HKD, but we use HKD in our TKD dojang for part of our self-defense, go figure.  I ran across a website some time ago that was about the North Shaolin Kung Fu and the individual in an article, some Shaolin person, stated that HKD was the Korean equivalent to the Shaolin Kung Fu.


"It's not the destination, but the journey that build character."


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## Humble artist (Nov 5, 2002)

Thank you too.
That is a very interesting description.


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## WaterCircleHarmony (Nov 5, 2002)

Hello 
in my opinion as long as the three principles of 
Water , Circle And Harmony are kept then it can be Hapkido. Hapkido in my mind should be a complete martial art encompassing all ranges and weapons.
As with TKD the art is meant to be scientific also and hence can evolve. Evolution does not need to be in one direction either. People are all different thus it would be natural for some instructors to favour eg striking as opposed to grappling. Some will enhance this part of their training and will have something to offer to the Hapkido community.




> You train to defend against trained fighters, so in turn you have to be able to cover all the aspects of fighting that all other systems use. As well, it is a Mixed Martial Art in one school, with nonconflicting Idealology and principals. All these different techniques are taught as a single uniform art. There is no nesesity to go from school to school to school to school.



i agree although i think in all reality to find out what others train to do i think that some degree of school visiting is needed. there will be something that one does not know about. :asian:


Let's adhere to the 3 principles and lose the ego for self righteousness and only then will one be practising the begginings of Hapkido.  :asian:[


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## H@pkid0ist (Nov 5, 2002)

watercircleharmony;
Actually what I ment was training in multiple systems and schools either one after another or at one time.
I still do and encourage my students to visit and at times practice with other schools when they get the chance. Especially in the world today with so many different systems and them changing so rapidly, you have to keep up with them or stay in the past.


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## WaterCircleHarmony (Nov 6, 2002)

I completely agree.

the next question is to ask whether there is a way of training without imposing yourself upon another class. the instructors may not like others visiting for example.


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## Hurdoc (Nov 12, 2002)

H@pkid0ist said:

"What makes Hapkido what it is, is its diversity. You train to defend against trained fighters, so in turn you have to be able to cover all the aspects of fighting that all other systems use."

The hapkido instructor in my community said the same thing to me and, at the time, I thought that it was just his way of teaching Hapkido or a personal opinion of his own. From what you are saying, this is an underlyig principle of Hapkido in general?


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## greendragon (Nov 12, 2002)

I totally agree with what you dudes are saying, Hapkido is a martial art made to counter other martial arts,, I am not saying that it is much more superior than other arts, it just has a very very large tool box to take care of whatever task comes along,, but as usual,, the person using the tools MUST practice hard and long so they know what and when to use the right Hapkido tool for the job,,,
                                Michael Tomlinson


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## MountainSage (Nov 13, 2002)

I find H@pkid0ists statement very interesting and informative.  Coming from a TKD background and being train in self-defense against a non-MA attacker this clear some concern I have had.  At my school we are taught the two MA would not fight and I've always had a problem with that assumption, to idealic.  This makes me more interested in Hapkido as my primary art.  Now I need one of you BB to move to Oregon and teach me.


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## H@pkid0ist (Nov 14, 2002)

One thing you want to make sure you do not do is neglect the erractic and akward fighting style of untrained fighters as well. They are just as dangerous as anyone else out there. They have no training in use of force, honor, self restraint. Its not just trained foghters that you need to practice a nd prepair against, its the untrained as well. Remember that they do have a fighting style as well that varies from person to person, and you have to take this in to account and be prepaired for it to. This is what you will probebly face more often than anything else, in the street.


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## WaterCircleHarmony (Nov 18, 2002)

Just competed yesterday.

First taste of ITF TKD Irish style.

Even though the second degree facing me was a skilled fighter i couldn't help noticing how street fighterishly he pummeled my head while chasing me out of the ring. No other kick were done except to initiate attack! Damn fast! Oh well need to work on it a bit more! :boxing:


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## Humble artist (Nov 23, 2002)

Thanks everyone.


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## TSDTexan (Jul 23, 2015)

Eraser said:


> Humble...
> 
> Well.. to generalize Hapkido .. and what makes it good.. its kinda hard.. because there are different branches of Hapkido as well..
> Our style of Hapkido is very unique becaue we use principles from Kosho Ryu..  We put major focus on body positioning.. you would be amazed on how much more power you can get from your body by simply turning your body 45degrees......  Its actually mind blowing.. we also do ground work not so much grappling.. but how to get the person off of ya.. its really cool when you learn what to do to make a persons freeze in place.. we do skeletel freezing..(i know sounds like an Arnold flick eh!!) which is sooooooo awesome!!
> Most all MA do kicks, punches ect.. but its the inbetween stuff that makes it different..... :asian:



Which sub-style of hapkido is that?


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## Mephisto (Jul 23, 2015)

H@pkid0ist said:


> What makes Hapkido what it is, is its diversity. You train to defend against trained fighters, so in turn you have to be able to cover all the aspects of fighting that all other systems use. As well, it is a Mixed Martial Art in one school, with nonconflicting Idealology and principals. All these different techniques are taught as a single uniform art. There is no nesesity to go from school to school to school to school. As well, we train in each area to a great proficience to equall that of the arts that specialize in their specific techniques ie.. striking, grappling. kicking,whatever. Becouse of all this we in turn have to have the aspects off all other systems without conflict and maintaining fluidity. Transitions from soft to hard to soft ect. Also, we must keep up with the ghanges and advancements of all other systems to stay true to our purpose as a combat art that defends against other systems. This and much more that is hard to put into words. This is HAP KI DO.


What you say is what initially interested me in hapkido. But after a year of training and meeting some other martial artists it's one problem I see with hapkido. You cant be the best at every area of training at the same time. I like that hapkido has some striking, joint locks, throws/takedowns, ground fighting, weapons, and in some schools a healing/meditative component but in my experience you can't have it all. A judo player who trains throws will always have advantage in thriwing skill compared to an hkd guy who divides his time between throws, striking, weapons, ect. I have yet to see evidence of a guy trained only in hkd doing well in a grappling, judo, or striking tournament. The same goes for hkd weapons, it's no where near as intensive as say a Filipino martial arts curriculum is. I'm not saying hkd is bad, I think it does a fair job of giving its practitioners a little bit of everything, but I do not agree that a hkd guy can beat a judo/boxing/Muay thai/weapons specialist at their own game unless there's a large disparity in skill or size.


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## Chrisoro (Aug 4, 2015)

While many arts share techniques with Hapkido, in order for a style to _be_ Hapkido, it needs two primary things, imho.

1. *It needs to make heavy use of the hapki/aiki principles.*

That is, circular motion, projection and redirection of force, as well as using these for balance breaking and for attaining positions in which you are able to maximise the leverage and torque of your techniques, while minimizing the opponents ability to attack/counter attack.

2. *It needs to have a lineage tracing back to Choi Yong Sul and the other early pioneers of Hapkido.*

Many other arts, such as Aikido, Daito Ryu Aiki Jujutsu(ancestor to both Hapkido and Aikido), as well as several chinese arts employing various forms of chin-na, make use of many of the same principles and techniques used in Hapkido. On the other side, some orthodox forms of hapkido employ few of the techniques we commonly associate with modern Hapkido, such as dynamic kicks, cane, various throws and other techniques added to the base hapkido by  Choi Yong Sul's early students. I would go as far as say that some orthodox forms of hapkido would, to an untrained eye, look more like Daito Ryu Aiki-Jujutsu, than Hapkido as it is commonly trained in the west. Yet, I would still call it Hapkido, because of it's linage trough Choi Yong Sul.

This is at least my humble opinion on the matter.


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## Chrisoro (Aug 4, 2015)

Mephisto said:


> I'm not saying hkd is bad, I think it does a fair job of giving its practitioners a little bit of everything, but I do not agree that a hkd guy can beat a judo/boxing/Muay thai/weapons specialist at their own game unless there's a large disparity in skill or size.



I cannot see that anyone here has made that claim.

While I agree that the diversity in techniques taught in many of the styles of Hapkido would make it harder for a student to gain high proficiency in any single aspect of their training compared to a student training in a more specialized style, one of the strengths of training in many different aspects of fighting, is not that you can beat other specialized styles at their own game(generally, you can't), but that you have the option to try to force other arts to fight outside their own comfort zone. If you cannot best a good boxer at boxing, you can choose to try to close the distance, tie him up, and take him down instead. Or you can choose to try to maintain distance and strike with a judoka, instead of trying to best him in the clinch.

Also, being exposed to a wide variety of fighting ranges and possible attacks, generally also makes you more conscious of what can be thrown at you, and make you better at defense in general, as opposed to more specialized arts being good at only defending the kinds of attacks they usually employ.


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## Mephisto (Aug 4, 2015)

Chrisoro said:


> I cannot see that anyone here has made that claim.
> 
> While I agree that the diversity in techniques taught in many of the styles of Hapkido would make it harder for a student to gain high proficiency in any single aspect of their training compared to a student training in a more specialized style, one of the strengths of training in many different aspects of fighting, is not that you can beat other specialized styles at their own game(generally, you can't), but that you have the option to try to force other arts to fight outside their own comfort zone. If you cannot best a good boxer at boxing, you can choose to try to close the distance, tie him up, and take him down instead. Or you can choose to try to maintain distance and strike with a judoka, instead of trying to best him in the clinch.
> 
> Also, being exposed to a wide variety of fighting ranges and possible attacks, generally also makes you more conscious of what can be thrown at you, and make you better at defense in general, as opposed to more specialized arts being good at only defending the kinds of attacks they usually employ.


See the quote I attached to my statement. h@pkidoist suggested that hkd or at least his flavor trains each area of specialty to the same level as a specialist. That's what I disagree with. I do agree that exposure to multiple ranges of fighting will give you options to take a specialist out if their comfort zone, but you've got to at least be proficient enough to force the specialist out of his or her preferred range (or style/method/ect). It's going to take a lot of ability to avoid being taken down by a grappling specialist, or to avoid the punches of a skilled boxer. Especially if you don't have a lot of experience applying your art to a resisting opponent.


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## oftheherd1 (Aug 4, 2015)

Humble artist said:


> Thanks for the replies.
> Even though the "DO" really shines into my eye every time I think of this art,some sources (which I refer to as web) give me the idea that hapkido would be "entirely self-defense" art or something like that,quite different to what I´ve read in other sources then.
> Must be a matter of school,but it´s still a way we are talking of,right?



In the Hapkido I learned, we were taught offensive techniques just before a black belt test.  Mostly an adaptation of some defensive moves we had learned but used offensively.  But to me, indeed, the Hapkido I learned was primarily defensive.


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## oftheherd1 (Aug 4, 2015)

Mephisto said:


> What you say is what initially interested me in hapkido. But after a year of training and meeting some other martial artists it's one problem I see with hapkido. You cant be the best at every area of training at the same time. I like that hapkido has some striking, joint locks, throws/takedowns, ground fighting, weapons, and in some schools a healing/meditative component but in my experience you can't have it all. A judo player who trains throws will always have advantage in thriwing skill compared to an hkd guy who divides his time between throws, striking, weapons, ect. I have yet to see evidence of a guy trained only in hkd doing well in a grappling, judo, or striking tournament. The same goes for hkd weapons, it's no where near as intensive as say a Filipino martial arts curriculum is. I'm not saying hkd is bad, I think it does a fair job of giving its practitioners a little bit of everything, but I do not agree that a hkd guy can beat a judo/boxing/Muay thai/weapons specialist at their own game unless there's a large disparity in skill or size.



I don't know your style or what level you are in it, but from you statement above, it would seem you didn't spend too much time in Hapkido.  That could explain your statements above.  I don't expect to train everything a judoist does, or a TKDist, or any other art.  But think, how many ways can you perform a fist strike or a kick?  If I train defenses against them, style of an opponent becomes less important.  If I train defenses for a grab (grapple) on any part of my body, what advantage does another grappler have?  If I train counters to techniques, how much do I have to worry if someone unexpectedly uses a grappling move on me?  But you don't learn those things over night.  You must practice well and often, and for a long time.  Some people will learn faster, others slower.

Two other things, first, I don't intend to fight an opponent in his style, only in mine.  Does that not sound like an advantage in its own right?  Your point almost stated, that people of different skill levels, will have more or less advantages is correct, and also the fact that on any given day, you may be off your ability for some reason, and your opponent may be having the best day of his life.


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## Chrisoro (Aug 4, 2015)

Mephisto said:


> See the quote I attached to my statement. h@pkidoist suggested that hkd or at least his flavor trains each area of specialty to the same level as a specialist. That's what I disagree with.



Ah, I see. I agree with you. That is of course overly optimistic.



> I do agree that exposure to multiple ranges of fighting will give you options to take a specialist out if their comfort zone, but you've got to at least be proficient enough to force the specialist out of his or her preferred range (or style/method/ect). It's going to take a lot of ability to avoid being taken down by a grappling specialist, or to avoid the punches of a skilled boxer. Especially if you don't have a lot of experience applying your art to a resisting opponent.



Which is why one needs to spar in addition to drilling techniques with various degrees of resistance, regardless of art but especially in arts that tries to incorporate many different aspects of ones art. As someone with a background in among other things, amateur boxing, sw and judo, I would probably have looked for another instructor in HKD if the one I am currently training under didn't see the necessity of regular sparring in most ranges of combat.

However, I don't agree that one necessarily needs to be really good in order to take someone out of their preferred range, if that person is a specialist with little to no exposure to other arts. When I started training grappling about ten years ago, I was also training kickboxing at the same time. After six months of regular grappling practice, I had no trouble taking down really good kick boxers in my other club almost at will when we agreed to spar medium to hard contact with both takedowns and strikes.


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## Chrisoro (Aug 4, 2015)

oftheherd1 said:


> I don't expect to train everything a judoist does, or a TKDist, or any other art.  But think, how many ways can you perform a fist strike or a kick?  If I train defenses against them, style of an opponent becomes less important.  If I train defenses for a grab (grapple) on any part of my body, what advantage does another grappler have?  If I train counters to techniques, how much do I have to worry if someone unexpectedly uses a grappling move on me?



In order to defend against techniques from another art, your defense would need to be better than his offense. If you dedicate an average of 30 minutes of your training each week to training grappling defenses and counters(which in reality is quite optimistic, considering the broad focus in Hapkido), you will have spent a total of 26 hours on training this in one year. Compare that to the amount of training a BJJ-practitioner trains his defense and offense in the same time, and it will be quite obvious that that you would have to worry quite a lot if someone with an actual background in a grappling art unexpectedly uses a grappling move on you, despite you training counters to those moves. There is a reason why BJJ uses belt classes in competitions, and why whitebelts have trouble countering blue belts and so on, despite training a lot more counters to the same moves in a year than what most hapkidoka do in their whole career.

And yes. You can learn the few strikes of boxing in a couple of months, including all the common defenses. That does not mean that you would have a good chance of defending against someone who had trained the same art several years, despite training and "knowing" defenses to everything he would be likely to do to you. Even black belts in BJJ regularly gets submitted with techniques taught at white belt level in competition. What makes you think your counters is better than theirs?

I love Hapkido, and I'm a second degree blackbelt under a Korean grandmaster who studied directly under Choi Yong Sul, by the way, so It's not like I'm ignorant of what Hapkido has to offer in terms of defenses against other arts. I'm just being realistic about how much use you can get out of a limited amount of training counters to offensive techniques that practitioners in more specialized arts uses an insanely higher amount of time to refine against people who train a lot more counters to the same moves than what we do.

Hapkido's strenght as a highly pragmatic and eclectic art that trains counters to the techniques of a lot of other arts is not that we can therefore counter everything other arts throw at us, because we can't. What this training offers us, is an awareness of what other arts can attack us with, which then grants us a somewhat less chance of being totally taken by surprise by that and similar techniques. It does not mean that we can easily counter techniques thrown at us by other arts on a one to one basis, but it gives us a somewhat better chance of denying practitioners of other arts from enforcing their game on us, and instead letting us move into territory where they do not have an awareness of what we will be doing.


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## Tez3 (Aug 6, 2015)

TSDTexan said:


> Which sub-style of hapkido is that?




I don't think you will get an answer to that question as the post was made in 2002 and as it says 'guest' under the name I'd assume they aren't here anymore.
For a 13 year old thread though it seems as if resurrecting it has brought some good posts.


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