HapKiDo: The Way of Inner Strength and Harmony

I am very excited!!! Woo-hooo!! :)

Yesterday evening, I went to a Hapkido training session at Kidurong Club, a recreational & sports club that I'm a member of. I've been attending the training sessions for several weeks now. All I can say is, Hapkido is a kick-ass! I love it!

Being a Karate-guy most of my martial art life, I've never been exposed much to wrist or joint-locking, even much more to a "Korean" art. The new ideas and knowledge that I've gained throughout the last few Hapkido sessions definitely "stimulate" me, making me even more excited and enthusiastic to know about this art.

Hand-Shake Lesson:

The Hapkido instructor demonstrated to me the strength of the Hapkido 'fingers' - extend your index and thumbs perpendicularly to each other and curl in the rest, sort of like a 'pistol' hand (as shown in Korean Hapkido Federation logo below).

He asked me to hand-shake with him. Then, he asked me to press his fingers as hard as possible while still hand-shaking. I did, as hard as possible! But, his face was calm. No hurt sign shown. Then, he pressed mind. Urghh!! It hurt!

Next, he asked me,"Now, do the Hapkido 'fingers' and again shake hand with me. Now, I press. Does it hurt?"

To my surprised, it did not hurt!

So, next time, when I'm going to shake hand with someone, will do it the Hapkido way! :)

A little Bit About Hapkido:

I went searching about Hapkido on the net, through my good friend Google, of course. Found some good websites on Hapkido's history and how the art has developed - from emphasizing on wrist and joint-locking techniques to incorporating kicks and striking in the art.

The founder of "original" Hapkido was Grandmaster Choi, Young-Sool. He was from Chung Buk province, Korea. The reason I put a "original" there was due to the fact that when Grandmaster Choi started teaching in Korea, he called the martial art as Hapkiyoukwonsool or Hapkiyosool and his emphasize was in Aiki-Jutsu style, the style he had learned in Japan, which emphasized a lot of bending, twisting, joint-locks and pressure points application etc. Later, Grandmaster Choi's students, after incorporating other techniques such as kicking and striking into his teaching, gave a new name to the art - Hapkido.

"Hap" means harmony, "Ki" means inner strength, "Do" means way. So "Hapkido" is a way of inner strength and harmony. Beautiful eh?

These are some pics of Grandmaster Choi, performing some Hapkido techniques:

Well, if you want to know more about the lengthy history of Hapkido, you may want to visit the following website. It has a nice article on the History of Hapkido.

http://www.hapkiyoosool.com/hist.htm

Further readings: