 I've started a new local program at Covenant Baptist Church in Shepherdstown WV. Class is held on Mondays 5PM-6:30PM. Ages 13 and up. Seniors welcome. Class size is limited to ten. I do this so that I can focus on each student and nobody get's left out. Next practice will be March 11th.
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In just a few few short days we Hapkido Online celebrates our six year anniversary! I'm happy to report that we are still going strong. I have many plans for 2018, high on my list is to update our film equipment and film new content. I also look forward to growing the content on the black belt site.
I want to share my most heartfelt thanks to all of you for supporting Hapkido Online over the years. God Bless, Jon Well 2017 like the year before has been a year of change so far. My wife and I bought our first home this year in Harpers Ferry WV! While that has been a milestone it's been a laborious one in that we've been renovating.
We are now just a stones throw from Mr. David Henry's excellent ProForm martial arts school in Martinsburg, WV. I hope as I approach military retirement to attend his school more often. Today I changed the domain name for the advanced site to: www.hapkidoonlineadvanced.com Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused. I'm still on the wicked wicked day night shifts for the military and I still look forward to retirement. We have many excellent seminars and the THA conference coming up this year and I'll be updating those links. God Bless to you all! Jon Well I think we are in for another exciting year of Hapkido and Hapkido Online. Many things happened in my life in 2015. For one thing I was transferred to my new unit in Alexandria Virginia. The Yorktown Hapkido Club continues to run under the leadership of CAPT Brad Bennett (ret) PHD. Brad is an excellent student and teacher and I know that club is destined for greatness. I am currently doing shift work which means that every other month I work entirely at night. This has made it very difficult to teach with any regularity. But I have made my fellow shift workers aware of my abilities and offered to teach them. Also I've been a guest instructor at a fantastic club run by Pastor Conrad Smith at Grace Bible Church several times since transferring. While my life has been turned up on it's ear I am proud to say that www.hapkido-online.com continues to grow and provide training for people all around the world. It has proven it's viability and robustness even now. Also it seems that the Tactical Hapkido Alliance continues to grow as well making in-roads into many new places and even countries due in no small part to this website. While I realize we all face many new challenges this year I also accept that the core values I've learned and taught as a Christian Hapkidoin will serve me well in the days ahead. I look forward to our continued journey. God Bless, Jon Grand Master chooses a theme every year and this year the theme is the Cutting Edge. The Tactical Hapkido Alliance IS on the cutting edge, the system is revolutionary in that it approaches the art of Hapkido in a systematic conceptual way. Hapkido is a already a modern art born in the modern age. It is not a traditional art from antiquity. Hapkido was born in the atomic age, when mankind was just beginning to explore space and break all records for speed and distance. Hapkido sprang into a world that had just survived a global war with terrifying new technological weapons. As martial arts go, Hapkido IS the cutting edge and Chon Sul Kwan is the newest and most scientific approach to learning Hapkido. Chon Sul Kwan has cutting edge interception methods pioneered in modern American martial arts like Jeet Kun Do.
I occasionally get asked about traditional Hapkido, it doesn't exist. All Hapkido is modern. Ours was the first Hapkido system to explore online distance learning via this website. This year, GM and Master Ziots have brought us brand new DVD's. White Belt through Black Belt filmed with comprehensive instruction and from multiple camera angles. It has been over ten years since the first white through black DVD's and I am happy to present them here for you. Please visit the store and check out this incredible resource. Finally I started building www.hapkido-online-black.com which is a Hapkido Online just for black belts. It is customized for the needs of black belts and is an invaluable tool for any student pursuing mastery. I have never been more excited about a martial arts system than I am for Chon Sul Kwan Hapkido it is the finest Hapkido program I have ever had the honor of learning and teaching. The final videos for High Red were filmed today, edited, and uploaded this evening!
With that my one year project is finished, three years later! In reality it will never truly be finished even now I am planning to re-shoot many of the video's that I know can be done better but every technique from white to black is represented on this night the weekend of Easter 2015. I have loved working on Hapkido Online up to this point and especially meeting so many good folks in the process. I would like to take a moment to thank the people who helped make this possible: God My Wife Julie My kids and parents Master Tim Feathers S Master James Ziots GM Barry Rodemaker Mr. Pat Mills And I would also like to send special thanks to all my students over the years who have taken part in this. I have far too many to list them all, but some more notable people: Brad Bennett Robert Logan JP Webber Matthew Mudry Mark Johnson Travis Landmesser James E. White Jr. William Haines Kristy Rogers David Henry John Straka Robert Paquette William Diepenbrock If I missed your name, forgive me, and please accept my gratitude. So I'll be doing double duty going back and revising and improving Gup content on www.Hapkido-Online.com AND starting this week building the new Black Belt site for students moving into black belt and beyond! Thank You all, Happy Easter, and God Bless! Jon Ferguson Hello Hapkido Friends,
Well the Coast Guard is transferring me to the Alexandria Virginia region for the next four years. I plan to leave the Yorktown Hapkido Club in place and in the capable hands of Captain Brad Bennett (ret) PhD. Since my family is staying in the Yorktown area I will be returning to check on the club's progress and conduct promotions regularly. If anybody on here lives in the Alexandria region I would love to hear from you. For one thing I really need to find a room to rent to live in! But also it would be nice to have a friend in the area. For someone who wants to learn Hapkido in Alexandria it could be a tremendous opportunity for you. I ask that prayers go out to my wife Julie and my family that they be safe and protected when I can't be at home. And if any predator should read this, we have guns.... I plan to go ahead with the July 18 Hapkido Seminar here and I also plan to keep supporting and building Hapkido Online, I am in this for the long haul. I also want to send out a prayer request for Master Tim Feathers and his family. He recently survived a rather harrowing operation involving his heart. The prognosis is good for him but I am sure he and his loved ones could use your prayers. God Bless, Jon Added two more High Red Techniques this evening: Slip Back to Horizontal Center Lock and the Head Grab Take Down!
Just five more video's and the basic instructional content from white belt to 1st Dan black will be complete!!!!! Wahoooo.... I must say when I began Hapkido Online I expected to have all this done in a year.... That was uh three years ago... So I am a little slow. However looking back, I am kind of glad I went slowly. You see in many DVD series you might buy for Hapkido they probably film all basic instruction over a long day or maybe two. I just did a video here and there for several years and so each move has my full attention. I am not thinking okay, now let's film the next one. You can kind of sense my willingness to just make the move about the move and doing it well. For those of you who signed on in 2012, the stuff we are shooting now looks light years better than my early content. Some that old video is still on the site. Don't worry I plan to go back and little by little replace and revise. What has changed since then? Well for one thing, I have changed. I am much better at demonstrating and teaching Hapkido now than I was three years ago. Why? Well that is three more years of diligent practice. In fact when I began Hapkido Online I was a 1st Dan Black belt and now I have earned my 3rd Dan Black Belt. Also I must express my appreciation to my teachers. Master Tim Feathers who drove out to see me and practice with me. Also Grand Master Rodemaker who also has come here to teach us locally. My camera equipment has improved as well. In the beginning I used my wife's Flip Camera and a broken tri-pod. Very low budget but hey it's what I have. That first Flip ended up getting broken in a practical joke run amok. Okay I'll digress and tell you what happened. My daughter Sophia was using the flip to shoot a little video in her room. Her Grandparents and I were in the process of tearing out the wall just behind where she had set the camera. I had this great idea that we could score the wall board a few times and then I could crash my head through the wall and yell "Here's Johnny!". Just like the movie The Shining. I was hoping the video would capture her complete surprise and perhaps terror. It was all going to plan. My head went right through the wall and she shrieked and jumped back which of course caused Julies poor camera to fall to the floor and break. Yeah, not my finest moment. I replaced Julies Flip camera and bought myself a used Sony Webbie Camera. It has some advantages, for example the screen could be rotated around. Prior to that I had to put a mirror behind the Flip Cam. Still the image quality left a lot to be desired. Then a kind photographer, Mr. Pat Mills, took an interest in my Hapkido project and helped me to purchase the ideal rig. What we ended up with was a little robot product called a swivl that holds lightweight cameras and automatically points them at a remote. The little flashy gizmo you see in the latest video's is the remote. The remote also acts as a microphone. He set me up with a proper Tri-pod, and most importantly we ended up getting an iPod touch 5 that has excellent camera's a screen that I can see and connects directly to the swivl with the swivl app. So now we have high quality video, even hi-def if I so choose. We have high quality sound. The only thing that was still kind of off was the aspect ratio. The focal length of the camera was such that you could see my upper body but not my feet or my feet but not my upper body. Pat suggested a small thimble sized Wide Angle Lens that literally pops onto the iPod touch like a magnet. It took me nearly 6 months to heed his advice but I finally bought one from a website called photojojo.com . Huge improvement, now you can see my whole body in frame for each technique. In 2012 I started with little more than a dream. I made the basic website. It looked cruder then, than it does now. But all the elements where there. I set up my old broken tripod and borrowed camera in our living room and started filming white belt. Now in 2015 Hapkido Online looks refined. We have custom artwork from my friend James Barnes. We have very high quality video and I feel personally that my instruction has improved significantly. Not only is it better but I am not as awkward in front of the camera as I used to be. Finally we are nearing the end of my original goal to have step by step video instruction streaming online from white belt to black belt. Am I finished? No Way!!! I am just beginning. First I want to go back and refilm white belt. Less chatter and more actual movement. With the new camera gear etc. Then I plan to push forward into the Dan Levels. I want to add cane, stick and knife techniques, kubotan, ground survival, steel baton, and all the wonders that were originally laid out by Grand Master Rodemaker and Senior Master Ziot's in the Tactical Hapkido Encyclopedia. I was looking at my old belt certificates the other day and it slowly dawned on me that my very first martial arts lesson was in February of 1991. So this month is essentially my 24th anniversary of practicing martial arts. It also represents 24 years of friendship with Master Feathers my teacher. February is also very significant to me because it is my wedding anniversary to my lovely wife and best friend Julie. This year will be our 11th. Sorry to ramble on, this could be the longest news post we have on Hapkido Online. What can I say, I am feeling blessed. Thank you God for my wife, my teacher, and my students. Jon I hope everybody had a Merry Christmas and has a Happy New Year. So after three years I've decided to leave ooVoo behind for digital dojang work and I've built a new page that simply has a link to my Skype profile. I think we are all a little tired of having to deal with a Java update every month and greater and greater complexity to load Java with ooVoo etc. Also I have been getting some disturbing feedback regarding ooVoo anyway. Some folks are telling me that the ooVoo website has given them spamware etc. For those of you who are still using ooVoo I'll leave the old dojang online for another month but I urge you to set up Skype if you haven't already. I suspect most of you already have Skype and use it regularly. My 2015 resolution? Get in better shape, lose a bunch of fat, get my dojang built, and keep on filming, editing, and uploading Hapkido Online content. Many exciting things coming up. I look forward to exploring the high end of the THA curriculum including, chair techniques, defense against knives, guns, and clubs. Cane training, and ground survival. So stay tuned... For those of you who are interested in helping. Frankly I just need you to get the word out. We need to grow! Also I have a handful of students out there who are members of Hapkido Online but have not yet joined the THA. I urge you strongly to head over to the join page and join THA. If you do you will get a nice membership certificate, a photo I.D. Card, and a genuine THA patch that you can sew onto your dobak. Finally, like Hapkido Online the THA is on a very important mission from the Lord. We are spreading the word and the good news. Not to mention teaching some incredible martial arts. THA provides all of us with a great learning curriculum that continues to grow and get refined, seminars all over the country, the massive annual conference, and not to mention awesome books, DVD's and other useful items. I am proud to be a member and I hope you will consider joining up. Something I am going to try to implement in the coming year are regular webcam training hours once a week. Hopefully I can get enough interested people involved that we can have a kind of organized showing. I'll still do scheduled private sessions of course. I am curious what hours are best for everybody? We have a new member. His name is Rob and he hails from San Diego California. Rob has some physical disabilities and I look forward to exploring Hapkido from his point of view. I know you all will welcome him and pray that he is able to learn our arts. That's all I have for now. God Bless! Jon Happy Thanksgiving Everybody!!!! Please have a safe, sane, and blessed Thanksgiving.
Today I added a blurb about Hapkido Sparring on that page in Green Belt. This is just a further explanation on the nuts and bolts of sparring. Some folks out there had questions and this is my attempt to answer them. I may make some video for this as well. My thanks go to God for all my blessings which are manifest. I also am thankful for my wife and family. Last but not least I am very thankful for my student's and teachers and for all the fine people at THA. God Bless, Jon |
Jon FergusonTeacher and Hapkido Online Developer. Archives
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