Hello,
My name is Jon Ferguson. I am a servicemember who teaches Martial Arts on the side.
One of the difficulties I have had in teaching Hapkido to military people is that either they or I have to transfer every three to four years. It is fair to say that I have students all over the world at this point. I myself would have to spend hours upon hours in a car just to get to my own Hapkido teacher.
A students commitment to learn is mirrored by the teachers commitment to teach. I have felt the burden of not being able to continue teaching my students. With that in mind I began tooling around with the idea of an interactive Hapkido website, so that I can effectively continue teaching my people anywhere in the world. I had the idea some three years ago and even made an early site that didn't really work too well.
I decided recently to give it another try. I'll be the first to admit that I am not a great web designer. I decided to use a provider and work from a standard template this time and the results have been WAY better. I've only been building the site for about a week but it is already a great resource!
When I began learning martial arts (20 years ago) it was reasonably affordable (my first classes cost $14 a month). That has changed considerably over the years. Nowadays Hapkido instruction (if you can even find it) runs between $80 and $250 a month. Even learning from a DVD series runs in the $500 range, sometimes more.
Some try to learn from free videos on YouTube and such but this is a very inefficient way to learn and often ignores the fundamentals that a beginning student must learn. If you have learned this way, good on you, but I bet if you could you would rather have formal instruction.
So I've created an interactive Hapkido Learning website that is affordable and has proven an effective way to learn martial arts.
Thanks for having me here!
Jon
Originally Posted by Fergal
