Masters Barry and Choon Ok Harmon are wonderful people. I always enjoyed the seminars taught my Master Barry, as he is a wealth of knowledge and a pretty nice guy too. One thing that’s always great about them is watching their demos. Since they are married, they have a special harmony and it always showed in their demos… with of course, Choon Ok always getting the best of Barry. 🙂

There are lots of good video out there of the two of them performing together. I especially love their weapons demonstrations with Choon Ok using the double short sword and Barry the single straight sword. I’ve been trying to find more video demo of just the two of them together but can’t. Lots of them demoing with others.

Oon Hak Hyung or “Crane Over Cloud” form is learned at the 5th degree black belt level in Kuk Sool.

Previously I linked to a video of Master Sung Jin Suh that had some snippets of his performance of Oon Hak Hyung along with other things.

Well, the World Kuk Sool Association 2009 World Tournament was just held last weekend and someone has posted video of the Masters demo. What I was thrilled about was seeing a complete performance by Master Sung Jin Suh of Oon Hak Hyung:

Unfortunately I can’t get wordpress.com to preroll the video to the performance, but you can flip ahead to 1:11 in the video to see it.

I have never seen this form interpreted as well as Master Sung Jin does it. His performance is amazing. The power, grace, fluidity. It’s simply awesome.

The video has some other cool things too. I really enjoyed Master Jack Harvey’s demo at the end of the video. Fun. 🙂

The curriculum of the martial art of Kuk Sool does contain animal techniques. Unlike Chinese arts which may form a style around the characteristics of a single animal, Kuk Sool looks to view animals as a whole. There are things we can learn from animal fighting styles and techniques, but we are humans, not animals. Thus when Kuk Sool views animal techniques, they take principles from the animals and adapt them to human means.

Some years ago I found a reprint of an article that discussed animal techniques in Kuk Sool. The website is long gone, but I saved the article in PDF’s.

• Kuk Sool Won’s Fighting Animals article (you must read this first to understand the context of the other PDFs)
• Crane
• Eagle
• Mantis
• Snake
• Tiger

Here’s an old video of Master Barry Harmon demonstrating various animal techniques.

Kuk Sool Won Master Gene Gause of Valencia, California has quite a collection of old and new Kuk Sool Won videos.

I personally love seeing the old stuff. There’s obviously a huge video library in people’s private collections of old Kuk Sool Won videos, from demos to training tapes to promotional materials. It’d be great if it could all be put online for people to experience.

That said, you can see a lot of Master Gause’s efforts on two YouTube channels:

TheDragonClips channel (I suspect this is Master Gause himself)

richhewton channel (I believe a student of Master Gause)

I’m going to make some separate postings of some of these videos as I think they deserve their own discussion.

Thank you Master Gause for putting these online. Looking forward to more!

Came across two blogs.

The first is Fighting Fit at Fifty, the blog of 6th degree black belt, Master Martin Ducker.

The second is Duckeys Health Corner, a personal health blog of SBN Rachel Ducker (daughter of Master Martin Ducker). Some fantastic looking recipes there. Have to try some.