Is Hapkido effective?

[wetware]

I am guessing that you are looking for an art with ALLOT of ground and pound and still retains much of its defensive techniques. The US Army has adopted allot of BJJ because if it's defensive capabilities in its' Modern Army Combatives Program.

You're doing good so far...

Though the biggest problem I have found is finding and instructor that actually wants to focus on the self defense stuff. Most of my instructors that I have had blatantly gloss over it and focus on what works in the ring.

What works in the ring works in the real world, period. Sure, there's other stuff you could be doing but why? When you learn how to control another person's body, a choke in the street is just as effective (if not more so, since the other person likely has little idea how to defend it) as it is in the ring.

So although I recommend the BJJ I would say that you need to shop the schools and talk with the instructors. Ask them questions about how much time they spend learning disarms and how tactics are different from the street and the ring. (Bear in mind the ring is a controlled environment where as the street has no rules and you may have to deal with factors such as multiple opponents and or weapons.)

Disarms? Really? Multiple attackers? **** me running backwards. What IIF said.

The only reason I don't recommend the Judo is I have no experience with it, but it may be a good art to consider also.

You obviously have very little experience with BJJ as well then. Otherwise you'd know that judo has more in common with BJJ than BJJ does with other forms of jiujitsu. I'm not going to get into it too in depth, but BJJ came from judo, not from traditional jiujitsu. The reason it's called Brazilian Jiujitsu and not Brazilian Judo is that at the time the terms Judo and Jiujitsu were used pretty interchangeably for what eventually became known as judo.

[hapkido_keith]

I forget if I replied to this thread 2 years ago, but here goes:

No.

Next?

[PXM]

For the love of all that is holy.

YES you could do HKD in the vain HOPE that MAYBE you will get as good grappling as you would from Judo or BJJ.

YES you could do HKD in the vain HOPE that MAYBE your striking will be comparable to that of MT.

Or you could cut the bullshit and Asian martial art pretentious elitism and just do those martial arts.

[Vorpal]

The "multiple attacker" scenario seems to be brought up only by people who would have virtually no hope in defeating any single attacker at any range of combat.

[DARPAChief]

YES you could do HKD in the vain HOPE that MAYBE you will get as good grappling as you would from Judo or BJJ.

YES you could do HKD in the vain HOPE that MAYBE your striking will be comparable to that of MT.

It would be a misnomer to say HKD is to BJJ/Judo as HKD is to MT. Mainstream HKD would be more likely to emphasize full contact sparring than groundwork and throws. Additionally, there's a wider variety of kicking techniques and some of them are pretty solid; low spin kick, for example. That doesn't solve the problem of FINDING a full contact establishment, but they do exist; HKD with groundwork is getting into unicorn territory.