A well known teacher, Mr. Robert Hunt, has received his 1st degree black belt in the rare martial art form of Hapkido, the way of Spiritual Harmony.

Martial arts is an art form that anyone can begin at anytime in their life.

“I started when I was a young kid and I started with my dad,” said Mr. Hunt. “We both started doing martial arts together.”

Over the course of his martial arts career he has progressed to a 4th dan black belt and will be testing for his 5th dan black belt next month in November. Mr. Hunt has entered several competitions. Mr. Hunt is an instructor at Bighorn Martial Arts Academy and has taught for several years. One of the techniques he teaches is the bo-staff.

“I wanted to start doing bo-staff with my students, but I figured I’d better make sure that I know how to do it well first. So, just to see how I would fare, I entered a couple of tournaments. I entered some in Billings and some in Cody, just to see if I knew my stuff well enough to teach it. I ended up getting first place in those tournaments for the bo-staff competitions.”

Mr. Hunt also has spent most of his life learning other different arts and forms of martial arts, such as different styles of karate, Kumdo and Kendo. Those are Korean and Japanese styles of swordsmanship.

“My favorite technique is probably, what is called a crescent kick,” Mr. Hunt said. “I can kind of sneak over the blind spot on the shoulder and land a good kick to the head.

“The other one I like is called a jumping back kick…you jump and you spin towards your opponent and hit them with your back leg. Its a linear spinning kick … Really I’m interested in all of it, whatever opportunity I have I learn when there’s a reputable instructor that I can learn from.”

Being a teacher and a student is sometimes difficult to keep separate and discrete. However, Mr. Hunt has always been humble and never arrogant about his experiences.

“For my part it’s not something, unless we’re doing stage combat, it really doesn’t have much to do with theatre and what I’ve kinda seen that the people that talk about it all the time aren’t  the ones that usually know what they are talking about,” Mr. Hunt said. “It’s kinda like the little dogs bark the loudest kinda thing. I don’t go out of my way to talk about martial arts for no reason whatsoever. No Rex-Kwon-do.”