Choosing a Martial Art

INTRODUCTION

I am frequently asked about what martial arts school a friend or my friend’s child should attend.  I myself have attended several different schools and have strong opinions about how to find a martial art school for you or your child.  I do indeed believe that many martial arts schools are complete wastes of time.  The considerations you should focus on when choosing a martial arts school are:

1. Aesthetics
2. Quality
3. Perspective

AESTHETICS

When you think of “martial arts school”, what do you have in mind?  What do you want to learn?  Do you have a specific culture you are trying to become exposed to?  These are the kinds of questions you need to think about first.  For more information about what kinds of martial arts are out there, see the appendix “Categories of Martial Arts” below.

The most important of these questions is “what kind of moves do you want to learn?”  The dark side of this question is “what kind of moves do you want to learn to endure the pain from?”  There is no substitute for executing the moves on others while they are trying to resist, and there is no substitute for learning how survive having a martial arts technique executed on you than having this happen to you while you are resisting.  (This is an important consideration if you are picking a martial art for your child: A) are these the kind of moves my child can handle being attacked by, and B) are these the kind of moves I want my child doing in a self-defense situation?  For this reason, grappling arts are generally preferable for younger children.)

For example, one of the best ways to learning punching is boxing.  First, you will get lots of practice punching at a moving target.  Second, you will get lots of practice getting punched.  Therefore, an important question about “what kind of moves to I want to learn” is “what kind of moves do I want to learn to get used to.”

QUALITY

Regardless of aesthetics, the quality of martial arts schools vary greatly. The poorer the quality of martial art school, the more it is a total waste of your time.  Regardless of the martial art techniques a school claims to teach, there is one universal factor when it comes to judging the degree to which they are able to teach it, and this is their sparring practices.  Sparring should:

• NOT be “stop and go”, martial arts students should fight continuously without being interrupted for minutes on end.  Sparring time is wasted when opponents spend a lot of time posturing or restarting on a line, and martial arts that do this are known to produce inferior self defense practitioners.
• Be full-contact.  Some light-contact sparring is fine, but students should frequently spar fully executing their techniques as they would in a fight, so that they can learn to land and defend against these techniques in a real fight.
• Be sane: a reasonable amount of safety equipment should be involved (mats in grappling arts, at least mouth pieces and cups in striking arts.)  Sparring should focus on the techniques the martial art claims to teach, and should be monitored closely by an experienced instructor.

The best case scenario is that the martial arts school has a full contact competition they train for in which their students test their skills against students from other schools.  There are so many style-independent full-contact amateur-competitions out there that even if your style doesn’t have a built-in competitions (like Judo or Muay Thai,) a good martial arts school should find some kind of San Shou, Sport Jujitsu, Pankration or other tournament they can participate in at least annually to test their basic self-defense athletic ability against others who are doing the same.

For example, my least favorite martial art is Tae Kwon Do.  Most Tae Kwon Do schools practice very poor quality sparring, and focus on extremely unrealistic self-defense techniques (especially high kicks.)  However some schools of Olympic Tae Kwon Do follows my sparring three points above, and insofar as a Tae Kwon Do school participates in that system’s regular competitions, these Olympic Tae Kwon Do schools are likely to teach students how to really knock down opponents attacking with high kicks, using high kicks.  If the sparring quality of the Tae Kwon Do school is high, then the students will really know how to use the moves the style claims to teach (kicks above the belt.)  But the same is true for any style: most Kung Fu schools are poor quality as well, unless they embrace serious full contact sparring (the quality of the Kung Fu is guaranteed to be higher if the students participate in serious full contact competition.)

PERSPECTIVE

You can know if your potential school’s sparring goes far enough by using Mixed Martial Arts competition as a lens.  You should be able to see professional Mixed Martial Arts fighters use moves in their fights that are like some of the moves you use while sparring. 

Tai Chi is a great example.  Tai Chi has sparring called “push hands.”  Most Tai Chi schools do some kind of “stationary push hands” where opponents stand still and try to get each other off balance to the point where one has to move their feet.  This drill is a skill building exercise, but by itself does not constitute sufficient “sparring,” as no one in MMA stands still while trying to get others off balance enough to move their feet.  This is why good Tai Chi schools also practice “moving step push hands” were much more aggressive stand up grappling is allowed.  You can tell if a Tai Chi school’s sparring is going far enough if you can see some of the the same clinching, sprawling, and other martial arts techniques that you see in professional Mixed Martial Arts competition.

Some say that this attitude towards martial arts fails to teach the “philosophy of the Martial Arts.”  However, the philosophy of the martial arts is found first and foremost through sparring.  When I was doing kickboxing, as a short guy I was very effective when I charged straight in and blasted away with hooks to the body.  From learning this strategy I learned to be more aggressive in my personal life outside of the ring as well. 

Then one day a friend of mine who weighed over 300 pounds decided to join the class, and three months later was ready to face me in the ring.  As I used my normal tool for taking on opponents, he leveraged his reach and weight against me and more or less dribbled me like a human basket ball.  8 Ibuprofen later I still had the worst headache of my life.  From this painful learning experience my instructor was able to get me to learn a wider variety of tools, especially circular side stepping.  I was able to use this side stepping in other informal challenges to be much more successful against opponents significantly outweighing me.  In real life, this taught me that though being aggressive was always an option, it also payed to be patient while under pressure, and to “stay off the opponent’s line of attack” when I am not taking a challenge head-on.

CONCLUSION

To find the best martial art, you should first figure out what it is you have in mind when you think of martial arts.  Then you should find a school that does what you have in mind, but does it with a lot of good full-contact continuous-sparring.  This sparring will allow you to have the mental benefits that martial arts are known to give people.

APPENDIX A: CATEGORIES OF MARTIAL ARTS

Martial Arts are usually categorized based on cultural origins.  Unfortunately cultural origins are one of the least effective ways to understand martial arts, since cultures other than your own are inherently difficult to understand.  Instead I’ve invented a story about a generic village developing martial arts in the same order that martial arts were popularized in the USA.  This construction does a lot to illustrate the trends we see in the martial arts, so that we can easily grasp “what kind of martial art” we are looking at in a transcultural way.

The Story	Real History	Examples
Once upon a time there was a village that they had a need to study the art of self-defense.  “Just fighting” each other was very dangerous, so they invented a form of sport fighting that effectively showed who had the best general qualities of a warrior, called “wrestling.”  They made a stage, and which ever wrestler could throw the other wrestler down onto the ground or push him off the stage first won.  This contest effectively showed who was biggest, strongest, most aggressive, and had the best grasp of how to use leverage in hand to hand combat.	The early Anglo settlers of North America brought with them various wrestling games based on trying to throw or pin the opponent. As the West encountered Asian martial arts, the spectacular “Mongolian Wrestlers” and gigantic “Sumo Wrestlers” made a lasting impression of the cultural significance of “Asian martial arts.”	Besides numerous indigenous martial arts throughout the globe that resemble this contest, Mongolian Wrestling,Sumo, Folk Wrestling and some would say American Football fit in this category of martial art.
After a while, warriors complained that while the wrestling contest did build admirable qualities in a warrior,  this kind of training did not teach the moves needed to finish a real unarmed combat confrontation.  They experimented to see exactly where the fine line was between what real-life combat moves could safely be added to the wrestling without killing all of the wrestlers. Wrestling down on the ground combined with some limited punching, kicking, choking and joint locking was added to the wrestling, with a new aim of forcing the opponent into non-lethal unconsciousness or submission.  They called this new wrestling “submission.”	Back when Folk Wrestling was taught along side Boxing in American high schools and colleges, these two arts together would have been such an art. When Americans encountered Judo, it became the most popular Asian martial art in the USA for decades, and Judo Clubs are still one of the most common types of martial arts schools here.	Martial Arts that fit this general description are Jujitsu, Mixed-Martial Arts competition, Pankration,Judo, and Sambo.
Some village warriors noted that the techniques that dominated “submission” did not represent most of the moves they needed for the battlefield, where wrestling down on the ground was bad for staying in formation, and striking techniques that could be used with weapons were needed.  Starting from the original wrestling rules, they made a new competition in which punching, kicking, and some limited weapon sparring was allowed, which they called “boxing.”	Boxing has always been a popular sport in the USA’s military.  Tae Kwon Do and Muay Thai have become the basis for their respective country’s military’s unarmed combat training. Throughout the 70′s and 80′s Asian striking arts became popular starting with Karate,  eventually culminating in a Muay Thai fad in the early 90′s.	Most of the martial arts schools you are likely to run into are in this category:Karate, Kung Fu, Tae Kwon Do, Kickboxing, Kempo etc. These are the arts most likely to involve “martial dance” (forms/katas) as a type of conditioning.  (Without sparring, martial dance is all these arts can be.)
Non-warriors in the village noted that the most important battle field skill was the use of a weapon, and that just-learning-to-use-the-weapon could give the average villager a high degree of actual self-defense ability.  They called this new weapon-only martial art “fencing.”	As the limitations of self defense training became obvious, non lethal weapons training has become more popular in the form of Filipino stick fighting starting in the 80s.  During this same time philosophical literature on the Japanese Samurai culture has become popular.	These martial arts are easy to identify, such as Kendo, Fencing, Iado, Kobudo, Paint Ball or any other weapon-only martial art.
As warriors and citizens grew old, they developed martial arts that helped them with their health, including developing self-defense techniques that maximized the advantage of skill over strength.  They called this martial art “internal.”	Though martial-dance inspired by Tai Chi has been in the USA since the 70′s, only recently have these schools emerged willing to prove their effectiveness through full contact sparring competition.	Aikido, Tai Chi, Pa Kua, and others fit solidly into this category of martial art. These are the arts most likely to involve “qi gong” (Chinese yoga) as a type of conditioning.  (Without sparring, qi gong is all these arts can be.)
Some more cynical villagers tried to figure out how to focus on techniques “too dangerous” to practice on opponents with, which they called “reality based.”	There seems to be a large amount of “unorthodox” self defense videos for sale on the internet recommending “dirty fighting” as a self-defense system.	Ninjitsu, Dim Mak, rape prevention and other notorious arts claim to teach “self defense” while not focusing on the actual athletic skills proven successful in close range combat.

To better understand the challenges with understanding martial arts through cultural categorization, see “all martial arts change .”