Martial Blind Spots

The gold standard by which all other martial arts are judged is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) popularized by UFC 1. But even BJJ has significant blind spots. When it comes to evaluating martial arts, blind spots are actually a good sign, because the effective martial arts focus on a specific goal. For example:

1. In wrestling, the ultimate goal is to control your opponent, and to keep them from controlling you, proving your dominance with a pin.
2. In boxing, the ultimate goal is to out punch your opponent, knocking them unconscious or landing a lot more hits than they can land on you.

Wrestling and boxing are extremely effective because of their intense focus and sparring oriented practices around mastering techniques relevant to that focus. The best take down artists out there are wrestlers, and the most skilled punchers out there are boxers. However:

1. Wrestling has huge blind spots when it comes to submission holds, defending against strikes and weapon attacks.
2. Boxing has huge blind spots for defending against leg kicks, take downs and submission holds.

And that's good, because it focuses the art so that practitioners efficiently master a specific group of skills. ALL martial arts have blind spots, because of constraints on training time. Even all-encompassing arts like Choy Lay Fut (where you have to study it like a part time job for multiple decades before reaching an instructor level because it covers almost every technique in existence outside of submission grappling) have blind spots:

1. No martial art will cover everything. The more they focus on basic frequently used moves, the more they will miss the tricky stunts that they aren't prepared for.
2. Having too much in a martial art keeps you from focusing on what you need. The more you learn every tricky stunt in the book, the less time you have for mastering the basics that you will have the most opportunity to actually use.

When people plan to attack you, they do one or more of the following:

1. Assume they are bigger or stronger than you.
2. Bring a weapon.
3. Bring friends.

This is when blind spots in martial arts become a problem. In a chaotic situation like that you need a variety of options, more than what any one good martial art usually specializes in. There is a simple solution, presented to us by MMA. In MMA it pays to have a background in multiple martial arts. An MMA fighter will be more successful if he has trained two of the following martial arts instead of having spent the same amount of time training in only one:

• Thai Kickboxing
• BJJ
• Wrestling

We can apply this to the problem of people planning to attack you as well. Consider how better prepared a martial artist would be for fighting multiple opponents they had trained any two of the following martial arts instead of focusing on only one:

• Boxing
• Kali (stick fighting)
• Judo

Ideally you would want to have a background in both striking and grappling. There are dozens of great martial arts out there. Training in two complimentary martial arts will cover most of these blind spots.