How Can You Choose Your First Martial Art? Ultimate Guide

Many times in your lifetime, you may have thought that you should start training in martial arts. The reasons can be many, depending on the time you are thinking. You may think to start martial arts by the cultural influence. The reason may be to get stronger or to win the street fighting. There can be many reasons but the thing is which martial art you should choose? This question may have often confused you. There are many martial arts, such as Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Muay Thai, Boxing, and a lot of others. The list is long enough to make you confused. This article will go into detail to remove your confusion and help you choose your first martial art.

Martial arts help you in your real life in a lot of ways. Following are some ways in which martial arts are beneficial for you.

• It makes you stronger both mentally and physically. You confidently face any stressful situations. You are no longer afraid of any panic situations.

• It teaches you all sorts of things about resilience and pushes you through discomfort.

• It builds your confidence.

• It gives you more options if you ever need to defend yourself.

• It helps you to relieve your stress.

• It teaches you discipline.

• You need to learn at least one striking style, one style that emphasizes takedowns and stand-up grappling, and one style that teaches you to fight on the ground. It probably goes without saying by now that if the style you are training doesn't involve some kind of live sparring, you need to be very skeptical about how well it is teaching you to fight ultimately.

• Fighting is about making your stuff work on someone who doesn't want it to work on them. So, if you are not training against an opponent who is giving you pretty near full resistance at certain points in your training, then you never really know if it works. For self-defense and a lot of the confidence that comes from fighting, you need to feel what it is like to get hurt and keep going. The first time you get punched in the face is horrible and disorienting.

• It will make you forget a bunch of stuff. You do not want it to happen in a real fight where the stakes are very high, but also in styles like Jiu Jitsu and wrestling, you just get used to being roughed up. You fight against people who aren't politely taking the moves. You get people who like grinding their elbows into awkward places or shoving a hand into your face, and you really have to get used to that stuff and still make the moves work.

Boxing is fantastic. It's perhaps the simplest thing you can learn because you only have to worry about hands. It will teach you good head movement. It will teach you to be very good at generating power by getting your hips into the movements you are throwing. It will teach you to get hit and keep going. Boxing may be slightly less useful if you are smaller or less powerful, but there are also some examples of boxers who were smaller but still dominated.

Muay Thai is great because it introduces a whole bunch of different weapons that boxing doesn't use, and there are definitely benefits to learning to throw, like powerful low kicks, throwing elbows over the top, using the tie clinch, and using knees and stuff like that. Boxing might be preferable as a beginner because it means you have only got one thing to concentrate on rather than spreading yourself quite thin over Muay Thai but Muay Thai is a fantastic choice.

For the takedowns, it really comes down to what is available in your location and what you most feel like doing. If you live in the UK, there's a much stronger tradition of Judo, and the people here have done a lot more Judo than wrestling. Ultimately though, what both Judo and wrestling do is teach you to kind of move around a resisting person's weight and ultimately try and throw them on the floor or not be thrown into the floor yourself. That is a hugely underrated skill. If you are throwing people around on concrete or through windows or in fire hydrants, that is kind of a much more important part of the fight than it is in the UFC, where the worst thing that is going to happen is you get slammed into the canvas quite hard.

• Finally, you need to learn to grapple on the ground. Honestly, for most people, this is going to mean Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or some kind of No Gi submission grappling, but Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is fantastic. Maybe you want to play around with strikes in it, but that is something for down the road. If you are good at Jiu Jitsu, it honestly feels like a superpower. You are so much more capable than 99 percent of the population fighting in this one area where most people don't ever think about ending up. You can beat up guys that are 50 kilograms heavier than you without actually that much effort. If you are only going to learn one style, then that basically comes down to what you are going to enjoy practicing the most.

• Therefore try the hardest at but also what kind of situations you are likely to get. If you are a woman, you are unfortunately more likely to be the victim of a kind of sort of predatory violence where either someone that you know or someone that you don't kind of stalks you and tries to grab you. If you are a man, you are more likely to get in the kind of altercations that are kind of chess beating outside a bar who are you looking at kind of thing. But then it is also worth bearing in mind that those are the kinds of situations that you can often just walk or run away from. So you don't have to worry about always being prepared for those situations.

• In the same way that a woman who wants to be able to occasionally walk home at night needs to think about her own life. There is enough street fight footage out there on video. Now we know what works, and the fact is a lot of different stuff works. There are videos where stuff is resolved by striking. There are videos where stuff is resolved by grappling. There are situations where grappling is not appropriate. There are situations where striking is not appropriate. Honestly taking the guy down and trying to do some kind of grappling would have been the absolute worst choice possible in those situations, so would hitting the guy. But then again you have about half a dozen friends who have been in situations that could have turned really nasty that they have resolved using like grappling or Jiu Jitsu.

• Grappling over striking is that it gives you more options. If you are in a situation where somebody is acting out a bit, but it's not clear that anybody's life is being threatened. It's much better to have the option of either taking them down to the ground and controlling them there, choking them out, or otherwise controlling them in the clinch. Then, just cracking them in the face and watching them fall over and hit their head, and maybe you end up on a manslaughter charge.

• If you are going to learn one thing, learn the thing you will show up to. So, in what order should you learn? The order should be striking, takedowns, and grappling. The reason for that is really simple. Grappling is addictive. If you start grappling before you do anything else, chances are you will never learn anything else. You start grappling and then anything that would take you away from grappling feels like a waste of time that you could be using to learn to get better at grappling. Because the thing about grappling is it's like video games.

• You pick a partner, you slap hands, and you try and kill each other for five minutes. One of you or the other of you probably taps or gets the advantage, and it's clear who's winning or losing. Then you smile at each other and you say thanks very much. Then you do it all again, so every time you train you are getting that kind of endorphin, dopamine hit of winning and losing and really trying hard.

• New move you learned, getting you out of a situation you couldn't get out of before, or that little trick submission that you picked up, like helping you tap someone out unexpectedly. It feels like a video game in that you never get really hurt, but you can go full out and then just reset after every round. It also feels like a video game. You are constantly learning, and there is a constant tech of new stuff to do. You will never learn everything.

• There is to doing grappling. You can do it for more than 15 years, and there will still be submissions that you don't know and new stuff being invented all the time. Every hour you spend doing it is making you better at doing the thing that you have come to really like doing. That thing is rolling around on the mat and trying to tap each other out. That is the beauty of Jiu Jitsu. You ultimately get addicted to the feeling of sparring in a way that is not a million miles from a real fight. So you get a lot of close to real fight experience while you are doing something that is addictive and fun.

• The downside of that is that you won't want to do anything else, and that is why you should learn striking first. The basics of striking are pretty simple. So, striking first, take down second, and grapple third.

Choosing your first martial art is the most important step as you are stepping for the first time in the journey of martial arts. You should keep in mind your purpose for selecting the martial arts. It will help you in choosing the right martial art. One martial art cannot be right for everyone. You have to keep yourself, your strengths, your weaknesses, the martial art you can easily access, the martial art for which you can make some time every day, and your purpose in your mind while selecting the first martial art. All these things are very necessary for you in choosing the perfect martial art that aligns with your goals and requirements. But if you are with a purpose that you will learn more than one martial art so that you can make yourself perfect in all three grounds such as takedowns, grappling, and striking, then you should choose in the order as explained in the article.