What Martial Art Is Best For Self Defense?

by | Dec 1, 2012 | Shihan's Blog

Knife2“What Martial Art is best for self defense?” a student asked me.  As a Jujitsu instructor who has been doing this for 32 years, I actually get this question quite a bit.  One would expect after dedicating an entire martial art career to one martial art, the answer would be obvious.  It would be the art I do.  It is obviously the best martial art for self defense.  But I could not give that answer to my student.  It would not be the truth.  Jujitsu is not the best self defense martial art in the world.

Ok, you are probably saying, I am confused now.  What?

I cannot say that Jujitsu, as practiced throughout the world is the best self defense martial art.  Some dojos focus on combat/street effective self defense, others do not.  Some look more like sport.  Some seek only to preserve a tradition and practice only kata.  So I cannot answer that question by stating Jujitsu.

There are karate styles, and kung fu styles, and Aikijutsu styles, and many styles who have practitioners that would absolutely destroy some Jujitsu practitioners.  There are many many Jujitsu practitioners who would have their asses handed to them by a mere street punk because those practitioners have never fought another human being in their entire life and have no practical experience.  There are sport Jujutsuka who have never practiced any self defense scenarios and would get killed trying to go against an assailant with a knife or gun.  So no – it is not Jujitsu.

What is it then?  Well first I would like you to take a look at an article I did called “What is Self Defense“.  It will give you the essence of what I am talking about – but I am going to answer in more specifics.  So what are the best self defense martial arts?

It is any and all martial arts.  As long as they have these 15 specific charactartistics:

  1. The techniques must be proven to work in combat.  No cobbled together mixes of karate and judo and crap-do.
  2. The techniques must be easy to learn and easy to understand their concepts
  3. There must be few core concepts which apply across many techniques
  4. The techniques must be easy to remember
  5. The techniques must be easy to execute
  6. The techniques cannot be designed to be successful only if you are stronger than your opponent
  7. The techniques must work on almost everyone
  8. The techniues must give at least one, preferably two answers to every common armed and unarmed attack
  9. There must be backup techniques, so that if one of your core techniques fails for one reason, your mind immediatly moves to its backup technique
  10. The techniques must render the attacker appropriately downed and controlled, allowing for the defender to escape
  11. Techniques must be practiced in a “pressure” atmosphere, where you must execute them under duress
  12. Techniques must be tested and tested and tested in unrehearsed self defense scenarios
  13. The class must contain a difficult fitness component.  Anyone who thinks that fitness does not give you an edge in self defense is a fool
  14. Techniques must be applicable to the current potential threat types.  It is meaningless to practice techniques for self defense designed to thwart attack types that happened a hundred years ago and simply no longer occur
  15. Lastly – and extremely important – your techniques cannot exist in a vaccum.  Just because you can demonstrate how to kick or throw a cooperative partner in the dojo, does not mean you have any chance whatsoever of executing them in real life against an aggressive attacker.  If you cannot execute them against a resisting attacker who is bent on hitting, kicking, grabbing, stabbing or shooting you at full force – they are useless.

So this is the real answer to the student’s question.  What Martial Art is best for self defense?  The one in which students and instructors train with the above listed charactaristics.  It could be any art in any dojo.  It really doesnt matter.  Because if you are not training with the above list of charactaristics in your dojo – you are fooling yourself into thinking you will be able to defend yourself against an actual aggressive attacker.