Which Style of Martial Arts is Best For MMA & Self Defense?
By Jeff Baines
5th Degree Black Belt in Kempo
2nd Degree Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do
Level 4 Apprentice Instructor in Jeet Kune Do
Owner of Dojo Source
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The distinction that needs to be made between MMA the sport and Self Defense, is that MMA has rules and the street has no rules. Weapons are not allowed in MMA, but they are in Self Defense. There are certain strikes and joint locks that are not allowed in MMA because they are too dangerous, but these ones are often the ones that are MOST effective in a Self Defense scenario. So it is important to note that an MMA gym that trains fighters for the sport can lack skills that may be useful for Self Defense. The sport of MMA is still one of the closest things that we can get to a Self Defense scenario while keeping both fighters relatively safe. My instructor has shown me some videos of sports allowed in other countries that allow some of those “illegal” moves like headbutts so there are even closer to Self Defense events out there to find, but only if you’re brave enough to compete in them.
MMA stands for mixed martial arts and like the name implies you have to mix several different martial arts in order to compete against high-level Fighters. No one martial art can dominate all the different fighters in MMA. There are five fighting ranges, they are weapons, kicking, punching, trapping, and grappling. Obviously weapons aren't allowed in MMA fights, but anything goes in the streets. It is difficult to test some of these fighting styles safely and MMA fights are some of the closest things we have to street fighting and self defense scenarios. There are some martial arts that dominate one of these ranges in MMA and some martial arts styles that do very well in a couple of these ranges. Unfortunately, there is no martial art that is the best in all of these ranges, unless you count Jeet Kune Do (JKD). The major principle of JKD is taking what is useful and discarding the rest, so true practitioners of JKD have trained in as many Martial Arts as they can and taken the best moves and strategies from each and added them to JKD. JKD is truly a Mixed Martial Art.
Before training Jeet Kune Do with my instructor I had trained Tae Kwon Do and Kempo. Kempo is a mixed Martial Art, there are parts of Kung Fu, Judo, Karate, and Jiu Jitsu in it. However, upon training JKD under my instructor I have learned about the gaps that exist in Kempo and Tae Kwon Do. My Instructor has been training Martial Arts for over 4 decades, he has been in real self defense scenarios with and without weapons, over 500 MMA fights, and through all this he has learned many of the best tools offered by each Martial Art. This information is mostly what I have learned from him. My Instructor is sort of uniquely qualified to talk about which Martial Arts are best for each range because he has actually done MOST of the different styles of Martial Arts, he actually tried to sit down and count all of them recently and got to 60 different styles. There are lots of Instructors who will tell you something like “Two Tigers cannot inhabit the same mountain” in an effort to get you to only train with one teacher or one style (their style). Jeet Kune Do Instructors will never tell you this, because whatever you learn from that other instructor or style can just be added to what you already know.
Weapons Range
MMA
Weapons are not allowed in MMA fights, so many MMA gyms don’t teach anything about weapons.
Self Defense
Kung Fu, Karate, & Ninjitsu all have lots of weapons like Bo Staff, Nunchuk, Kamas, etc. and these weapons are great to learn because they are fun and good for coordination. However, nobody is walking around with Katanas or Nunchuk on their hips anymore and it would be hard to find a 6 Foot pole lying around to be used like a staff. The practicality of many of these weapons have diminished, and the weapons of this day and age are mostly knives, guns, and sometimes bats or short sticks of some kind. The Martial Art known for its knife and stick work is the Indonesian Martial Art of Kali. Kali trains you to use sticks, knives, and eventually bare handed combat against an armed opponent. So if you want to train for weapons that people may actually use you will need to find a school that teaches Kali. Many Kempo schools teach “Club Defense” and “Knife Defense” techniques, and some of them teach sound principles for weapon defense but if you don’t know how to use the weapon that you are defending against yourself you won’t have a great idea of how your opponent will move. So in addition to those Knife and Club Defense techniques, these schools need to teach the fundamentals of Kali to help these techniques be more successful against an actual opponent.
Kicking Range
MMA
Next let’s move to the longest unarmed range, kicking range. The best fighting styles for kicking range are usually considered Savat, Tae Kwon Do, and Muay Thai. For a while Muay Thai did dominate in all the Striking ranges because of their devastating leg kick. So most MMA coaches will advise you to learn at least some Muay Thai to protect yourself from these leg kicks. After Muay Thai fighters kept coming in and winning all the Kickboxing and MMA matches, everyone started training some Muay Thai and added it to what they already do. So now many of the Savat and Tae Kwon Do fighters can keep up with the Muay Thai fighters in Kicking Range now. So if you want to be a good kicker, find yourself a Savat, Tae Kwon Do, or Muay Thai school.
Self Defense
Kicking in Self Defense is almost the same as in MMA fighting. Many MMA fights end in a knockout by kick or hard kick to the liver and both of these have the potential to end a Self Defense scenario as well. Kicking requires great balance and coordination to pull off, this makes it a tad risky in Self Defense unless you have been training in Savat, Tae Kwon Do, or Muay Thai for a significant amount of time. However, if you do put in the time and effort to get good in Kicking Range, your opponent likely lacks the balance and coordination to fight you effectively in Kicking Range. Being good in Kicking Range is quite the advantage, because your opponent may not expect it, again they probably can’t effectively stop you because they don’t have the balance or coordination, and kicking lets you keep the opponent further away than punching or any of the other barehand ranges.
Punching Range
MMA
There is really only one Martial Art that controls punching range, and this is the one where only punching is allowed. This is of course Boxing. Boxing has the market cornered on punching range, the other Martial Arts like Karate, Kung Fu have some moves that are effective in punching range that are not allowed in Boxing (Boxing has very limited rules, these other moves are allowed in MMA and self defense). These moves like the Palm Heel and Hammer can be added into your Boxing to make it more dynamic. Most Muay Thai gyms have adopted Boxing to handle Punching Range, and all MMA gyms do some combination of Boxing and other traditional Karate or Kung Fu. If you only care about Punching Range, you should join a Boxing gym, but if you care about other ranges most MMA and Muay Thai schools have added Boxing principles to what they already do.
Self Defense
In a Self Defense Scenario, Boxing has a huge danger of breaking your hand. If you don’t know how long the fight will last and you throw a punch that breaks your hand in the first couple of seconds you may make it much harder to finish the fight because you’ll have to fight through the pain. The mechanics of throwing a good punch that come from Boxing are best and still apply but using open handed strikes taught in arts like Karate, Kempo, or Kung Fu are more valuable in a Self Defense Scenario. That is not to say that you have to do a traditional Martial Arts for Self Defense in Punching Range, you can still go to a Boxing Gym. Just imagine and practice on your own doing all those same punches without gloves on and hitting with the heel of your palm or a hammer fist.
Trapping Range
MMA
Trapping Range includes quite a bit, Elbows, Knees, Headbutts, the Clinch, and some Takedowns and Joint Locks (many Takedowns and most Joint Locks work better in Grappling Range though). Many Martial Art styles do Sparring, but don’t allow Elbows, Knees, or Headbutts at all in their sparring because it is just too dangerous. MMA actually has several rules regarding these strikes, Headbutts aren’t allowed at all, and only certain kinds of Elbows and Knees are allowed. This should tell you just how strong these strikes are. Many Martial Arts styles teach Elbows and Knees, but one of the few styles that allows it in their sparring is Muay Thai. You can understand a move inside and out, but if you never spar with it there will always be things that you miss. This is why most MMA gyms include Muay Thai in the mix of what they teach, because it deals with so much of the sport. Muay Thai has some great takedowns, but the Martial Art that is most known for their takedowns is Judo. If you want to learn how to take someone to the ground, Judo is the art of takedowns and their sparring is all about takedowns. Wrestling and Jiu Jitsu have taken many of the moves from Judo and added them to their art because they don’t want opponents to be able to strike them so takedowns are crucial to these arts. When a Wrestler or Jiu Jitsu practitioner gets close enough to you to hit you with an elbow or knee, they know you could hit them too, so they take you down and move you into grappling range instead. So most MMA gyms include some form of Jiu Jitsu or Wrestling in their teaching to handle takedowns.
Self Defense
Whenever I hear about a move that is “not allowed” in MMA, I think “oh so this is perfect for self defense then!” Groin strike, illegal in MMA, great in Self Defense (if you can hit that target). No eye gouges, illegal in MMA, great for Self Defense. I feel like Trapping Range has the most rules in it to protect the MMA fighters, because strikes in Trapping Range are some of the most damaging strikes to the human body. Muay Thai has some of the best moves for Trapping Range that Martial Arts has to offer. Muay Thai Knees and Elbows are legendary and when Muay Thai fighters came to MMA they dominated with these strikes. However, they do not allow Headbutts in Muay Thai or MMA (for good reason). There is a Martial Art style that allows Headbutts in their sparring, and that is the Burmese Martial Art of Lethwei. I believe Lethwei and Muay Thai have a lot of similarities, but the biggest difference is Lethwei allows Headbutts. My Instructor did his over 500 MMA fights before they had weight classes, and when everything except eye gouges were allowed. He said he ended most of his fights with a Headbutt. To learn how to defend yourself from the striking in Trapping Range, you should do Lethwei, or you can do Muay Thai but find a way to incorporate Headbutts into your training. To deal with the Takedowns and Joint Locks that happen in Trapping Range, you will need to train some Wrestling, Judo, or Jiu Jitsu.
Grappling Range
MMA
Most Jiu Jitsu instructors will tell you that all fights go to the ground. Well of course they would say that! Their entire Martial Art involves getting your opponent on the ground and then choking or joint locking them into submission. Many fighters have trained their striking to a very high degree, and if you can get these fighters to the ground all that striking can be made useless. So of course these fighters have also had to train how to keep themselves from going to the ground. You end up with situations where some fighters like to fight on the ground, in Grappling Range, and other fighters like to stay standing and strike their way to a knockout victory. When these two kinds of fighters clash, who wins? Easy, the fighter who is better at either not falling down or taking their opponent down. Not all fights go to the ground, but when they do you want to know some kind of Martial Art that specializes in Grappling Range like Jiu Jitsu (Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is currently the most popular) or Catch Wrestling. For the strikers who don’t want to end up on the ground, they have to train a Grappling Range Martial Art so that they can get back to a striking position or if they get good enough, they could get their opponent in a submission as well. Be warned that doing just Jiu Jitsu or Catch Wrestling is different from MMA, because most pure Grappling gyms do not allow striking of any kind in their “sparring” (they call it rolling). Striking while you are in Grappling Range is allowed in MMA, so if you want to do MMA you need to do Martial Arts in Kicking, Punching, and Trapping Ranges as well. To anyone that says “all fights go to the ground”, I may point them to the statistics about how fights end in the UFC, these show a greater percentage of fights end in KO or TKO (from a strike) than in almost every weight class.
Self Defense
Grappling Range is great when fighting one opponent, if you are good you can keep your opponent from hitting you while you slowly move them towards a choke hold or joint lock. One of the great things about Grappling is that you don’t have to knock someone out or break a bone to finish the fight. Any person who is frustrated because they are getting beat up in a striking range by you will try to tackle you. They instinctively understand that if they can just keep your body really close to theirs, you won’t be able to strike them. If they can just get you close, maybe they can figure out how to squeeze you hard enough to get you to stop fighting back. It makes sense then to learn how to fight from Grappling Range. The same Martial Arts for MMA still are the best for Self Defense in Grappling Range, you should learn Jiu Jitsu or Catch Wrestling. But like I said earlier striking is allowed while Grappling in a Self Defense scenario so you won’t be able to rely just on Grappling in a pure sport sense, you will need to find a gym that either does MMA Grappling or does Grappling that allows striking. Some slight modifications need to be made to sport Jiu Jitsu moves to make them safe against striking. In addition, Self Defense scenarios are unpredictable and Grappling does not work against multiple attackers. If you are on the ground tangled up with one attacker you have less free limbs to defend yourself against their friend(s).
If you are sparring with your sibling or maybe a training partner at a Martial Arts gym, there are lots of moves that are considered “dirty”. For example licking your sibling’s hand to get them to let go of you in disgust. Other examples are pinching, biting, hair pulling, and eye gouging. These moves have been banned from MMA and all sport Martial Arts, but in the street there are no rules and fighting “dirty” is not only allowed but it might be the easiest way to get out of danger. In fact, there is an entire subset of moves in some Martial Arts dedicated to “dirty fighting” called Kinomutay.
Before talking more about these dirty fighting techniques, I want to caution you, these moves do work and inflict pain but doing these moves on their own may only escalate the fight unless you use it with a plan in mind. For example if your older brother had you pinned down and you decided to pinch or lick him, he would flinch a bit but if that wasn’t enough to get out of the pin, your brother would get angry and start to squeeze you and hit you harder while saying something like “Oh It’s that kinda fight, huh?” The same is true of a Self Defense scenario, if your opponent is in a dominant position and you bite them, they will release that position just a bit for only a moment opening a door for your escape, but if you can’t get through that door, they will lock you down harder and will be angry now.
Kinamutay is about using these dirty techniques for a purpose and with an end goal in mind. For example some people who train Kinomutay will buy raw meat and strap it to their body then when you spar, your goal is to remove a certain amount of raw meat from your opponent’s body in a certain amount of time. This simulates biting to completely disable your opponent, if you can completely sever certain muscles, your opponent will not be able to move that part of their body in addition to being in terrible pain. Or even more violently, biting an opponent’s Throat and making it so they can’t breathe is an option. Many Martial Arts overlook practicing these “dirty” techniques because they think, “If I have to use it, I will use it and it will work.” If you don’t practice using a move, you won’t pull it off in a Self Defense Scenario. Kinamutay would also focus on how to defend against ”dirty” techniques, because you may not know how to prevent important body parts from getting heavily damaged if someone started biting you. So if you want a complete understanding of all parts of the “Martial” part of Martial Arts, make sure that your instructor teaches you Kinamutay.
Conclusion
The reason that MMA exists is because no one Martial Art is enough on its own to dominate in the sport of MMA or prepare you for all that can happen in a Self Defense scenario. Many Martial Arts need to be combined to be properly prepared for any kind of attacker. So it really depends on what you are looking to get out of the Martial Arts. If you are not looking to compete in MMA matches and you are not worried about defending yourself from any kind of attacker, feel free to try any Martial Art you want. There are many benefits of Martial Arts that have nothing to do with fighting or Self Defense, see our Blog about the Top 10 Benefits of Martial Arts. All Martial Arts are a lot of fun, and if your goal is fun, just go find a gym and a style that is fun for you. If your goal is MMA or Self Defense, find a gym that talks about the different Fighting Ranges and how to transition between them.
Instead of thinking about whether a Martial Arts is best or worst, remember that all Martial Arts can offer useful techniques, strategies, and attributes. Asking the question “Which Martial Art Is Best?” is actually the wrong question, because there isn’t a correct answer. If two fighters were to only train in one style, each a different one, and then they fought, the fighter that won might have done so only because of luck or superior athletic ability. There’s no way to say that the winner of that fight definitively proves that one style is better than another because in the hands of a different fighter the outcome might be different. This hypothetical also doesn’t reflect real life, because no fighter that enters an MMA fight does so with only training in one style. Every fighter knows that it takes more than one style to be effective. So the better question is “Which Combination of Martial Arts is best?” This is the question that Jeet Kune Do seeks to answer, because it doesn’t limit itself to just one style or one source of information. In the words of the great General Iroh “It is important to draw wisdom from different places. If you take it from only one place it becomes rigid and stale.” (Avatar The Last Airbender 2005) Any Instructor that is unwilling to see other perspectives and learn new things has become too rigid, you want an instructor who is still learning from others.
Don’t count out a Martial Arts style that I didn’t include in this article either. All styles teach you important skills for one or more fighting ranges, and all styles will help you develop attributes that will help you in learning about the other ranges. The styles that I talked about were some of the best that my Instructor and I thought were best. You may have your own combination of Martial Arts that help you feel like a complete fighter in all 5 ranges, and just because I didn’t mention YOUR combination of styles doesn’t mean that it is wrong. You can combine a multitude of styles to fill in all the gaps in your fighting ranges, there is not one answer. Also the attributes that you develop along the way could be even more beneficial than the knowledge you possess. Attributes like Speed, Power, Balance, Timing, Footwork, Accuracy, Flexibility, etc. are developed by all Martial Arts, and someone who is faster and stronger can sometimes beat someone with more knowledge. Whatever style you are training right now, as long as it is fun for you and you feel like you are getting better through good instruction, you are in the right place. There is more Martial Arts to learn than anyone one person possibly could in a lifetime, so take all that you can from the style you start with and after you feel good about it go try another. You will never know all there is to know and fights are fast and unpredictable so you will never be invincible. The journey is the fun part!
Here at Dojo Source we teach Kempo as it forms a good foundation for Striking and as you advance you will learn more of the principles of Jeet Kune Do. The first being that Kempo isn’t perfect, and there are things that should be added to it to make you a complete fighter. Boxing is added in to make you better in Punching Range. Muay Thai is added in along with Tae Kwon Do (my Instructor says my Tae Kwon Do Kicks look very similar to Sevat Kicks and I’ll add his notes to my kicks to make them better) to make you a formidable fighter in Kicking Range. We begin adding Kali in so you can prepare to fight someone using weapons. Then we add a mix of Jiu Jitsu and Catch Wrestling to learn to both prevent a fight from going to Grappling Range and learning to grapple if they are good enough to force the fight there. Lastly, we help you understand Trapping Range through Muay Thai, this is the most dangerous range to practice safely, which is why we focus on it last, it requires the most control. So Dojo Source offers something for everyone, even if you have trained Martial Arts already, we can increase your skills in the Fighting Ranges where you have less experience. If you want to try a free class, sign up by going here: www.dojosource.fit/free-trial.
Martial Arts is a wonderful activity that is both fun and has many benefits. I hope that you give Martial Arts near you a try to see the benefits for yourself. If you are near Arvada, CO come to Dojo Source to see a class for yourself. Click Here to try a Free Class.
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