I have been doing Martial Arts since I was 6 years old and it has had a huge impact on my life. I did take a break from it in middle and high school, and although I forgot some of the exact moves like the katas, most of the principles and ideas remained important to my life during the break. Upon starting up again in college, I discovered that there was so much extra to learn as an adult that I had missed or wasn't’ ready for as a child. Then I began to compare myself to friends and other adults who don’t do Martial Arts. When I began teaching I would notice the growth in students as they progressed in the Martial Arts. This is a list of the Top 10 things that I have noticed that Martial Arts helped me with and I hope will help you too!

As you train, you come to know your body quite well. You will know what it can do. You will know how hard it can strike, how quickly it can move, and how long it can reach. But most importantly you will come to know how soft you can strike, how quickly you can stop a motion, and how to keep relaxed even in tense situations. I have had countless punches and kicks thrown at me through my 21 years of training. You begin to notice the ones that are actually dangerous and which ones you could block or easily dodge. You know that you have the control to strike someone right where it hurts, but you also know that you throw a lightning fast strike that stops mere millimeters from harming them if you so chose.

I don’t want to hurt people though… Martial Arts isn’t about hurting people, it’s about protecting yourself and the people you care about. Watching boxing or the UFC you see that Martial Arts can be used to hurt others but we forget that those people are choosing to enter the ring and choosing to risk hurting themselves. What you don’t see is the hours they put in NOT hurting other people. If they spent everyday hitting and getting hit that hard their careers would only last like 2 months. Their bodies wouldn’t be able to heal fast enough to keep up with it. You can enjoy Martial Arts without EVER getting hit or hitting that hard, join a school that doesn’t focus on combat. I often tell people who are scared to spar (that’s when we put on the gloves and pads, and simulate a fight) the thing that hurts the most when I am done sparring are my smiling muscles because I smile and laugh the whole time. Your instructor should be making it clear that during most sparring the goal is to learn, not to hurt others.

2) Safety (Self Defense & Falling Correctly)

One of the biggest reasons people start training Martial Arts is because they don’t feel safe for some reason or another. Maybe you are smaller than all the other kids in your class and you keep getting picked on. It could be that you are in a household or community where you don’t get to feel safe. Possibly you live in a society where violence is the norm and you hear news stories every day about people getting hurt. Or maybe you are part of a group that is the target of hate and violence and you fear for yourself and your family. Whatever the reason, you chose to join a Martial Arts school of some kind. I can’t recommend highly enough the feeling of peace you get from feeling like you could defend yourself no matter the situation. That doesn’t mean that I always feel invincible, but for every “what if this happened?” that pops into my brain, I feel like I have an answer that is enough to satisfy my fears enough to focus on other things. 

A mother approached me recently and said, “I saw my child fall off the slide the other day and I thought they were going to get hurt, but as they hit the ground they did that one move you taught them and then got up completely unharmed! It was amazing!” The name of that move in Japanese is called “Ukemi”, some places call it a “Breakfall”, and here at Dojo Source we call it “Slap Out”. These moves are basically how to fall properly so that you don’t hurt yourself and this has been one of the most valuable lessons I have learned from Martial Arts. Many people I know have fallen while playing a sport and gotten injured, but learning to “Slap Out” when I was very young has protected me from any serious injuries caused by falling. Many of my friends have told me similar stories to that mother as they watched me play a sport. They said something like “When that person tripped you, I thought you were going to fall down and break something but then you just got up like nothing happened.” Teaching people to fall safely is one of the skills I value most and it is one of the first skills we teach our students.

I’m not worried about people starting fights with me because I am confident that I could defend myself in that fight. While being able to defend yourself is one of the most important goals of Martial Arts, you will begin to realize that the more you learn the less you feel like you have to use it. As you improve, you will gain confidence in your body and skill, and as you do so you will find that your confidence prevents others from fighting you. Most people don’t actually want to fight, if you are confident and aren’t afraid of backing down, you will be able to talk your way out of fighting. Imagine the confidence you would feel in talking your way out of something knowing that if talking didn’t work you could still defend yourself. 

There was a study done recently on people who commit violent crimes, if you want to know more about the study check out this article. The study got data about what makes people more likely to be attacked. The way that people walk tells criminals whether that person will make an easy target. When you walk confidently (because you have good coordination) you seem like less of a target. 

4) Coordination

If you have never done Martial Arts before, you will quickly find that it uses muscles that you don’t often use. Doing sports or working out will target specific muscles and groups of muscles through repeated movements. However, through Martial Arts you will move your body in new and often unique ways. Just like when you start playing any new sport or doing any new activity, the new muscles take time to gain endurance. However, in Martial Arts that feeling doesn’t go away for a longer time because just as you master moving a certain way we change it and add some new movement on to what you’ve been doing. 

It was a popular trend not too long ago to ask adults to skip, and then everyone laughs as the adult can’t remember how to make their body skip. Adults have forgotten the coordination required to do something like skipping. Adults have gained coordination in many areas, but often lose coordination in other areas because we stop moving in novel ways. In most sports you will use a repetitive motion using just one side of your body. For example baseball players practice running, throwing, catching, and hitting but they don’t practice kicking, jumping, etc. because their sport doesn’t really require it. Also we are encouraged to just get good with one side of our body instead of doing both sides. So people that focus on one sport will experience a lack of coordination in other sports because they never practice those motions or they are good with their dominant side and cannot do a motion with their other hand. In Martial Arts you are usually encouraged or even required to learn those motions using both left and right sides of your body. We also are one of the sports that explore as many fundamental human body movements as possible. This increases your coordination and body control and will actually make you better at any other sports you do play.

There are two activities that practice most of the fundamental human body movements, Martial Arts & Dancing. When a Martial Artist or Dancer tries another sport, people are usually surprised at how quickly they pick it up. Having taught Martial Arts for almost 15 years now, I notice when a new person learns the first moves quickly and even shows a more advanced understanding of the movement without being told. I always ask them “Have you done Martial Arts before?” Some people grin and say “yes.” Others look a little confused and say “No, why?” In my almost 15 years of experience, almost every single one of these people are dancers. Some of the good kickers are soccer players, but they usually don’t impress me as much as the dancers on their first lesson. This also happened to me in the reverse, I went to a dance class and the instructor asked me if I had done this type of dance class before. I said “No, why?” and she quickly asked, “Have you done Martial Arts before?” and I giggled and knew that she must have noticed the same pattern.

While one of the main goals of Martial Arts is to be able to defend yourself in a dangerous situation, children lack the coordination and self control to do this early on in their training. Adults have probably played sports or done some physical activity and they have bigger bodies so they can hit harder to begin with, so adults can often skip some of the beginning lessons taught by traditional Martial Arts. However, children can’t hit as hard as adults due to their smaller bodies and still learning coordination as well as life lessons like self control, respect, etc. so Traditional Martial Arts like Karate, Tae Kwon Do, and Kempo are a great place to start for kiddos. At Dojo Source, we start off by teaching Kempo to all children, but as they advance and demonstrate the coordination and self control required to do more advanced moves we mix in more Martial Arts to make them able to defend themselves against any kind of opponent.

5) Speed & Power

Martial Arts also trains proper body mechanics that help you generate maximum power with good balance and the least wear on the body. This will give you confidence in all other activities that your body is in the right position to stay balanced and powerful in any motion. Few other activities require you to use your body in such a large variety of ways. 

I have always been on the small side, and my friends grew faster than me but I wanted to keep up with them despite being smaller. Many of them started to get larger muscles through the sports and activities that they chose. As I advanced in the Martial Arts though, my friends got bigger but in order to keep up with them I had to use what I learned in class to use my body more efficiently. In other words, I hit like a bigger man. Oftentimes at volleyball I play against men with larger muscles who are always surprised when I hit as hard as they do or often harder because my technique is better than theirs.

7) Grit & Focus

One of the popular terms in the education world recently has been Growth Mindset and Grit. Teaching kiddos to be resilient can be difficult. Martial Arts actually lends itself quite easily to help develop a Growth Mindset, because the goal of each class is just improving one or a few skills at a time. Many Martial Arts use a belt system so it is also easy to chart your growth in skill and towards your next rank. Team activities can be difficult to see your own progress because you might be playing on a really good team that keeps winning despite you lacking some skills. You may also be the best player on a team that keeps losing, so you won’t see your progress on this team until their skills catch up a bit. Individual sports like Martial Arts lend themselves a bit better to tracking your own progress. 

8) Respect

While being able to defend yourself is important, Traditional Martial Arts teaches things that many people think are even more valuable skills. For example, avoiding a fight is always better than getting into one. In Traditional Martial Arts you learn to show Respect and Kindness towards your Sensei (Instructor) and your fellow classmates. You will sometimes compete against your classmates and you always bow to them before and after, this reminds students that their opponent is still a person and is worthy of Respect and Kindness. The better at Martial Arts students get, the more confident they feel with themselves and when other people are mean to them and try to start fights, they have respect for that person and know to de-escalate the fight by showing kindness rather than engage. Plus when you feel more confident and sure of who you are, the words of others that are meant to hurt you don’t sting as much because you feel like you have a place you belong in your Dojo, and you know you are good at Martial Arts so you don’t feel worthless.

9) Flexibility

I haven’t had very many injuries in my life and I think a lot of that is owed to balance and coordination, but I also think flexibility was an important factor as well. The ability to twist and contort my body into whatever shape that it needs to allows me to protect myself when I move or fall. I have seen friends injure themselves because their body was stretched past its limit, but I knew that if the same thing happened to me I would be able to stretch further than they did so I wouldn’t have been injured from the same motion they made. 

Being able to throw kicks to an opponent’s head opens up an entire range of fighting that is unavailable to the average person. In a street fight, most people expect to have punches thrown at them or for their opponent to attempt to wrestle them. Just by looking at someone you can’t tell if they have trained Martial Arts or not, and there are many fights on the internet where someone gets surprised by a head kick. Most people can’t kick the head so most people don’t expect it, a good Martial Artist can take advantage of this weakness ending the fight in one shot. Kicks are also the longest range attack without weapons (Learn more about Fighting Ranges), so being able to throw kicks to any height can keep your opponent further away from you so they can’t punch or tackle unless they can get past your kicks.

10) Proprioception

Proprioception is sometimes called “the sixth sense”, and this is the ability of the brain to know where your body is in space. This is one of the greatest benefits of doing Martial Arts, as you are constantly thinking about and learning where your limbs are, how fast they are moving, and whether they are tense or relaxed. You come to know exactly how long your limbs are, not in inches or centimeters but by feeling, you know if your punch or kick will reach its intended target. This has helped me in most aspects of my life from just walking around to other sports. In other sports I know exactly how far I can reach out to make a play.

Conclusion

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.

What Kind of Martial Arts Do We Do (at Dojo Source)?

How Do I Know Which Martial Arts School Is Best?

How Is Karate Different From Martial Arts

Martial Arts & Kids with ADHD Study

https://www.understood.org/en/articles/9-benefits-of-martial-arts-for-kids-who-learn-and-think-differently