The Best Martial Art For Self Defence

Learning a martial art is one of the more practical things you can do for your own safety. Training doesn't make you invincible, but it changes how you respond when something goes wrong. Someone who has spent time being pushed, hit, pinned down and put under pressure in the gym is far more likely to stay composed and be well prepared in a real confrontation. Being untrained can often cause you to freeze and panic. This can lead to bad decision making and fatigue during a struggle. Being prepared to your best ability through training can help you keep a level head if the day ever came where you needed to defend yourself.

With that said, the most effective self-defence in almost any confrontation is not being there for it. Reading a situation early, keeping your distance and, if it comes to it, being able to run fast and far will do more to keep you safe than any strike or submission.

Avoidance isn't always possible though, and no single art fits every situation. What serves you best depends on the circumstances, whether you're facing one person or several and whether it stays standing or ends up on the ground. Different scenarios call for different tools. What follows is a practical look at how the arts compare, and what separates training that holds up from training that doesn't.

Avoidance and awareness

Awareness is the first layer. Noticing a situation developing early gives you the time and space to leave before it turns into anything. De-escalation is the second, and is a skill in its own right. Keeping your hands visible, your tone level and your pride in check gives the other person room to back down without losing face, and many confrontations end right there.

When it turns physical

Sometimes there's no way out and the situation becomes physical. This is where training proves its worth and where the strengths and weaknesses of each art come into focus. You have to make quick decisions to understand how you're going to handle the situation you've found yourself in. Things to consider: the type of person you're dealing with, the number of people you're dealing with and the environment you're in.

Grappling

Grappling arts such as wrestling, judo and Brazilian jiu jitsu are mostly built around controlling and submitting another person. They also teach you how to escape being pinned. Against a lone attacker, control is invaluable, letting you take an aggressor down, hold a dominant position and bring the situation to an end. It's just as useful if the opposite happens and you're the one being held down. Being able to off-balance someone while you're underneath them so you can reverse the position, or get inside position to frame and create space to escape, is a skill everyone should learn. You don't have to be big or strong to do it. It comes down to solid fundamentals and technique, not strength. Another great benefit of grappling is you don't have to throw strikes which can cause someone to fall and hit their head. If you are proficient in takedowns, once you have the attacker on the ground, they really are in a world of problems.

I remember my first few months as a white belt in bjj, how easily a higher belt can hold you down and you feel helpless. It really is a strange experience, finding out how someone can pin then submit you and you can't do anything about it. Even if they are half your size and trained a couple of years, it is quite a humbling experience. That is the reason I never stopped going, I couldn't walk around knowing someone else can do that to you. Like Nate Diaz said in an interview on Theo Von's podcast, "you're walking around helpless and you don't even know it". Usually on videos that you see online when someone comes up against a bjj practitioner, an attacker pinned on bottom gets exhausted from trying to push you off causing them to fatigue and give up. This is why I believe grappling is a great neutraliser when defending yourself.

The complication is numbers. Committing to the ground ties you to one opponent while anyone else present is free to intervene, and it's difficult to keep an eye on your surroundings during a grappling exchange. One on one, grappling is formidable. Against multiple opponents, it can quickly become a liability. This is what leads me onto the next subject…

Striking

Striking arts such as boxing, Muay Thai and kickboxing keep you upright and mobile, which is exactly what a multiple-attacker scenario calls for. Staying on your feet lets you create distance, keep moving and avoid being pinned down by any single person. The odds against several attackers remain poor, and no discipline changes that, but mobility offers options the ground simply doesn't. Striking also carries a serious consideration of its own. A well-placed punch can drop someone, and an unprotected head meeting the ground can cause grave injury, sometimes far beyond what was intended.

Striking is also great against a single attacker. Being able to manage your distance and pick your shots against someone untrained will quickly cause them to fold. The art of striking is to hit and not get hit, so at the very least you'll be well trained in reading and slipping the shots coming your way. Even a good push kick can give you the space you need to make your getaway.

Pressure testing

Whatever the style, the single greatest predictor of whether training transfers to a real situation is pressure testing. Sparring, live rolling and drilling against a partner who is genuinely resisting are what separate functional skill from choreography. A technique rehearsed only against a compliant partner tends to collapse the moment the other person stops cooperating, and a real assailant will not cooperate.

If you are training for self-defence, find a martial art or gym that pressure tests constantly. Point sparring can be good as you are avoiding injuries and trauma, but it doesn't translate as well as full contact martial arts. As Mike Tyson said, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth". If you have been punched in the face in sparring, or pinned down and submitted, you get familiar with this and it will help you to stay calm in bad situations and not freeze up the way many would who have never been tested before.

Competition

Competing takes pressure testing even further. A real match is something you can't recreate in normal training: the nerves beforehand, someone in front of you who wants to beat you. It puts you under a level of adrenaline much closer to a real confrontation, and adrenaline is what catches people out. It floods your body and makes everything harder, your focus narrows and movements you've drilled a thousand times suddenly feel clumsy. Even a good fighter can come undone if they've never felt it before. The more you compete though, the more familiar that feeling becomes, and you slowly learn to keep a clear head and do what you've trained while your heart is pounding. You don't need to be chasing medals to get something from it either. Even competing every now and then builds a composure that sparring on its own rarely gives you, and more often than not, that composure is what makes the difference when things get real.

Training multiple martial arts

Ideally you'd train both a striking art and a grappling art. Between the two you've got an answer for wherever the fight ends up, whether it stays on the feet or hits the floor. Boxing or kickboxing keeps you comfortable at range, picking your shots and keeping out of the way of theirs. If it ends up on the ground, a wrestling or jiu jitsu base means you're not suddenly helpless. Grappling also gives you the option to control and restrain someone rather than keep hitting them. That kind of control is something striking on its own can't offer. Cover both and you're ready for most of what a real situation can throw at you.

Mixed martial arts does the same job in a single system. MMA blends striking, wrestling and ground fighting and pressure tests all of it against a fully resisting opponent, so rather than switching between disciplines you train the transitions between them from the outset. Those transitions are where fights tend to get messy, the takedown attempt, the scramble, the point where striking turns into grappling.

Weapons and multiple attackers

It pays to be honest about your abilities. Once a weapon enters the picture, or several attackers do, no amount of training makes you safe, and anyone who claims otherwise is overselling it.

My old wrestling coach Sam, who also worked as a prison guard, used to drum this into us. He would have two people try to take you down and pin you at once, and it was surprisingly easy to end up stuck, one person wrapping up your legs while the other controlled your upper body. Most of the time I ended up pinned and unable to get back up. His advice for that situation was simple: if two people have hold of you, be "pointy". Throw knees, elbows, anything that buys you the space to get free. If you try to grapple in that situation, being outnumbered simply won't work, so be "pointy". That stuck with me.

The bottom line

No single art covers every scenario, and the endless debate over the "best" one tends to distract from what matters. Learn to recognise trouble and step around it. If you do train, choose something that is pressure tested, at a gym you'll return to willingly, and train it consistently. A well-drilled boxer, wrestler or jiu jitsu practitioner will always be better prepared than someone who dabbled in the "perfect" art for a month and gave up. In the end, the best martial art for self-defence is the one you'll stick with, backed by the good sense to avoid ever needing it.

My take

As someone who predominantly trains jiu jitsu, I think for self-defence the right direction would be doing MMA. It is called mixed martial arts for a reason. Blending striking, grappling, takedowns, takedown defence and the transitions in between positions will make you the most well-rounded fighter. MMA is the closest art to simulating a real fight. It also takes out the gamified areas in martial arts such as jiu jitsu. You most likely aren't going to berimbolo someone on concrete in a real situation and it's unlikely you're going to fall back into a leg lock unless your name's Dean Lister or Mikey Musumeci. These techniques work in competitions with rulesets, tactics and no striking, but not so much on the streets. Of course, many aspects of jiu jitsu work very well if you know takedowns or end up on the ground, but for me, MMA gets straight to the point (and that's coming from a jiu jitsu guy). MMA chooses the most effective parts of every martial art when mixing techniques together to win a fight. This is my personal choice if you are looking to defend yourself.