If you feel that it is the right time to start learning self-defense and improve your physical fitness, you are at the right place because we created a list of best martial arts for real life situations and fitness. Unfortunately, these days having knowledge in combat sports is almost a must because you never know if you will have to defend yourself during your walk home or in a parking lot while walking towards your car. Luckily, people from all over the world have been developing different forms of martial arts for ages and the choice of martial arts is everything but scarce. If you are interested in the easiest way to learn to defend yourself we advise you to take a look at our 7 Easiest Forms of Martial Arts to Learn for Self Defense.
Martial arts and physical fitness go hand in hand because all martial arts combine strength training, conditioning, mobility, agility, flexibility, functional movements and technique. While you are getting better at each one of these aspects, your ability to defend yourself will grow more and more. If you are physically stronger, chances to fight off a bigger opponent are much bigger. When your stamina and agility improve, you have bigger chances of escaping from your attacker. Another outcome of training martial arts will be a perfect body that many people dream about. Physical benefits of martial arts are countless but mental training is often the crucial factor in stressful and dangerous situations.
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One of the mental aspects of martial arts is learning how to react “properly” in a life-threatening situation. Fight-or-flight reaction will depend on instincts and experience. While in training, you learn what could happen if someone attacks you and you learn how to respond. Many people who do not have martial arts training often freeze in a critical moment. Martial arts practitioners, on the other hand learn, through sparring and techniques, how to react. As a person who spent quite some time in martial arts, I can definitely say that this is the biggest advantage of practicing martial arts. While for someone else certain situation seems like the end of the world, for you, it will be just another problem that you need to solve.
So, how to choose the most effective martial art? The answer to this question is never simple since most practitioners will be subjective and advise you to join them because their art is “the best one”. In order to compile our list of best martial arts for real life situations and fitness, I used several parameters: effectiveness of techniques, application to real life situations and most frequently recommended styles for real life situations. I looked at the opinions of Reddit and Quora users, Evolve MMA‘s advice as well as personal experience with martial artists from different styles and their experiences in the application of their martial art to real life situations. The ranking of martial arts on this list is random and according to my personal opinion since it is probably impossible to say that one martial art on this list is effective and the other one is not. After all, application to real life situation depends on the situation itself as well as the skill of a person involved.
Now let’s take a look at our list of best martial arts for real life situations and fitness:
