The best martial art for young people

I am seated at the left of the picture above, at the end of the row, with a kendo sword across my knees. This was on the playing field of Bristol Grammar School in 1964, when I was thirteen years old.

The school was quite progressive in the breadth of sports it supported as you can see: fencing, kendo, judo. So here is my advice to a young person considering studying a martial art.

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The best martial art for young people

Choosing the right martial art isn’t just about picking the one that looks most impressive in a movie or the one some self-styled expert insists is “the most effective”. Real fights are messy, chaotic affairs, and the only techniques that matter are the ones you can execute automatically—without hesitation, without thought, and certainly without consciously consulting your mental archive of choreographed moves. That’s why the way a martial art is trained matters more than the theoretical lethality of its techniques.

Let’s take three popular options: karate, boxing, and judo.

Karate is often touted as the ultimate fighting system, but it has a fundamental flaw—modern training methods. Sparring (kumite) is often light or heavily choreographed these days, and much of the training focuses instead on kata (solo forms) and kihon (repetitive drills).

These may build precision, but they don’t instill the instinctive, high-pressure reactions needed in a real fight. If you’re unaccustomed to applying techniques in live combat, they won’t magically materialize when you need them. Hesitation equals defeat.

Boxing is better in this regard. Training involves regular sparring, conditioning fighters to react under fear and pressure. However, the most effective techniques—full-power strikes to the head—come with an inherent problem: repeated blows to the skull are not conducive to long-term brain health. While a hardened boxer is formidable in a street fight, few people want to endure the cumulative damage required to reach that level of effectiveness.

And that brings us to judo. When I trained in judo as a youth, every class involved at least 20 minutes of randori—live, full-contact sparring: throws, immobilisation holds and joint-locks. Over weeks, months, and years, this developed automatic reactions: gripping, positioning, attack and defence, and controlling an opponent on the ground.

Because judo is designed to be non-lethal, it allows for continuous, realistic practice without the fear of permanent injury. This is its greatest strength—techniques become second nature, and when conflict arises, you react instinctively. More importantly, judo equips you to neutralize an opponent without excessive force. You won’t kill anyone, and you won’t end up facing a manslaughter charge for defending yourself.

So, for anyone looking for a martial art that builds self-confidence, resilience, and real-world effectiveness, judo is by far the best choice.

It allows you to train the way you’d need to act in a fight, ensuring that when the moment comes, your body moves smoothly and rapidly without needing permission from your brain.

And in a real fight, that’s what makes all the difference.

ChatGPT interviews me about Martial Arts

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ChatGPT: How did you first get into martial arts?

Nigel: I think I was 10 or 11 when I got the idea to do Judo: it seemed empowering. My mother was against it, thinking it would make me violent. My father came to my rescue, telling her that such training would stand me in good stead if I got caught up in any bar brawls. I imagine he was recalling his army days—this would have been around 1961-2.

I used to cycle up to the local club on Saturday mornings, they used a scout hut on the Southmead Road, near Filton aerodrome. I was keen and worked my way through the Mon grades of the junior system. Back then, gradings required contest victories, and I won enough.

ChatGPT: Did you have a favorite technique or style of fighting?

Nigel: Tai-otoshi—body drop. It suited my build: long and lanky. I was never very good at hip or shoulder throws. Once, in a grading contest, I got caught by a sucker-punch. My opponent used tomoe-nage, the stomach throw. It’s spectacular—an instant ippon, a victory. But it should never work against a prepared opponent; the counter is too easy. Just squat down and go straight to groundwork with the advantage of being on top!

ChatGPT: Did you continue Judo into adulthood?

Nigel: I kept it up in secondary school, but university and then work took over. I dabbled a bit later, but I never returned to it systematically. A shame, but priorities are what they are.

ChatGPT: Did you explore other martial arts later?

Nigel: Briefly. I tried karate a few years later, but in those days, it was all punching the air and ferocious numbers of push-ups. Too hard for me, and the benefits were years away. Aikido? I went to a few lessons, but it seemed curiously placid and ineffectual. I couldn’t buy into it.

ChatGPT: And T’ai Chi? How did that fit into your journey?

Nigel: I never thought of T’ai Chi as a combat art. You get what you train for. If you go slow and don’t spar for real, you’ll win no fights. For me, T’ai Chi was about Taoist ideas—balance, a calm frame of mind, and kinaesthetic awareness. You could see the difference between the newbies and the adepts: I wanted to be like those who flowed through the form, and I think I’ve got there.

ChatGPT: Did Taoism lead you to T’ai Chi, or was it the other way around?

Nigel: Taoism came first. I’ve always had sympathy for Lao Tzu’s idea of immanent harmony. But I’m also mindful of Cheng Man Ch’ing’s remark that Taoism is for the philosopher-hermit on his hill, while Confucianism is for those who live in the world. My adherence to the Catholic Church probably reflects the wisdom of that remark.

ChatGPT: So, would you say you’ve always balanced the philosophical with the practical?

Nigel: I’m open to the deep mysticism of consciousness in the universe, for sure. But I also believe combat skills matter in an uncertain world. Shotokan Karate reminded me of that. I achieved 7th kyu (yellow belt) in nine months of regular training. Realistically, though, I think first dan, plus hard kumite getting there, is the minimal precondition for useful skill. In another life, I’d have liked to get there.

ChatGPT: You mentioned earlier that martial arts should unify inner spirit and outward efficiency. Did you see that in your training?

Nigel: Yes. My Shotokan Sensei, a 6th dan, insisted on that unity, as do all serious martial arts. The hard and soft styles ultimately converge. I first encountered that idea as a child in Judo, and I’ve always internalised it as the goal.

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Draft Notes for My Obituary

From ChatGPT

We went to a funeral last Thursday. Iris Klim, aged 95, a parishioner. Her son gave a eulogy: pleasant, informative, affectionate, moving. A model of its type.

Nigel said he would prefer something different when his time comes …

Skate rapidly over my life, he said: youthful communist - a militant of the Fourth International; software developer turned researcher in Artificial Intelligence; successful freelance designer of telecoms networks.

Nigel's wife and children confirm his weird and bizarre opinions.

He claimed that the passage of time is a psychological illusion, that all times exist as if in amber. He claimed Albert Einstein as an authority on this. He said that, in any case, both space and time are not fundamental: the universe we live in is an emergent artefact of quantum entanglement - true reality is set in abstract Hilbert space.

Honestly!

Nigel had yellow belts in Judo and Karate, and years of T'ai Chi. He practised these arts to the end but never fought anyone for real (after an inconclusive  scrap when he was nine  - he was provoked!).

He died a Catholic, although for most of his life he was irreligious. He said that the apocryphal Martian anthropologist (a methodological nihilist) might say that human beings were simply biological machines. But ‘it is not like anything to be’ any of the machines we know about. The materialist faith that consciousness is reducible to neural net operations is no more than that; in any case explanations do not account for lived experience: that is the mystery and reality which theology encompasses better than anything else. Anyway, he was drawn more to Catholic deontology than any specific ontology: how we live is important.

Nigel puzzled over the continuity of personal identity. How do we know that we, now, are the same person who will wake up tomorrow morning? Actually, he said, we can’t know. Many people are quite like us, whoever we are. Personal memory is always mentioned, he said, but who’d die in a ditch for that when it comes to the foundational nature of our very selves?

So at this space-time moment, in this branch of the universal wave-function, you should say: Nigel has passed on. He wanted you to know that in the great enduring sea of consciousness and human experience, it’s not such a big deal. Except to those who shared our lives together, for whom it is everything.

Can martial artists actually fight?

Tricia Sullivan - SF author and fighter

Tricia Sullivan thinks not.

"Most people think of martial arts and fighting as being more or less synonymous. I see them as a Venn diagram of two sets that overlap by a tiny margin. This is because most martial artists don't fight and their training isn't directly based on what happens in a fight.

There are reasons for this. The problem of training for a fight is a tricky one. If an instructor puts students in an actual fight (as opposed to highly controlled drills with restricted moves), they might get seriously hurt. But if instructors can't create an accurate representation of a fight in the gym, trainees will never really be tested. To make up for the lack of fighting, martial arts typically focus on displays of fake combat that illustrate the combative moves that have been passed down through history. They may have non-contact or light contact fighting, but this only tests your ability to touch the other person with the techniques you have been taught--not your ability to hurt them for real much less take a beating yourself.

Most people who study martial arts study a system. Whether the system is historical (like kung fu and karate) or modern (like Systema and Krav Maga) the techniques are taught formally, with ranks, with semi-compliant drilling between members of the same school, and with a heavy dose of hierarchy that keeps everybody in their place. With a few exceptions (Gracie Barra jiu-jitsu is one system that grades predominantly through hard competition) the idea of all-out fighting is a theoretical one, kept well in the background.

But fighting is chaotic. It's often unpredictable. It doesn't systemize well and it's difficult to pass on as a body of knowledge. What people don't realize is that no matter how effective the founder of a discipline may have been in his (or in the case of Wing Chun, her) day, unless the practices of that system involve rigorous testing in realistic fighting conditions against non-compliant opponents from outside your system, you can never really know whether you can make their moves work for you.

..."      (continue reading)

The many comments are pretty insightful too.

Tricia is a prolific science-fiction writer as well as martial artist, the reason she's writing this post on Charles Stross's blog. I haven't read any of her stuff and I guess her reviews are mixed although her novel "Dreaming in Smoke" won the 1999 Arthur C. Clarke award.

She has follow-up posts here and here.

Sadly for those who devote their lives to the perfection of Karate, Aikido or Taekwondo, skilled practitioners often come off very badly in fights with drunken idiots. Despite lack of formal training, being large, aggressive and fearless takes you a long way in a fight as does the use of improvised weapons such as bottles, drinking glasses and ash-trays. The sensei complains that his or her victorious opponent wasn't following the rules.

Tricia has most time for Judo and Wrestling - at least you really get to grapple with opponents - but even MMA has to outlaw those injurious or  lethal moves which are decisive in real fights.

One of the videos Tricia embedded in her second post was this one, of a real street fight in Turkey where a gang set upon a guy who happens to be a boxer ...

... looks like boxing really works.