So, you’re interested in karate and maybe that’s for yourself and maybe that’s for your kid. If you have some interest in karate, I think that’s a great thing. What that means to me is that you’ve started becoming interested in the martial arts, you’re most likely looking for something like the ability to engage in self-defense and you’re also probably interested in things like discipline, focus and confidence. These are all great things for yourself or for your kids.
If I had to venture a guess, the reason that you’re interested in karate has probably been spurred on by something like the movie, The Karate Kid, or the follow-up TV series, Cobra Kai.
I love both of those things, I think they’re fantastic and I think that overall, karate has a lot to offer people, but I don’t think it’s likely to get you all the things that you are dreaming of getting. That is, it won’t get, in the full sense, the discipline, focus and confidence aspect. I think it’s going to potentially deliver on that best when we start looking at self-defense.
Why Is Jiu Jitsu superior to Karate
I think karate is going to fall short of the goals that you intend for yourself. Karate is a striking-based martial arts and if you understand self-defense well, if you adjust your self-defense fantasy to imagine a scenario in which you’re in a potentially dangerous confrontation with someone who’s larger than you, if you are at a range where striking is possible or punching and kicking is possible, it is much better for you to run away. Because, if you can punch and kick, that means they don’t have any sort of hold on you, and you are much better off, especially when it’s someone bigger than you, getting away and getting help. Finding yourself somewhere that can be safe and calling the police.
There are many people in the world who you could strike very hard and be very good at striking and they are not going to get knocked out. Just a cursory review of some boxing matches will show you that there are people on this planet who can take upwards of 300 strikes to the head from professionals who train at throwing punches as hard as they can and they’re not capable of knocking people out. Not with the kind of consistency that you would need to have to be able to rely on something like karate to defend yourself from an assailant.
I’m not saying it would hurt your odds of getting out of that situation, but I wouldn’t consider that something I could depend upon or something that I would want to devote an enormous amount of time to, given its lack of dependency.
What I would offer is that jujitsu, which is maybe a martial art that you haven’t heard of, is the martial art that you’re really looking for. That is a martial art that’s actually going to deliver on the discipline, focus and confidence, but it’s going to deliver in the self-defense realm in a much more consistent and reliable manner. Now we know that jiu-jitsu works, we know it works because back in around 1993 UFC 1 happened and we had fighters from many different disciplines and the absolute smallest fighter in the entire competition, the smallest fighter in a competition with no rules, with no time limits, the smallest fighter in there, a Jiu jitsu fighter, came out and won three matches against three grown men, three trained fighters in different disciplines and he beat them all in one night. Each match was under three minutes for him.
Now, how did he do that?
He used Jiu jitsu.
What is Jiu jitsu you may ask. It’s a grappling or wrestling style of martial art. What you will learn how to do is to avoid the striking range altogether and not take chances on throwing punches because the probability of getting knocked out is too high.
You will learn how to get up, get free and get away with Jiu jitsu so that if someone were to get on top of you or to get a hold of you, you could get yourself free, back to that range where there’s no connection and when there’s no connection I’m going to leave. But also, what you learn in Jiu jitsu is, if I do need to engage, how to move past the striking range actually get to that close quarters range and be able to bring my opponent down and start on top of them and use things like arm locks and more preferably chokes to stop somebody.
Jiu jitsu has a proven record in self-defense. Every month I see a new news report of some Jiu jitsu practitioner not only being able to defend themselves because someone attacked them, but maybe even helping law enforcement to subdue someone without doing any real damage or being able to help someone else who is being attacked. Because there is another component to self-defense which is not just defending myself, but the ability to defend other people around me.
Chokes are amazing for that because what we do in Jiu jitsu is blood chokes. That’s attacking blood flow to the brain, so it takes the tough guy factor out of things. No matter how big or how strong you are, if we reduce the blood flow to your brain you will pass out.
These are proven things, you don’t have to take my word for it you can start going on YouTube and you can you fine like ‘Jiu jitsu chokes man’, you can just start googling all these different terms and you’re going to find an enormous number of videos, an enormous amount of record for Jiu jitsu working.
I don’t feel that you’re going to see as consistent a record if you start doing the same thing for karate. One thing I can say for certain is you’re not going to find a consistent record of karate fighters being successful in mixed martial arts. In situations where we’ve reduced the rules as much as possible and we’ve just said, “We’re going to have these two guys fight”, we just don’t see the success record from karate fighters there that we do from Jiu jitsu fighters and other types of fighters. It’s simply not a proven thing.
Jiu jitsu, at this point, is the only martial art that, if you want to compete in mixed martial arts, it is an absolute prerequisite. You must know it, or you will not last, you will get beat.
BJJ Classes in New Braunfels
So, in my opinion, if you’re interested in self-defense, if you’re interested in that discipline, focus and confidence, come on down to SBG Texas and come check us out. Our whole model is built around the idea of giving people the best of self-defense and in the case of kids, I’m giving the best of self-defense. I’m building that discipline and I believe that discipline is the vehicle through which we create focus and focus gives us accomplishments that are real. Real accomplishments that we can build sustained confidence off. I hope to see you at the gym, and I hope this was informative for you.