Hello,
How is everyone today? Well I have decided that I want to start a Martial arts.......My reasons for learning are I want to protect my family, friends , and loved ones.
The first thing to understand is that martial arts and self protection are two (almost) completely different things.
Self-protection is 95% Threat Awareness & Evaluation and Target Hardening. 4% Verbal Descalation and 1% physical techniques*. So spending 95% of your time performing physical techniques in a martial arts class is not the most productive use of your time if you goal is self-protection. Martial Arts will not teach you most of the things required for effective civilian self protection (The Rituals of Violence, The Fence, Threat & Awareness Evaluation, Target Hardening, Coopers Colour Codes. Habitual Acts Of Violence, etc).
Learning martial arts for self protection is like learning to cross the road safely by making no attempt to avoid being hit by a car, and instead learning how to do a stuntman roll over the car and then hoping once you get hit by a car you’ll be able to pull it off. You, of course don’t do that, you spend you time instead learning how to avoid getting hit by the car in the first place. Martial artists however, have a rather unfortunate habit of completely ignoring the varied and many different non physical skill that will allow you to avoid a situation devolping to the point where violence becomes necessary. Largely because they don’t have those other skills, all they have is violence and so they jump straight to
the **** has hit the fan this is what you do.
As for which art to do, try out everything that is in your area, and pick the one you enjoy the most, as the one you enjoy the most is the one you are most likely to stick with, and therefore become good at.
*There is no scientific proof of these statistics by the way, they are just used by Iain Abernethy, and my own personl experince leads me to agree with them, hence I use them ;-)
