Ask a group of martial artists which martial art is the best, and you may want to clear your schedule.
You’re going to be there for a while.
The boxer will tell you boxing.
The wrestler will tell you wrestling.
The Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner will tell you BJJ.
The Muay Thai fighter will tell you Muay Thai.
The karate practitioner will tell you karate.
And somebody will eventually say MMA and think they’ve settled the argument once and for all.
But there’s a problem with the question.
Best at what?
Because there isn’t one martial art that’s best at everything.
And there probably never will be.
Different Martial Arts Were Built to Solve Different Problems
We tend to talk about “martial arts” as though they’re all trying to accomplish the same thing.
They’re not.
Some systems place tremendous emphasis on striking.
Others specialize in throwing.
Others focus primarily on ground fighting.
Some were developed around competition.
Some were developed around self-defense.
Some preserve cultural traditions.
Some focus heavily on forms.
Some are designed primarily around weapons.
Some intentionally combine several of these areas.
That means asking which martial art is “best” without explaining what you’re trying to accomplish is a little like asking:
What’s the best vehicle?
A sports car?
A pickup truck?
A minivan?
A motorcycle?
A tractor?
The answer depends entirely on what you need it to do.
A Ferrari might be an incredible car, but I wouldn’t choose one to haul lumber.
That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the Ferrari.
It means different tools are designed for different jobs.
Martial arts aren’t all that different.
Systems Have Strengths
Spend enough time training with people from different martial arts, and something becomes obvious pretty quickly:
Certain systems consistently produce people who are really good at certain things.
Boxers tend to be very good with their hands.
Wrestlers tend to be extremely good at takedowns, pressure, and controlling where a fight takes place.
Judoka tend to be very good at throwing people who desperately don’t want to be thrown.
Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioners tend to be extremely comfortable fighting from positions on the ground where many people would panic.
Muay Thai practitioners tend to develop excellent striking with their hands, legs, knees, elbows, and clinch.
Those aren’t insults to the other arts.
They’re compliments to those systems.
If you spend hundreds or thousands of hours specializing in a particular area, you should become good at it.
The problem starts when we assume being very good at one area automatically makes us equally good everywhere else.
Systems Have Weaknesses Too
This is the part martial artists sometimes have a harder time admitting.
If your system has strengths, it almost certainly has weaknesses.
That’s not an insult.
It’s reality.
Training time is limited.
If one school spends half of every class grappling and another spends none of its class time grappling, we shouldn’t expect those students to develop the same grappling ability.
If one fighter spends hundreds of rounds learning to strike against fully resisting opponents while another primarily practices predetermined combinations on a bag, we shouldn’t expect identical striking skills under pressure.
If someone trains almost entirely on the ground, there may be areas of stand-up fighting they haven’t developed as deeply.
You get good at what you practice.
That seems obvious.
But martial arts mythology sometimes convinces us that our system has somehow found a way around that rule.
It hasn’t.
“It’s Not the Style, It’s the Fighter”
You’ve probably heard this one too.
“There are no bad martial arts. It all depends on the person.”
There’s some truth there.
A great martial artist can absolutely come from an imperfect system.
A terrible martial artist can come from an excellent one.
Athleticism matters.
Coaching matters.
Effort matters.
Experience matters.
Training partners matter.
Individual talent matters.
But the training system matters too.
Imagine two people want to become good swimmers.
One spends three years swimming several times a week.
The other spends three years practicing swimming movements while standing beside the pool.
Which one would you expect to perform better when they fall into deep water?
The training method matters.
If your goal is developing skills that work against resistance, at some point you need to practice against resistance.
That’s true whether you’re punching, kicking, throwing, grappling, or defending yourself.
So no, style isn’t everything.
But pretending style and training methodology don’t matter isn’t any more accurate than claiming one style is unbeatable.
MMA Didn’t End the Argument
Mixed Martial Arts changed the martial arts world tremendously.
It forced people from different backgrounds to test their skills against one another and demonstrated something incredibly valuable:
No single range of fighting is enough.
A great striker who can’t stop a takedown has a problem.
A great grappler who can’t safely get close enough to grapple has a problem.
A fighter who can wrestle but has no submission awareness has a problem.
MMA didn’t prove that one martial art was best.
In many ways, it proved the opposite.
It showed us the value of learning from multiple martial arts.
Modern MMA fighters routinely train striking, wrestling, takedowns, clinch work, submissions, and ground fighting because each area contributes something important.
But even MMA isn’t automatically “the best martial art” for every possible goal.
Training for an MMA fight and preparing someone for self-defense aren’t identical problems.
Competition has rules.
Self-defense has legal considerations, environmental hazards, weapons, multiple attackers, surprise, escape, and countless other variables that don’t belong in a sporting contest.
That doesn’t make MMA ineffective for self-defense.
Far from it.
It simply means the question determines the answer.
We Aren’t the Best Martial Art Either
And if we’re going to be fair about this, we have to apply the same standard to ourselves.
At Impact Martial Arts, our approach is intentionally broad.
The style we practice tries to address all of the major ranges of fighting. We strike. We clinch. We throw and take people down. We grapple on the ground. We train with and against weapons. And throughout all of it, we place a strong emphasis on practical self-defense.
That’s the kind of martial arts we believe in.
It’s the kind of training we enjoy.
And it’s the approach we believe best serves what we’re trying to accomplish with our students.
But I’m not going to tell you that means our martial art is the best martial art for everyone.
It isn’t.
We’re not everyone’s cup of tea.
Someone whose primary goal is becoming the best boxer they can be would probably be better served training in a good boxing gym.
Someone who wants to become an elite competitive grappler needs to spend an enormous amount of time grappling.
Someone who loves the precision and artistry of traditional forms may want a school that devotes significantly training time to that pursuit.
And someone looking primarily for a light recreational activity may not enjoy some of the things we emphasize at all.
That’s okay.
We don’t need to be the best martial art for everyone.
We need to be very good at accomplishing what we’ve chosen to accomplish.
That’s an important distinction.
Trying to cover multiple ranges also means we have to recognize the specialists who know those individual areas better than we do.
If a boxer can teach us something about punching, we should listen.
If a wrestler can make our takedowns better, we should listen.
If a BJJ practitioner exposes a weakness in our ground game, we should pay attention.
If another martial art has developed a better answer to a problem than the one we’re currently using, our loyalty shouldn’t be to doing something the way we’ve always done it.
Our loyalty should be to getting better.
You Don’t Have to Insult One Art to Appreciate Another
One of the things I love about martial arts is discovering what other systems do well.
You don’t have to become a boxer to learn something from boxing.
You don’t have to become a judoka to appreciate Judo’s throwing ability.
You don’t have to become a wrestler to recognize how valuable wrestling can be.
You don’t have to abandon your own martial art because another system does something better than yours does.
Learn from it.
That’s how martial arts have always grown.
Good martial artists don’t need their system to be the best at everything.
They need to understand what it does well, recognize where it has limitations, and remain willing to learn.
The Better Question
So let’s stop asking:
“What’s the best martial art?”
There isn’t enough information in the question to answer it.
Instead ask:
What’s the best martial art for what I’m trying to accomplish?
Do you want to compete?
Get in shape?
Learn to strike?
Learn to grapple?
Study traditional martial arts?
Develop practical self-defense skills?
Build confidence?
Challenge yourself?
Give your child an environment that reinforces discipline and perseverance?
Those questions can actually lead somewhere useful.
And sometimes the answer won’t even be one martial art.
It might be several.
Because no martial art owns every answer.
No system has perfected every range.
No instructor knows everything.
And no style gets to ignore its weaknesses simply because its practitioners are proud of its strengths.
So let’s let another martial arts myth die.
THE MYTH:
There’s one best martial art.
THE TRUTH:
Every martial art has strengths, weaknesses, and a purpose.
The goal shouldn’t be finding a martial art you can declare superior to everything else.
The goal should be finding training that helps you become better at the things that actually matter to you.
And if another martial art has something valuable to teach you?
Be a martial artist first and a stylist second.
Learn it.