Why Train in the Martial Arts?

When you continuously practice these skills and continuously improve, you gain self-confidence. By learning how to breathe or exclaim with every attack, this allows a person to gain confidence in what they are doing. Children and adults alike gain from this.

Showing respect is so important no matter where you are in life. Training in martial arts teaches you to learn to use ma'am and sir or yes mom yes dad. Respect is gained by demonstrating it in classes. Students address the instructors by saying yes sir or yes ma'am. Eventually this becomes a habit that students bring home with them! This also teaches children to be kinder or nicer to other children, their parents, and everyone they meet.

Although it's not something many will think of as exercise or a workout, anyone that trains has the potential to lose some weight. There's cardio from sparring or any of the drills that are done in class. If it's a faster paced drill, it's a great cardio workout! Some classes may do other warmups such as push-ups, squats, jumping jacks, you name it!

Knowing how to protect yourself is a great tool when put in unexpected situations. By training, it allows you to experience uncomfortable scenarios that may or may not happen. This will help make those uncomfortable situations less uncomfortable. Both children and adults benefit from this, as you never know when and where you will need it the most.

Martial arts is a great stress reliever. You may think it's from punching or kicking out your aggressions or stressors. When you think about what calms people down when they are stressed, the answer tends to be taking a few moments and breathing. By taking a few deep breaths, the stress begins to fade. In martial arts, you learn to breathe with every strike. This allows you relieve some stress you may or may not have had before coming to classes. This can also be present in our daily lives. When a stressful event happens and you take those few deep breaths, your mind and heart start to calm down. In addition to the breathing, the skills you learn distract you from what's going on in your personal life. If this is something you're struggling with maintain, I highly suggest giving martial arts a try!

Although it sounds like a silly concept, self-control is a great tool to gain from training! The way some schools teach is self-control with the attacks. Instead of hitting your training partner has hard as you can, using self-control to stop before connecting or lightly touching instead is implemented. Self-control doesn't only apply to the techniques we learn in martial arts. We can use it as a way to limit how much we are eating, spending time on work, or even getting upset and frustrated on something. Children can learn to have self-control as well, such as with not getting upset over a sibling or wanting to throw something. It can vary from person to person. But using self-control can help us grow.

For some, this may sound silly. Why do we need to learn social skills? For some individuals, social skills are lacking. If you're an introverted person, you may have a hard time with this. By training martial arts, you learn to work on these challenges. By talking to other students, their families, or even strangers out in public. This pushes us out of our comfort zones and eventually, we wonder why it was even an issue to begin with! A lot of children learn a lot from this, it trains them to be more confident in what they want and interacting with individuals as they get older.

Certain movements such as kicking high or getting into a certain stance can help improve flexibility over time. Doing these movements repetitively over time will increase your range of motion. Training martial arts will also train your body to develop good posture. If flexibility is something that challenges you, give martial arts a try!

Being self-aware is more useful than you may think. Being aware of surroundings is key to keeping yourself safe and those around you safe. You see people constantly playing on phones while walking down the street. When your head is buried in your phone, you're not paying attention to your surroundings. By avoiding this, you can see when a possible attacker is coming, if that car isn't going to stop, or if someone nearby is in need of help. There are many reasons why this can benefit a person.

By training in martial arts, it increases your health in various areas. It helps with weight loss, builds strength and stamina, and increases your cardiovascular health. Once you progress with the different set levels, your body learns to adapt with certain challenges. A good one is balance, especially with kicking. You learn to balance in different ways with the different kicks that are thrown, or with the different techniques that a learned overall. If improved health and fitness is something you're looking for, martial arts may be a great fit for you!