The best martial art for self-defence

The short version: pick any art that spars, at a club close enough that you will go twice a week, and add a short self-defence course if you can. Sparring means a partner who is really trying to stop you. Boxing, muay thai, judo, wrestling, jiu-jitsu and MMA all do it as standard. With karate, taekwondo and krav maga, it depends on the club.

Every martial art claims to work in real life, and almost every page answering this question is written by a school that teaches one of the answers. We list clubs of every kind, so we have no art to sell.

Picture two classes practising the same defence against a punch. In the first, your partner throws the punch and stops, arm out, while you do the technique. In the second, your partner keeps punching, pulls away and tries again, and you have to make it work anyway. Both look like self-defence. Only the second is practising what happens when someone does not cooperate, and that difference matters more than which art is on the sign.

That second kind of training is sparring. It does not have to be hard or dangerous to count. It has to be a partner who is really trying to hit you, throw you or pin you, rather than one who lets the technique work. The useful question about any art is how much of the class is done that way.

How the main arts train

Boxing, kickboxing and muay thai spar standing up, against a partner who is really trying, as a normal part of training. Good gyms build beginners up to it over weeks or months rather than throwing them in. Muay thai adds knees, elbows and the clinch, which is the close-range grappling you get when two people hold on to each other. None of the three teaches you what to do if you end up on the floor. Our guide to your first muay thai class covers what a beginner's session involves.

Judo, wrestling and jiu-jitsu finish most classes with live practice against full resistance: randori in judo, live wrestling, rolling in jiu-jitsu. Nobody is punching, so people can do this safely every session. Judo and wrestling keep you on your feet and put the other person down. Jiu-jitsu is at its best on the ground, which is not where you want to be on concrete or with someone else around, so ask whether they teach getting back to your feet. All three rely on leverage and position as much as strength, which suits smaller people.

MMA combines both and is the most complete answer on paper. Whether it suits you depends on the gym having a proper beginners' class rather than a room full of people preparing for fights; our guide to your first MMA class explains how to tell which class to book.

Krav maga was built for self-defence from the start. It trains things the sports mostly ignore: weapons, more than one attacker, what to do before anyone touches you. How much of it is practised against real resistance varies a lot from club to club, so watch a class before you join.

Karate and taekwondo range from full-contact styles like Kyokushin, through point sparring that stops after each clean hit, to clubs that barely spar at all. The word karate tells you very little, so ask which one you are looking at. Our guide to your first karate class covers the difference.

Aikido, wing chun and tai chi are mostly practised with a cooperative partner. That can be a lovely way to train, and good for balance, movement and calm. It is not the kind of pressure the research points to, though some clubs do add resisted work, and it is worth asking.

If you want one answer: choose an art that spars, at a club close enough that you will go twice a week. For standing up, boxing or muay thai. For grappling, judo, wrestling or jiu-jitsu. For both, MMA. A club you attend every week will do more for you than a better art you visit once a month.

What the research says about sparring

The best test of whether sparring matters put 66 Dutch police officers, one at a time, into a small windowless room. Someone banged on the walls and shouted threats, then attacked them with punches, kicks, tackles, a club and a knife that gave a real electric shock. The officers could fight back however they liked. Nineteen had only their police training. The other 47 also trained in kickboxing, karate, jiu-jitsu or krav maga.

Everyone did worse under that pressure than in a calm version of the same test. The officers with only police training scored under three out of five, which the researchers rated as not good enough. The martial artists dropped less and stayed ahead, including the krav maga group, who had trained for under four years on average at roughly an hour a week. The researchers were careful not to say which art was best.

Under real threat your attention narrows, your hands get clumsy and anything you only half know goes first. A second Dutch study shows what stops that. Two groups of police officers practised shooting, one against a target and the other against an opponent who fired back with coloured soap cartridges. After training, the second group's accuracy no longer dropped under pressure. The first group's still did. Four months later the difference was still there.

That study was about shooting rather than fighting, but the lesson carries straight across. You keep what you have practised under pressure, and in a martial arts class that means sparring.

The best evidence is for a course, not an art

Nothing in the martial arts research has evidence as strong as one trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It took 893 first-year women at three Canadian universities. About half were given the usual leaflets. The rest did a 12-hour course over four sessions.

Most of those 12 hours had nothing to do with fighting. They were about noticing risk from men the women already knew, trusting the feeling that something was wrong, and acting on it early, out loud. Two hours were physical self-defence. A year later, 5.2% of the women on the course had been raped, against 9.8% of those given leaflets. Attempted rape was 3.4% against 9.3%.

That course was built for one group and one kind of danger, and self-defence courses elsewhere vary a great deal. But it is the strongest evidence behind any self-defence training we could find.

The police research points the same way. A later Dutch study found that officers trained on whole situations, from the first words to the physical part, did better in realistic scenarios than officers trained on techniques alone. They learned to use what they did before contact to calm things down, and to see an attack coming.

So a self-defence course and a martial art do different jobs, and they go well together. A good course takes a few sessions and gives you the early part, which was most of what that trial taught. A martial art takes longer and gives you what the police study measured: staying calm and capable while someone is trying to overpower you. Neither replaces the other.

What to ask a club

A club website will tell you its art is effective. These questions tell you how it is trained.

• Do beginners spar, and when do they start? A good answer describes a gradual build-up. "Never" and "on your first night, full power" are both worth thinking about.
• Can I watch a class where people spar? Watch whether partners resist or let each other's techniques work.
• How hard do people go? Real resistance and hard contact are different things. Most sparring in a good room is light, with harder rounds for people who want them.
• Is there anything on the moments before contact? Talking someone down, keeping distance, getting away. Krav maga clubs usually cover this. Most sports gyms do not, which is where a course comes in.
• What happens if I end up on the ground? Striking gyms should have an answer, even a short one.

If a club tells you its techniques are too dangerous to practise against resistance, that means nobody in the room has tried them against someone who was fighting back.

We went through how to weigh up two clubs after trial classes in how to choose between two gyms, and if you are starting later in life, the best martial art to start after 40 looks at which arts people stick with. Our directory lists clubs of every kind near you, with timetables where they publish them.