How to Get Started in the Martial Arts, Part 4: Final Thoughts

The Next Step is Yours

There are books and DVDs for learning martial arts available online, but your best way to learn a martial art is from a martial arts instructor, so be sure to ask around or search martial arts online forums for places to train if your initial searches for schools near you come up empty.

Also, my suggestion would be to stick with one martial art for a while before you start on a second martial art. Once you have the basics of the first martial art under your belt, then learning the second martial art will be easier, much like learning a second foreign language is easier once you’ve learned your first. Each person has at most two hands and two feet, so there are only so many effective ways to kick and punch. Thus, there are commonalities across the martial arts, so learning your first martial art will teach you many core concepts that will transfer to your second.

Consider starting a journal of your experience through the martial arts. Getting to black belt can take a while, but over the course of your training you will change as a person, in addition to gaining new skills. I suspect that having a record of your thoughts and observations will be invaluable to you when you want to see the progress you’ve made during your journey. Also, jotting down things you hear during training from your instructor, like fighting tips and names of techniques, will help you remember them. Who knows, maybe one day you will be able to turn your journal into a book, like the two memoirs I included below in the More Resources section.

Finally, once you’ve decided on a martial art and have found a place to train, well, now you need to stick with it! Only then can you reap the benefits discussed in part one of this article series.

More Resources

There are many good martial arts book and movie resources available, but here I just wanted to pick out a few that might be helpful to someone just getting started with martial arts.

American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China: Matthew Polly, a 98 pound college student at Princeton, leaves his sheltered university life and heads to China to learn kung fu at a Shaolin Temple. Along the way, he learns kung fu and has many adventures as a fish out of water in a foreign land and culture. But more importantly, we watch as Polly becomes transformed while training in a school and way of life that most of us could not imagine.

The Warrior Within : The Philosophies of Bruce Lee: An inspiring collection of many of Bruce Lee’s philosophical ideas on martial arts, training, and life. Maybe these thoughts will motivate you to start martial arts training.

Angry White Pyjamas: A Scrawny Oxford Poet Takes Lessons From The Tokyo Riot Police: Robert Twigger, a British teacher of English as a foreign language to female high school students, decides to test himself by taking a year-long martial arts training course normally reserved for the Tokyo riot police. Along the way, we see his observations on Japanese culture and we see him try to persevere through a physically and mentally abusive course.

Fight Quest: A compilation of episodes from the Discovery Channel following two guys as they are challenged to learn fighting techniques from many different martial arts styles I mentioned in part two of this article series. Here’s your chance to see what some of these martial arts are really about!

History Channel: Human Weapon – The Complete Season 1: Like Fight Quest, this is a compilation of episodes from season 1 of a series on the History Channel. The episodes follow two guys as they are challenged to learn fighting techniques from many different martial arts styles I mentioned in part two of this article series. At the end of each episode they fight with the master of the art they just trained in. Here’s your chance to see what some of these martial arts are really about!

That’s It!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on how to get started in the martial arts.

Have fun, and train hard!

This is part 4 of a four-part series on how to get started in martial arts:

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For those who’ve done martial arts before, what did I miss? Any comments? For those considering martial arts training, what else would you like to know? Any suggestions? Please, send feedback my way— I’d love to hear from you.