The Top 5 Easiest Martial Arts For Beginners

When choosing a martial art as a beginner, it can be quite daunting due to the sheer volume of styles available. Kung Fu alone has 400 unique styles of martial art – and whilst you likely won’t be able to find a school for each form, there are many other martial arts that are completely different altogether.

Learning a martial art takes time, dedication, sacrifice, and resilience. In short, there is no easy path when learning a martial art, but that is not to say that some fighting styles aren’t easier for beginners than others. Basic martial arts skills can be picked up quickly in a variety of disciplines, but take an extremely long time to master.

Overall, an “easy” martial art is defined as an easy style to pick up the basics. Anything where you cannot master the basics very quickly can be considered a difficult martial art. Some of the quickest martial arts to learn are generally striking based, since it is a lot more natural for a human to land strikes than throw opponents or apply submission holds.

No Background In Martial Arts

If you don’t have any background in martial arts, you are going to be at a slight disadvantage when learning a new style. With that being said, if you have an athletic background in a sport such as crossfit, lifting weights or running, you’re going to do pretty well. This is because conditioning the mind and body for strenuous exercise is one core feature of any martial art. It is impossible to learn a martial art to its fullest capacity without being in physically good condition. If you are not in good shape, this will limit your movement, flexibility and strength, impairing your ability to perform specific techniques.

Progression in martial arts is just like any other skill in life. If you practice piano 20 days in 1 month, you’re generally going to be a lot more skilled than a person who practices for 3 days. Some people walk into a gym thinking they are going to become the best by training whenever they like and not putting 100% effort in. These people generally do not last in martial arts, people who stick things out and grind through their challenges are the ones who end up reaching black belt level by pure willpower more than any innate talent.

Top 5 Easiest Martial Arts For Beginners

Many beginners will ask questions such as “what is the best fighting style to learn?”. To briefly summarise, there isn’t a best style, which is why we see MMA fighters that know everything, rather than a single style as they did in the 1990s. The same can be said for a best martial art for beginners, nothing really works better than anything else in an isolated vacuum.

With all of that being said, some martial arts are simply easier to learn than others. The reason you won’t see taekwondo or Brazilian jiu-jitsu on this list is that they require skills such as greater flexibility or unnatural movements to be learned. Whilst they aren’t necessarily more difficult than any other martial art to master, it is certainly harder to grasp the basics, and therefore they aren’t recommended for a first martial art.

Every martial art below is very difficult to master and should not be considered as an easy option – simply because there isn’t one. However, these martial arts are much easier to grasp and you should at least have a basic understanding within a couple of months.

Boxing

Boxing is arguably the easiest martial art to learn, but one of the hardest to master. Humans have been punching each other in the head and body since the beginning of time and it doesn’t look like this will change any time soon.

There is no doubt about it, boxing can be both tough and brutal, but it is also so much more than this.

Beginners in boxing will learn real toughness, resilience and mental fortitude, as well as a variety of physical skills. When learning boxing you will lose a lot of fat and become fitter than you ever thought you would be. You also learn skills such as balance, speed and agility, which you otherwise would have not learned doing a less physical martial art.

The main benefit of learning boxing is that it is one of the most optimal martial arts in terms of self defense and also inexpensive. In general, if you’re going to be attacked in the street – it’s not going to be by an Olympic wrestler. Most likely the person will want some kind of boxing match, so if you can out-box them, this would be 100% ideal for survival.

Krav Maga

Some will argue that krav maga is the best fighting style to learn since it is the style chosen by the IDF. Krav maga is never trained with full contact sparring since it is a very aggressive form of self defense and arguably not even a martial art.

The basis of krav maga is based around extreme situations where you will aim to damage your adversary as much as possible and win a fight by any means necessary. This will be appealing to some beginners since krav maga is relatively easy and has a straight forward system to learn with just as much focus towards your own mindset. It also teaches you how to defend against weapons such as guns and knives, which may be completely useless since you will likely never be in a situation where you need to risk a knife disarmament, but nevertheless this is what krav maga is all about.

Krav maga is quite different from other martial arts since it is more based around survival than anything else. For this reason, it is relatively easy to learn, especially if you already have a survival based mindset.

Aikido

It should be noted that aikido is one of the most difficult arts to master since it is so intricate. With that being said, it is pretty beginner friendly on the basis that it is one of the most gentle fighting systems in the world.

The key emphasis of aikido is not to damage your opponents any more than necessary, so is pretty much 100% the opposite of krav maga in terms of its mentality. Aikido is ideal since it will teach you a lot of fundamental movements used in other martial arts even if you decide to quit practicing it in the future. Forward rolls and breakfalls are useful in pretty much any other martial art since you are learning how to protect your body from the floor – these movements are a key staple of aikido and will stay with you for a lifetime after learning them.

Based on its falling movements, aikido is also a good gateway martial art into the likes of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and judo if you ever wanted to learn these in the future.

Kendo

Kendo is one of the best entries in to stick fighting martial arts. Compared to other styles and forms of fighting, kendo is also one of the best self teaching martial arts as you’re able to practice many of the techniques and forms by yourself. This is not to say you can train kendo exclusively from the comfort of your own home, but certainly more so than other grappling based martial arts.

In general stick/sword fighting martial arts are very different from the basic forms such as striking and grappling. This gives beginners an opportunity to learn something that they wouldn’t usually try and provides a completely different skillset to martial arts such as judo or karate.

Overall, kendo is an especially good martial art for adult beginners since the general age of a kendo student is a lot higher than martial arts most popular with kids. Once again, there is obviously a lot to learn in kendo and you aren’t going to master the art of sword fighting within 2 months or even 20 years.

Shito-Ryu Karate

Shito Ryu karate is one of the best martial arts for beginners since it is more gentle than other forms of karate such as shotokan or kyokoshin. All of these forms are legitimately good choices, but the latter two are more based on conditioning and sparring, so may not be for those who want to try martial arts for the first time.

If you don’t know anything about karate, in short it is a Japanese striking martial art that mostly features punches, kicks and blocks. Depending on which style of karate you learn, there is also a small focus towards grappling exchanges and/or weapons.

However, for the most part Shito-Ryu is based on technique and learning the 26 katas. Katas are essentially a sequence of movements that you are expected to learn in order to progress through the belts. If you have ever watched a non-contact karate demonstration then this is pretty much what you will be doing if you choose to learn Shito-Ryu.