Can You Lose Weight With Martial Arts?

   Millions of Americans and people all over the world are constantly looking for a way to maintain a healthy weight. Because activities like running or weightlifting is mundane for many people, funner activities are often desired. One of these is martial arts. Can they help you lose weight? Yes and no.

There are many different kinds of martial arts. There are hard martial arts, soft martial arts, martial arts that focus on striking, and others that attempt to submit the enemy. Which ones are best for weight loss?

One category can be ruled out almost immediately: internal martial arts. This includes Aikido, much of Hapkido, Tai Chi, and certain schools of Kung Fu. These schools often focus more on meditation and mental development. Exercise is often very light. The techniques rely mostly on leverage and control in a manner that exerts little or no energy. Thus, these arts are not ideal at all for weight loss or muscle gain.

The two most effective genres of martial arts for weight loss are striking arts and grappling arts. Striking styles such as Taekwondo, Muay Thai, and Karate require lots of aerobic and anaerobic exercise to achieve a level of skill. Bodyweight exercises that require management of your own weight are very common, such as pushups and situps. Repetitions of kicks and punches are a consistent part of exercise and can be executed in an aerobic or anaerobic manner, depending on whether speed or strength is the goal.

Grappling arts are also very effective for weight loss. Although much of judo and jiujitus relies on using you and your enemy's momentum and weight against them while actually sparring/rolling, practice consists to a great extent of incredibly difficult core exercises ideal for losing weight.

Is Stretching Bad for You?

Seeing as stretching is a common and traditional part of Taekwondo, it may seem like a shock to some when they are told that stretching can be unhealthy and detrimental to their performance. Specifically, static stretches have been proven to be damaging to runners by studies ranging from the deserts of Las Vegas to the frigid areas of Scandinavia. All over the world, the traditional idea of stretching and holding a certain position before a workout is being thrown out the window.

 As quoted:

“Science has moved on… many athletes’ warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but actually bad for you. The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 or 30 seconds, known as static stretching-primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them.”
 -William Holcomb, PhD, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 



While the research has largely been conducted on sports such as running, Taekwondo contains many of the same elements. Taekwondo contains elements of both cardiovascular and anaerobic exercise, as well as many of the same muscular movements in the legs as running sports. Overstretching is a problem, especially when done to the point of pain, and will weaken both strength and speed, such as diminishing the "snap" of a kick, before a workout or sparring match. The muscles will sometimes not even cope with the strain they are being forced to exert, causing collapse or severe injury if overstretched. Stretching has been proven in tests to decrease the force a muscle can exert by about 30% for a short time after the initial stretch.

What do kinesiologists and scientists recommend instead? A warm up that begins slowly and increases in intensity. For example, before class, it would be recommended to first jog, then run, then sprint for a short while. Basically, this is just cardio/aerobic exercise. For kicking exercises, it would be recommended to begin swinging the leg back and forth, slowly working up to a stretch kick. This is called dynamic stretching. Why is this better? Exercises that put your body into motion supply blood to the muscles of the body, while warming the muscles, which allows them to extract and use oxygen from the blood stream far more effectively. Oxygen is required to produce ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate)", a molecule that breaks down in order to release energy to the body. "Cold" stretching skips this vital step, which can do more harm than good.