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There are a variety of kickboxing styles in the world of martial arts. There’s Muay Thai, American kickboxing, and Japanese kickboxing, just to name the few that we’ve recently covered. The differences between them are subtle to the untrained eye, but there are several crucial distinctions, especially with respect to their rulesets.

In this post, we’ll follow the lead of Alby Tam of the San Francisco-based Muay Thai gym Combat Culture, who walks through the history, rules, and defining characteristics of Japanese kickboxing in the video below. As Alby explains, Japanese kickboxing began as a blend of Muay Thai and karate in the 1960s and took off in popularity during the 1970s. By the late 1980s, it had entered into a period of decline, and it was then supplanted by K-1, which continues to be extremely popular in Japan.

Being a good training partner is one of those things that most people don’t think about when they first join a gym and start learning a martial art. This is totally normal. When it’s your first day or even your first month, you are usually inwardly focused because your main goals revolve around not embarrassing yourself and building up your endurance.

When Alby Tam of the San Francisco-based Muay Thai gym Combat Culture was growing up, the only combat sport that he remembers watching with any regularity was boxing (we’re not counting the WWF and WCW). Every so often, however, he’d stumble across a different kind of martial art that he’d never seen before. It was usually late at night, and usually on a station that he didn’t watch very often, but it was here that he caught a glimpse of another type of combat sport where the fighters were wearing pants and shoes. They were also kicking each other. 

Finding a new gym is always difficult, especially if you’ve recently moved to a new city and you don’t have a lot of connections in the area. As Shane Fazen of FIGHTTIPS and Vince “The Anomaly” Cachero explain in the below video, just about all of the things that anyone is really looking for in a new gym boil down to feeling comfortable, being challenged, and finding a group of people who will make you better. For younger fighters, you may also want to find an established fighter willing to take you under their wing.

Conditioning is absolutely vital for any involved in combat sports. Whether you’re playing high school hockey or training to become a professional MMA fighter, conditioning needs to be the backbone of your game if you ever plan to have the endurance to be a serious athlete and competitor. 

Learning a skill takes time. To become a world-class musician, you need to dedicate hours to running scales and improving your finger dexterity. To become fluent in another language, you need to really live in a culture where the language is spoken for months or even years. In Japan, even the art of making buckwheat soba noodles requires years of practice before one can consider themselves an expert.

Self-defense is the most common reason that people learn martial arts. While there are other benefits, like getting in shape, increasing flexibility, losing weight, and building confidence, the majority of people who walk through the doors of a martial arts gym for the first time are there to learn how to better defend themselves. For those who are just beginning to learn about martial arts, one question that repeatedly comes up is: Which martial art is the best in a real-world altercation?

Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is a combat sport that has gained widespread popularity in recent years. MMA involves the use of various techniques and disciplines, such as boxing, wrestling, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and Muay Thai. While MMA is often associated with violent and aggressive behavior, it offers a range of physical and mental benefits that can positively impact a person's overall health and wellbeing. 

Grappling is not the most glamorous form of combat. When you imagine the hero in an action movie fighting the villain’s top henchman, they’re usually landing uppercuts and roundhouse kicks or throwing each other through walls and windows. These fights also tend to end with a picturesque right hook. 

Mastery takes time. Whether you’re learning how to cook, how to play an instrument, or how to defend yourself with jiu-jitsu, you need to put in the hours if you want to become an expert. This is because learning a new skill that requires activity of both body and mind requires at least three types of knowledge. The Ancient Greeks specified them as episteme (theoretical knowledge), praxis (practical knowledge), and phronesis (practical wisdom).

When people start learning jiu-jitsu, they tend to be the most interested in submissions. After all, the easiest way to defend yourself is to quickly neutralize your opponent by putting them into a hold that ends the fight. In some cases, fighters are interested in getting an opponent to tap not only to end a fight, but to demonstrate dominance. 

When you begin training jiu-jitsu or any mixed martial arts, you will get sore. It doesn’t matter if you’re coming to class just to learn the basics of self-defense or planning to become a professional fighter. The good news is that conditioning creates results, and you will undoubtedly notice that you have more strength and endurance. What you may not notice is that conditioning can make you less susceptible to injury.

Takedown moves are crucial in a fight scenario. On the one hand, taking the fight to the ground reduces the amount of damage that strikes can do. It by no mean eliminates the threat of strikes, but a person who is standing can generate a lot more power in a punch or a kick than a person who is on the ground.

Training is integral to becoming good at jiu-jitsu. It’s the same as learning a language, an instrument, or any technical skill, and it doesn’t matter if your ultimate goal is to have the skills to win a street fight or to dominate in a mixed-martial arts tournament. Learning jiu-jitsu takes time, effort, and repetition. There are no shortcuts to mastery.