Toddler Girl - Jiu Jitsu, or Taekwondo? Something Else? For Daughter

[Akira-R]

Gymnastics can be pretty injury prone, depending on the level of competitiveness. My sister was pretty good and had came home in crutches more than a few occasions. Pins in elbows etc. Just keep that in mind if you think your kid will want to do it competitively.

They have gym schools that just focus on non-competitive aspects like tumbling for smaller kids. Places like ATA Gym in San Jose would be an example. It's a good entry into gymnastics. Then joining a competitive gym later on if she chooses to take the next step at around age 7 or so.

 

[Climber]

When I was heavy into karate, we had some Kenpo 'blackbelts' (back then was guaranteed in 2 years, as long as you paid the fees) come to our dojo. Our blue belts beat the shit out of them and they never came back, blue belt was our lowest belt rank after white.

We never saw them at tournaments where most of the other systems competed (exception was taekwondo and Kenpo).

I put my son into karate when he was almost 3, he stayed in until he was 7 and track got too demanding.

Gymnastics provide a nice foundation for other sports, same with soccer, for different reasons.

 

[greenmonster]

My daughter did gymnastics from age 4 to age 10. She started competing at age 5 and spent many hours in the gym, became very close to her teammates, learned how to take coaching direction, learned to stay away from sugar and eat healthy , developed a good mind body connection.

Transitioned to dance and picked that up quickly due to the gymnastics experience.

To this day at age 22 she is still seeing the benefits of early physical training.

 

[Climber]

Gymnastics are good because it gives them flexibility, strength, coordination, balance and other factors that are a great foundation to pretty much any other sport.

 

[Dubbington]

Gymnastics are good because it gives them flexibility, strength, coordination, balance and other factors that are a great foundation to pretty much any other sport.

My daughter did gymnastics from age 4 to age 10. She started competing at age 5 and spent many hours in the gym, became very close to her teammates, learned how to take coaching direction, learned to stay away from sugar and eat healthy , developed a good mind body connection.

Transitioned to dance and picked that up quickly due to the gymnastics experience.

To this day at age 22 she is still seeing the benefits of early physical training.

Yeah, the owner of California Strength said soccer, swimming, gymnastics are the best when kids are young before they specialize around 8-9 years old. Those three sports teach the best unilaterally body control and development.

I think I'm just trying to deny the commitment gymnastics might require.

Rory started in gymnastics and is becoming an olympic weightlifting. Very impressive.

 

[greenmonster]

I think I'm just trying to deny the commitment gymnastics might require.

That’s the thing with gymnastics.
What started out as something to do on a Saturday for an hour became 12-15 hours a week in the gym for years.
She had great coaches who were strict but supportive and a very positive atmosphere but it was pretty much all we did.

 

[Grissom]

Our soon to be 5yr old grandson had been doing Karate and now will be doing Jujitsu

He also has done some gymnastics (little dude is fearless) baseball and soccer

His parents are giving him a bunch of options

Heck I was only doing t-ball if that at that age

 

[ST Guy]

I’d give her a choice of various options and let her choose.

 

[Pandelyon]

I think I'm just trying to deny the commitment gymnastics might require.

To be honest the commitment will have to be there for any activity you choose.

As someone who teaches martial arts...

If you want "Energy per minute" value, I would pick any activity that is trained specifically to be competitive. The existence of meaningful competition will naturally increase the energy of the activity for the kid and the class overall.

Gymnastics and BJJ are all perfectly fine activities on average because the likelihood of not having the optionality of competition is very low.

"Theoretical" martial arts, in my experience, can be a bit of a dice roll for how "engaged" the instructor and the program are in development. You can get some crazy cynical people teaching it, so you have to do your homework. Forms/katas/whateveryourart calls them can be exhausting when done well, but it's like dance: You get out what you put in. Also, the lack of proprioception at young ages makes esoteric movement extremely difficult to understand and improve upon*.

My vote would be boxing, wrestling, or Muay Thai, personally. Striking arts tend to have a very different injury profile than gymnastics / BJJ (less catastrophic in my opinion) and wrestling is a level of raw athleticism and grit that no other martial art can touch.

One caveat: I wouldn't pick an activity under the illusion it helps with self-defense. That's a very different problem and requires a very different thread.

I’d give her a choice of various options and let her choose.

^

*Sustaining yourself in water or exerting enough energy to lift your body in the air for fill-in-the-blank maneuver is hard to cheat. Failure is much more self-evident when the criteria is "I fell down", "I had to tap", or "I was 5 seconds slower" than "You need to relax your shoulders more" and breaking boards (Which is genuinely really easy).

 

[greenmonster]

Has your daughter indicated what SHE wants to do?
And at 5 years of age what she likes today may change tomorrow or next week so I wouldn’t sign any contracts.
It would also help her if she had a friend in the class so they can support each other rather than her going in alone with strangers.

 

[tuxumino]

I'd recommend Judo, no I don't do Judo and only did it as a kid cus the Y day camp made me. The thing about Judo is the rolling and falling which developed early may save her when she slips and falls, which as we know can happen anytime. Judo can lead to competitive sports and is even an Olympic event. In the event of a self defense need slamming some one into the ground can end a fight real quick.

 

[littlebeast]

lol - if my parents had provided training on how to seriously injure someone at age 5, i’d have been in juevie by age 7. probably earlier. as it was, first kid i punched in the face, and gave a black eye to was second grade. pure impulse (no formal training). and in case there’s any question. kid was a dick. deserved every bit of what he got.

 

[budman]

This is barf so just saying…

 

[Kurosaki]

Looking to dive in to the sports world to a degree and get my 5 year older into something. Swim lessons are weekly but she needs other types of activity. She's pretty high energy. I like the idea of jiu jitsu or taekwondo but reading about the differences and it's tough to determine if one is better than the other to start with. Might be something else.

Video's of BJJ (brazillian jiu jitsu) look cool but also scary when some break the rules with slams on the back of the neck area.

We can do some trial clases locally and see if she gravitates toward one or the other.

Father inlaw recently said he prefers TK, being a "6th degree black belt" granted he's 63, is very lazy with the motivation of a sloth. He likes the less injury side of TK and the focus on kicks and not grappling on the ground.

I would say do both if you can afford it. TKD is generally a lot cheaper than jiu jitsu. If you want to go that route, do your research not just on the websites but opinions you can find on social media from current students maybe even reddit. I think you understand what the term McDojo means... But I started jiu jitsu in 2017 when I was already a Karate black belt at I wanna say I was 16-17? But I started training when I was 6-7 in a dojo with maybe a total of 10 people, adults and kids so there was constant training that was monitored every minute. We were doing a lot of intense training, well within self control, I'm not sure parents would want to see their kids doing back in the mid 90s, early 2000s.

Cross training is important. This is a different day/generation where training just one martial arts is generally not going to be enough, when it comes to real self defense. Too many people, even as kids, have trained many different outs growing up, relying on one isn't smart.

Also consider wrestling as a martial art to push her into. Even though my jiu jitsu gym does a lot of wrestling specific classes, I fuckin hate wrestlers, guys that have done this since they were just kids or a lot in middle school or high school. They don't know much about anything hunting for submissions compared to jiu jistu. They will put you on your back, if you let them, even if you don't, it can be hard to get out there and it's not gonna be a fun time. But if you're on top, they start acting like fish outta water. (If you can keep them there) and a lot of submission options present themselves.

At the end of the day, your daughter is 5 years old. Get her into jitu jitsu and/or wrestling. She'll likely have much better results of defending herself if shit goes down on the playground. She can develop striking skills later. If she wants. But to slightly change point her, let her do to whatever she wants. She's just a kid, I don't think you should push her one way or the other. If she likes one martial art, let her do it. If she doesn't let her try another. When I was your kids age, I didn't have the options she has.

 

[Kurosaki]

LOL, thank you for kind words my man!

I've known for awhile but we've talked jiu jitsu in other threads over the years.

 

[Kurosaki]

lol - if my parents had provided training on how to seriously injure someone at age 5, i’d have been in juevie by age 7. probably earlier. as it was, first kid i punched in the face, and gave a black eye to was second grade. pure impulse (no formal training). and in case there’s any question. kid was a dick. deserved every bit of what he got.

You're a different breed. You did what you did, I'm assuming you did what you did because people can be dicks even at young ages.

And my training since taught me at any age, What we learn has ALWAYS been self defense, not offense. But that said, any martial arts training facility should ALWAYS make sure you understand how to offensive. There's no waiting to respond. Do what you do to defense yourself and many times that means being first, don't wait.

This is why as much me and my brother are broken with our family and will be for years to come, I'm assuming, when my mom, to this day, talks about my martial arts experience compared to him, she has his unreal expectation. He's got 20-25lbs on me and he has none. Regardless of that, I've trained with bigger guys, I always have to because of my age. I told my mom she needs to get this idea out of her head that because of what I learned for decades means this would be a fight easily. Because one of the major reasons I know this is because he is a narcissist and if came out of that fight, I don't know if I would "win" because he would fight me with bad intentions to hurt me the way he would do some stranger that wronged him and even though if I could win well enough, I had to tell me my mom "let's get back to fuckin reality. There's no way I would get out of this fight not bloodied and bruised because I'm not trying to hurt him the same way he wants punch me as hard as he can. It wouldn't with that way. But there's a reason why we train."

It's not happened as adults, not since we were kids and that size advantage didn't matter, maybe he has a chip on his shoulder from those times.

 

[Kurosaki]

This thread brings up a lot my personal martial arts experience. Too many. Joye/

When I was in elementary school, even though I had a lot of kids to play with, I always liked playing in the kids on tarmac. One year I might be getting some of these years mixed up, it was 30+ years ago.

Sometimes I just wanted to play in the sandbox during Recess by myself. Some of the losers would come bother me and kicked over whatever I was making. This didn't last very long because one of the bigger kids Joey saw what was on of these kids. If any of these losers on another day try to mess with me in the sandbox, they weren't threatening to get by Joey.

Joey was, we connected but I haven't talked to him in recent years. He is a person and even though we were into decent classes,) Well he went to none because he was just a big guy. I felt I didn't need him anymore but wanted to stay because he protected me from kids that would have been fine kicking me in the face. I that was a beginning of what I've said for said for years, "Being Nice to People is not that fucking hard." Interactions like that are part of why I say that quote often.

 

[littlebeast]

You're a different breed. You did what you did, I'm assuming you did what you did because people can be dicks even at young ages.

And my training since taught me at any age, What we learn has ALWAYS been self defense, not offense. But that said, any martial arts training facility should ALWAYS make sure you understand how to offensive. There's no waiting to respond. Do what you do to defense yourself and many times that means being first, don't wait.

This is why as much me and my brother are broken with our family and will be for years to come, I'm assuming, when my mom, to this day, talks about my martial arts experience compared to him, she has his unreal expectation. He's got 20-25lbs on me and he has none. Regardless of that, I've trained with bigger guys, I always have to because of my age. I told my mom she needs to get this idea out of her head that because of what I learned for decades means this would be a fight easily. Because one of the major reasons I know this is because he is a narcissist and if came out of that fight, I don't know if I would "win" because he would fight me with bad intentions to hurt me the way he would do some stranger that wronged him and even though if I could win well enough, I had to tell me my mom "let's get back to fuckin reality. There's no way I would get out of this fight not bloodied and bruised because I'm not trying to hurt him the same way he wants punch me as hard as he can. It wouldn't with that way. But there's a reason why we train."

It's not happened as adults, not since we were kids and that size advantage didn't matter, maybe he has a chip on his shoulder from those times.

it wasn’t that complicated. i had a bandage on my upper arm. kid asked me why. i told him i just got a shot (vaccination). he punched me in the spot, laughed, and asked me if it hurt. i punched him in the eye, and asked him the same question. my mom got called into the school. the first of many trips. my threshold for reciprocating with physical aggression was always very low. didn’t change until i met my dude. he put a stop to that tendency real quick. and as it happens, we took up martial arts together, and became intense sparring partners.

 

[Kurosaki]

it wasn’t that complicated. i had a bandage on my upper arm. kid asked me why. i told him i just got a shot (vaccination). he punched me in the spot, laughed, and asked me if it hurt. i punched him in the eye, and asked him the same question. my mom got called into the school. the first of many trips. my threshold for reciprocating with physical aggression was always very low. didn’t change until i met my dude. he put a stop to that tendency real quick. and as it happens, we took up martial arts together, and became intense sparring partners.

This is why I say you're a different breed and I mean it as much as someone can make that compliment.

I'm not sure I would wanna be in a situation where I had to fight you.

Best martial art, Mr. Miyagi said it, best defense... don't be there.

Run fast. The best fights are the ones the don't even happen.

 

[Melissa]

I agree and I noticed that when I was in training for boxing I felt more aggressive out in the real world.
In the gym I was able to express my frustrations and anxiety via punching and dipping, ducking and denying.