Every martial arts school on the planet offers "self defense" training, but what is generally meant by this is that you can apply your dojo skills on the street. Most of the time the reality of this is disappointing.

Learning a martial art is a long term commitment. You wouldn't expect to take six weeks of piano lessons and expect to play concert halls, so why should you expect to be able really fight after the same amount of time? Most martial arts programs are structured around training you for years.

Many martial arts have primary goals that are not related to fighting. It sounds strange, but while most martial arts trace their origins to actual combat, some have evolved into sports or moral philosophy and fighting is no longer their primary goal.

Fighting is about the application of principles more than the application of techniques. A given technique is only the answer to small range of potential situations. While learning the mechanics of a technique is relatively easy, learning to recognize what techniques fit into which situations is considerably harder.

Most martial arts instructors don't know anything about the legalities involved. If you put your self defense skills in the context of justified use of force, is your stop kick to the head of a downed opponent or your choke hold legally defensible?

Most martial arts do not integrate well with modern weapon systems. The more progressive martial arts schools will not eschew the use of modern tools (pepper spray, firearms, etc.) but the integration of those tools is up to you, the newbie student to figure out.

Few martial arts schools do a good job of putting dojo skills into a real life context. A typical dojo technique is something on along the lines of a canned response to a stimulus (block a punch, escape a grab, etc.) which omits a lot of the questions (and answers) about how self defense situations develop.

All of that being said, martial arts are on the whole are a completely beneficial practice. Any martial art is better than nothing especially if you can fill in some of the contextual gaps and stick with it.

Recommendations for Martial Arts Training:

• Do something with a sparing component. While the stress is not the same as a real fight, training with some level of adrenaline is a good idea.
• Do something with as much contact as you can physically manage.
• Do something with a conditioning component. Physical fitness is a key factor in self-defense.