Oct
23
Where Are The Boys?
Total Karate- blog is wondering where are all the teenage boys since most of the participants in martial arts classes are girls and ladies.
You’d think that, in martial arts, we wouldn’t have much trouble getting lads interested in training. Not so at our club! Most of the junior students are girls, and about half the seniors are ladies.
Do young boys are really more interested in pumping iron to impress the ladies than learning the wisdom and techniques of marital art?
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Interesting thought! At the moment, we have a good 50-50 split throughout our kids classes. However, I think it’s probably down to sensible parents concerned about their Daughters safety, wanting them to learn some very valuable life skills, that is starting to edge the numbers in the girls favour.
I do TKD and aikido. I had noticed over time that the proportion of male to female was changing to higher female representation in TKD and asked a few of the instructors about this. While they liked the increasing number of women, they attributed it to the style becoming softer over time. By the time we hit 2nd dan, the number of women are lower proportionally, even though they started higher proportionally.
While in aikido, which i consider generally softer (although the ukemi can be challenging) women never seem to be highly represented where i train, and even less so when you get to the dan levels. I think the even lower representation of women in higher ranks may be partly due to the amount of time you have to put into grade in aikido (5-7 years for shodan) vs 3-5 years for cho dan in TKD.