Can a Judo expert hold his own against a Taekwondo expert?

Depends on the rules and who the people are. Also, Japanese martial arts are traditionally divided into art forms and fighting forms, designated by the final part of the name. -do is an art form, while -jutsu is a fighting form. Taekwondo doesn’t match that pattern, and is taught as practical, art, and sport.

Judo is an art and sport form, which concentrates on throws and pins. It includes some strikes and kicks and weapon use, but those are more just the forms, and are not used in the sport matches. So I would tend to expect that an expert who only trained in Judo and/or was limited to using Judo training, would probably be at a disadvantage versus an otherwise-equal Taekrondo expert, unless it was a Judo match, or the rules of the match disallowed or de-emphasized strikes and kicks.

Jujutsu however, was traditionally a more serious/practical form, designed for taking on armed opponents even when not using weapons, and included practical use of strikes, kicks and weapons. I would think an Jujutsu expert would be more likely to be well-matched against a Taekwondo expert, but again I would think it would come down to specifics of the individuals and the situation.

If you’re thinking about taking up one of the martial arts for purposes of self-defense, well … it’s not a bad start.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that you could win a street fight or fight off a rapist, for example, just because you have mastered some forms in a specific discipline of MA.

Street fighting, fighting for your life, and attempting to save yourself from ambush – to name a few unplanned events that necessitate self defense skills – have little or nothing to do with martial arts training. Don’t get me wrong: you may very well improve your strength and conditioning, your self-confidence, and your awareness and general attitude. And you will certainly learn new ways that your body works vis-à-vis others’ bodies – physical interacting that is brand new to you – and that’s a good thing.

But street fights don’t follow rules. There’s no tapping out in a fight for your life. So I would recommend a specifically “self-defense” class in addition to (or instead of) taekwando. You don’t want belts and levels and demonstrations; you want to know techniques that can save your life if you make the mistake of getting into the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. A well managed self defense class will teach you that the first and best thing that you can always do is avoid those places, times and people – and give you techniques to do that.

Above all, watch out for what is called “bullshido”. That’s a term I’ll let you look up for its humor value – and so you’ll have some good examples of what not to do.

I would think that in terms of real-life self defense, Krav Maga would be better than either of the other two.

Do you have a sword?
If you want self defense, and self discipline, you are better off having a tutor than getting into a class.

Each art has it’s strengths and weaknesses. TKD if a “hard” art that focuses on strikes while Judo is a “soft” art that is more into grapples. But for personal fulfillment, Aikido is probably the best. Read a bit about it’s founder, Morihei Ueshiba a.k.a. “O Sensei” and you might learn why your concept of “triumph” really has no place in martial arts. And there are many books and blogs about how to use Aikido principles of redirection in everyday life, even to the extent of winning a fight without actual combat.

On the physical side, a good Aikidoka may not rip your arms off, but they can almost effortlessly hold your arm in ways that give you the choice of submitting to their will and going where they want you to go or breaking your own arm. It may look like Aikidokas are aiding their attackers and giving the impression that it’s more a “performance” than an effective fighting style, but the truth is that the Uke is just trying to avoid getting hurt; doing a forward flip and landing on your back is generally preferable to a broken wrist or dislocated shoulder. Or they are just have their balance disrupted enough that gravity pulls them down with just a slight “suggestion” from the Tori. In any event, O Sensei claimed that his Aikido got better as age made his body weaker, and some who faced him felt as though they were fighting Mount Fuji rather than an old man.

Watch this video to get an idea of how Aikido stacks up against Karate; it’s a bit long (~40 minutes) but the bit around the 10-minute mark might show you why the police like Aikido. Any time you fight, you are legally responsible for any harm that results, even if you are fighting in self-defense. Grabbing someone’s wrist and pinning them to the ground is far less likely to get you prosecuted for Excessive Force, than a rib-breaking kick or a punch to the throat. For a self-defense art, that is a rather important consideration.

Also, this

@Buttonstc Yes, but Krav Maga has no spiritual side to speak of.

Taekwondo is the preferred “form” of the McDojo. It’s easy to look like you know what you’re doing, but has very little substance behind it.

In a real life altercation, by the time you’ve gotten yourself “into position” to fight, the asshole you’re threatening with all your years of experience has already shifted your skull six inches behind its normal place.

Regardless of types of martial arts, the winner is the master of his discipline & the better opponent of the fighters. So, yes, Judo expert can overcome Taekwondo expert if he is the better one.

@Seek Not entirely true. You know how all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares? The same applies to TKD; not all TKD dojos are “buy a belt” places in a strip mall.

That said, TKD is both geared more towards competition than actual combat, and has very little history. As a result, it’s not good for either self-defense or spiritual growth, especially compared to an art that has been around for a long time and/or was designed for more than booting people in the head. Many other arts were founded with more “internal elements” and/or more utility in a real fight and thus would be better suited for both goals OP stated.

Of course the instructor said that taekwondo is superior. He was trying to sell you something (i.e., his class). But if two masters of different martial arts decide to fight, the result will not be determined by which art each one practices. The result will be determined by a combination of who has practiced more and luck. (Luck cannot be eliminated from a fight. It can only be mitigated. This is true no matter how much and what kind of training someone has.)

There’s an unfortunate tendency among certain people in the martial arts community to obsess over which style is better (@jerv makes a very important point on this matter when he notes that the concept of “triumph” has no real place in serious martial arts). Ultimately, this insistence on ranking different arts often reveals a fundamental ignorance about other styles—one that is typically based more on rumor and stereotypes than facts. But in the end, different styles are just that: different. That doesn’t mean that one is better. In fact, many of them teach roughly the same things, but in a different order and putting emphasis on different elements.

A stock example here is that karate starts with straight line movement and eventually teaches you circles, whereas kung fu starts with circular movements and eventually teaches you straight lines. The example is an oversimplification, but it gets at the basic point (which is that they both get you to a similar place by way of different paths). Not all martial arts focus on the same things, of course, and not all will lead you to roughly the same place via different roads. But even then there tends to be significant overlap in both goals and technique.

Another important factor here is that there’s only so much you can know about a school by the way it names its style. There are (at least) two reasons for this. The first is that most martial arts have “sport” versions and “practical” versions. Sport versions tend to be “purer” because they are designed to help you compete against people using the same techniques. Practical versions tend to be a bit more hybridized because they are designed to help you compete against people using different techniques.

The second is that a particular style’s historical name might not match up with modern labels. In the past, there was a lot of trading of techniques. But those who would impose a categorization schema upon all martial arts have difficulty accounting for this fact. Case in point: I study three martial arts (karate, kendo, and Jeet Kune Do). But the style of karate I study is a “practical” version of Korean origin. It includes a lot of striking techniques (as a modern martial arts taxonomist would expect), but it also involves a lot of locks and throws.

In fact, if a modern martial arts taxonomist were to look at it, they would probably call it Tang Soo Do. And in fact, the style was once called Tang Soo Do. But the Japanese pronunciation of the characters for “Tang Soo Do” is ”karate-do.” And in places like the US, it was once common for the word “karate” to be applied to any martial art that involved striking techniques. So when our style moved to the US, the master who came here (speaking five languages, but English being the last and weakest of them) just went with it when people told him the English word for what he was practicing was “karate.”

Incidentally, this has led to disagreements with a friend of mine who does judo. He likes to say that he can beat any karate technique—because he thinks karate is only striking. When I started doing karate, he challenged me to some light sparring. The moment he got a grab on me he said “the problem with your martial art is that it has no response to this simple move.” So I threw him. This led to him protesting that I had cheated because “that move wasn’t real karate.” Well, too bad. It’s part of the karate I learned.

A similar thing is true about the style of kendo I practice. It is not sport kendo. In fact, it would be better described as kenjutsu. But again, when the style moved to the US, local conditions led to it being referred to as “kendo” (mostly because no one in the area back then knew what kenjutsu was, but had a vague idea of what kendo was). These sorts of historical facts muddy up any attempt to make blanket statements about what a particular style is or does based solely on its name.

So in short, I would recommend you dispense with all notions of one style being better than another. Instead, focus on the specific school in front of you. Does it seem legitimate? Does it seem interesting (i.e., does it offer what you’re looking for with regard to what it teaches and how it is taught)? Those are the things that matter.

@CWOTUS There are several martial arts based on the notion of “fights don’t follow rules.” I practice three of them. So while your comments apply to some martial arts, they are equally misrepresentations of others. In fact, everything you have attributed to “self-defense classes” has been taught in my martial arts class (and quite early). As one master instructor of mine is fond of saying: “The first rule of martial arts is don’t be there. The rest of what we learn concerns what to do when you fail to follow this rule.” And yes, we learn quite a bit about avoidance. In fact, almost all of the “practical self-defense” classes taught in this city are taught by one of our instructors. (And the one that isn’t makes the absurd promise that it can teach you how to defend yourself from guns, knives, and grabs all in one three-hour session.)

@jerv Notice that @Seek never said that all TKD dojos are McDojos. She said that most McDojos are TKD dojos.

You’re absolutely right, @SavoirFaire, and I see that I left out an important distinction in my response earlier. That distinction is the vital difference between “sport” martial arts, where most of the discipline takes place in a controlled environment, indoors and (usually) on mats, with a referee, following strict rules in a defined area of competition, etc., and the “real world, fight for your life” combat that has no rules, no ring, no referee and no style points.

Thanks for helping me to realize and rectify that omission.

@SavoirFaire Yes, it’s very easy to form a bias with martial arts, especially if you are trying to sell a dojo membership. I myself have a bit of a bias simply because my own personality and what I want from a martial art make me gravitate towards Aikido. It’s not that I think Aikido is better than, say, Karate, but it’s better for me. Of course, the Aikido you learn from many places here is a bit different from what police in Japan are taught which is more like Aikijutsu, and the fact that O Sensei trained under the “founder” of Aikijutsu before making his own art doesn’t make things any less confusing.

She also never denied it, and I just wanted to make it clear that the TKD/McDojo relationship was one-way. I’ve seen a lot of issues, from miscommunication to crashing multi-million-dollar machines, from assuming that an implication/omission would interpreted as the speaker/programmer intended. Hell, you and I have been down that road a few times.

How on earth does me saying that Tae Kwon Do is the “favored form of the McDojo” imply in any way that I believe all Tae Kwon Do practitioners are running McDojos? Context reading fail?

Hey, @Eggie , do you feel you have the information you need?

@Seek It’s not about what you believe, it’s about how what you said could be interpreted. I never really thought you believed that, but I saw how others may read what you wrote and, through the fallacy of “affirming the consequent”, get the wrong idea about TKD.
I’m just a little more sensitive than most about things like that since my experience is that if something can be misinterpreted, it’s safest to assume that it WILL be misinterpreted… just as my comment was interpreted as a rebuttal rather than a clarification.

Thanks guys. Just one more thing. I’m 30 going on 31. Is that a good starting time for Judo?

@Eggie As the saying goes: “The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. The second best time is now.” In any case, there’s certainly nothing wrong with starting at 30. Just be aware of your limits.

There are people who start martial arts at twice your age. You’ll be fine.

@SavoirFaire I don’t think that there will be anything too stressful with Judo as apposed to TKD. Also they offer Aikido classes there as well. Listening to Jerv, maybe I should take that up instead?

@Eggie Like @jerv, I think you’ll be fine. The advice to be aware of your limits is really applicable to anyone practicing a martial art, both younger and older. When young people do too much, it is often because they have energy to spare aren’t yet fully adept at feeling when their body is telling them to stop. When older people do too much, it is often because they are consciously ignoring their body telling them to stop in order to “keep up” with some idealized notion of how much they ought to be able to do (which may or may not be influenced by the presence of younger people in the room). But to quote another martial arts platitude: “The goal is not to be better than anyone else. The goal is to be better than you were yesterday.”

As to the relative stresses of judo and taekwondo, I doubt either one is more stressful in any absolute sense. They’re just going to present different challenges. But no matter which martial art you practice, there are going to be some rough moments. You’re going to take some hard falls if you do judo or aikido. You’re going to take some errant kicks if you do taekwondo. And there are going to internal doubts and inhibitions to get over (which will probably be rougher than all the hard falls and errant strikes put together). But speaking only for myself, martial arts has eliminated more stress than it has ever brought on.

Regarding the choice between judo and aikido, I’ll leave it to @jerv to expound on the latter if he so desires. I’m not qualified to advocate for either one. Both are attractive options to me personally (if I were to take up a new martial art, judo and aikido would be the top contenders), and a dojo that offers both is a nice advantage (since it makes things easier if you change your mind or decide to take up a second martial art). One piece of advice I would give you is to observe a class before signing up for anything (any dojo that won’t let you do this isn’t worth joining, by the way). See what you’re in for. See if one looks more like something you’d want to do or if one has a more attractive philosophy.

Whether or not Aikido is the best choice for you is a question I can’t answer, but I can say that O Sensei was still tossing people twice his size well past his 70th birthday, claiming that his Aikido got stronger as his body got weaker. That stands to reason as Aikido is about redirecting force instead of opposing it. Judo is similar as it is more using the opponent’s force against them rather than matching it with force of your own.
It’s also worth noting that most MMA fighters know multiple arts. At a bare minimum one striking art and one grappling art. Many people prefer striking arts, but wrist-locks and hip-tosses can end an altercation just as easily as knocking their teeth out, and with fewer medical and legal repercussions.
But personality plays a role in choosing a style. I prefer using finesse/technique over raw power and efficiency over exertion, so I favor a different set of arts than @SaviorFaire who seems to favor more aggressive styles.

@jerv For the record, the style of karate/tang soo do that I practice is not particularly aggressive, or at least not relentlessly so. The striking aspect is definitely more “hard style,” but the grappling aspect shares a lot with judo and aikido (for both historical and philosophical reasons). And kendo is almost entirely a finesse art. Physics does a lot of the work for you when you have a long, sharp objected to swing around.

Jeet Kune Do tends to vary wildly from dojo to dojo, but the version I practice is still thoroughly grounded in Bruce Lee’s exhortation to “be like water.” There is a lot of mixing between so-called “hard” and “soft” approaches, though.

@SavoirFaire That’s as may be, but it’s hard to find a style that is less aggressive than Aikido. O Sensei was a pacifist after all.

@jerv Sure. But the way you characterized the difference misrepresented our style. Finesse and technique over raw power are the name of the game in our dojo, too.

I’ve had 7 years of Aikido training, so I would go with @jerv . You can use the training in all aspects of life. I have avoided many car accidents due to my faster reflexes and wider view of the world. Helps a lot at work too, when the direct path doesn’t work.

Similar to what he mentioned before – one time I was asked by a 5 ft tall visiting instructor to grab his wrists during a demo. A second later I was in the air, upside down, and 6 ft away from him. I knew right away that I had to land correctly, otherwise it was going to hurt. I landed well, but it took me two 360° rolls before I could stop. He was like a little Terminator!