Can you train 2 Martial Arts at once?
Many people believe that when you begin training a Martial Art that you solely stick to that single one, whatever it may be. What most people don’t realise is that Martial Arts is often a journey where we train in multiple styles until we have something that is somewhat unique to us, now this isn’t always the case, some people will learn one martial art and never train any other style, and this is absolutely fine. There are advantages and disadvantages to training one single style versus multiple styles, however for those who are interested in training in multiple styles at the same time here is a small list of things you must be aware of.
You have to balance time according to your needs.
what do I mean by this, well everyone who participates in Martial Arts has a certain amount of time to dedicate towards it, for people who train one martial art this is fine, they can pick out what days of the week they would like to train. however when you study multiple styles you quickly run out of time, An hour here, 45 minutes there, then you have to consider travelling time as its likely that your other Martial Arts train in different locations. It all adds up quickly so you will have to think about how you allocate your time, which leads me to my next point.
Training multiple styles means you aren't going to get as good as fast than if you were training just one.
unfortunately due to the nature of having to train something more to get better at it, chances are splitting your attentions amongst multiple different styles is going to have an effect on how much you improve, lets say you have two days a week you can train, if you were studying one style twice a week you would make steady gains on your abilities and noticeable improvement within that style, than lets say you decide you want to learn a new style alongside your current one, now those two days really become one for each, so your returns would be much slower. You will get better, just slower.
Its going to cost more
This one feels fairly obvious but yes, training another Martial Art is going to cost more, a lot of the time training isn’t cheap and paying for extra petrol or extra train fare is going to add up quickly too, so be mindful of your budget. Make sure it is something you can afford to do.
Finally
The part you’ve been waiting for, yes, you can train multiple Martial Arts at the same time, however it is something you really have to dedicate yourself too, its a hard thing to do as you have to find more time and you’ll find yourself being sore from all the extra workouts, but you can comfortably train two Martial Arts at the same time if you do think about what goals you have and how quickly you want to meet them. You can mitigate my second point by just dedicating more time to training, you could do what I do and have a ‘main’ style and a ‘supplementary’ style, where essentially two of my training blocks a week are taken up by Muay Thai and then one block is BJJ, I might train like this for 6 to 10 weeks and then I will swap them round, this way, I feel as though I give an almost equal amount of time to each style, maybe one day I’ll feel the need to change it up and go back to training just one style if I want to compete again, that choice is entirely up to me. I get to choose how much time I dedicate and so do YOU.
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