Guest post by Evolve MMA, Asia’s premier championship brand for martial arts. It has the most number of World Champions on the planet. Named as the #1 ranked martial arts organization in Asia by CNN, Yahoo! Sports, FOX Sports, Evolve MMA is the best Singapore BJJ gym.

Martial arts is becoming more and more popular for women and girls. Training empowers them with increased confidence and the ability to defend themselves, which is so important in this day and age.

We all love our kids, most especially our daughters. We want them to grow up in a world that’s safe and fair, and in an environment that will allow equal opportunity for all. While we’re getting closer and closer to achieving that as a society, we’re not there just yet. We still have a lot of work to do. Martial arts training can play a major role in helping us change the world for the better.

Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), in particular, is a fantastic martial art to introduce to young girls. Known as ‘the gentle art,’ BJJ teaches students strong principles that they can apply to their daily lives, how to use leverage to their advantage in self-defense situations, and protect themselves from physical threats.

Women and girls are genetically smaller than males. BJJ is a highly technical discipline that allows a smaller person to gain the upper hand against a larger opponent through positioning and leverage. This makes it the best martial art for the undersized.

As parents, it is our responsibility to equip our children with the confidence, skills, and values they need to become good members of society. BJJ is a gift we can share with our daughters.

Today, Evolve Daily shares five reasons you should enroll your daughter in a BJJ class.

1) Builds Self-Esteem

Self-esteem is all about how people value themselves internally, and the confidence that stems from their abilities. It is more than how people simply picture themselves in terms of appearance, behavior, and personality.  

BJJ training teaches our daughters to be comfortable with their bodies, how they function. It unlocks their full physical potential and empowers them with physical ability. And because every situation in BJJ is basically a problem to be solved, it teaches them how to analyze problems and develop viable solutions. It helps kids to think outside the box.

This, in and of itself, breeds self-confidence.

Of course, having increased self-esteem means it’s going to affect other parts of daily life. It will help our daughters become more confident as they grow older and develop their personalities, interacting with other kids in school, and understanding how valuable they are outside of just physical appearances.

2) Learning Self-Defense

In a world that’s becoming increasingly volatile, with humanity blurring the lines of morality and decency, there’s certainly a lot of violence going around. While it’s easy to tell our daughters not to hang out with the wrong crowd, walk away from tense situations, and simply avoid danger, it’s unrealistic to think that they can do that effectively a hundred percent of the time.

That makes teaching our daughters how to defend themselves extremely important.

In Singapore alone, one in every 10 women experiences physical violence in their lifetime. It’s a disheartening statistic, but our daughters have a very real risk of encountering physical danger at some point.

BJJ empowers our daughters with the combat and self-defense skills that will allow them to protect themselves from physical threats. The gentle art’s distinct techniques teach them to end conflict swiftly and effectively, and with the least amount of explosive damage as possible.

BJJ also enables our daughters to defend themselves against physically larger and more imposing threats.

3) Mental Fortitude

Aside from the obvious physical benefits BJJ imparts, our daughters will also gain tremendous mental fortitude and toughness, which is essentially the ability to persevere and remain resilient, even when things get rough. 

Loss and failure are inevitable in life, but the difference between success and failure is the ability to bounce back and try again. 

BJJ training teaches our daughters to embrace failure, and treat it as a learning experience. It gives them a strong and sturdy mindset, that will help them stay the course and never give up on their dreams.

Developing mental fortitude in our daughters will enable them to face adversity and overcome any obstacle in stride. When all else fails, only the mentally tough will achieve more in life than those who give up.

4) Leadership

We can all agree that we should have more women leaders in society and that there should be equal opportunity in the workplace. In order to become a leader, however, one must have leadership skills. BJJ training gives our daughters the opportunity to develop leadership skills in the gym before they need to apply those skills out in the real world.

As they progress in training, our daughters develop self-esteem and confidence in their abilities. They are also put into situations where they are asked to share their knowledge with fellow practitioners, especially those with less experience. This puts them in leadership situations where they must use their learnings to help others.

Other lessons BJJ teaches include humility, understanding, cooperation and teamwork, and respect. Because of this, enrolling our daughters in BJJ class will have far-reaching effects on their futures.

5) Social Development

Last but certainly not least, BJJ teaches our daughters how to interact with others, whether of the same or opposite gender. In BJJ, there are no lines between boys and girls. Every practitioner is of equal footing, separated only by their knowledge and experience.

Each BJJ class is a mosaic of children of varying ages and vastly diverse backgrounds, and the values instilled in them to respect each other regardless of these differences. By exposing our children to this safe and controlled space to interact and work with each other, they gain a better understanding of each other’s similarities and differences, therefore allowing them to build strong and positive relationships as they drill and roll together.

BJJ training teaches our daughters that while we all have different strengths and weaknesses, no gender is stronger or weaker than the other by birth. We all control our physical destiny, and we can be who we want to be.