Take a month of martial arts training (aikido, jujitsu, and judo are popular soft styles, Tae Kwon Do and Krav Maga are two very different hard styles (TKD is fun and mostly useless for defense, Krav is super effective for dangerous situations but pretty grueling)).
Join the local swing dancing scene. If you don’t have one, try salsa or Argentine Tango.
Take an art course. Start with a beginner class that does a little with lots of different of media types, then take a class focusing on the medium you prefer. Do this even if you feel you are bad at art. I am terrible but I still enjoy working with clay.
Buy an Audible subscription and fill useless hours with audiobooks. This can improve commutes and other boring tasks.
Buy either a stereo Bluetooth headset with playback controls on it, or a small mp3 player such as the Sansa Clip Zip that has easily accessible controls outside your pocket. This advice is mostly relevant if you listen to media a lot. Having playback controls very accessible lowers the activation energy of starting your music/podcast/audiobook.
I’m pretty skeptical of how much good a month of martial arts will do you once you’re off the mat. Most of the value of martial arts is in conditioning (both physical and mental, e.g. making you more comfortable around people acting aggressively towards you), not technique, and a month of classes isn’t nearly enough to build a strong foundation there. Even on the technique side, that much time will give you a few neat tricks but won’t allow you to systematize them or to generalize them to unfamiliar situations.
On the other hand, a month is just about enough time to get you past the boring introductory lessons (how to stand, how to fall, how to throw a punch that doesn’t completely suck) and into the meat of the art, so that kind of time might be a good sample if you’re on the fence about a longer-term commitment.
I did not much more than a month and it made me feel much more comfortable with my body. Am I going to win any fights? No. But I feel a lot more stable (I basically never fall over now), and more conscious of what I can and can’t do. I even feel like I’m a better dancer/skater because of it.
Depends what you want out of it. If you want to fight effectively, efficient use of training time implies having a tight feedback loop to improve quickly, which means fighting a lot (for real). Fighting a lot is not a pleasant life.
You can get a lot of things out of martial arts training, but I don’t think you can get many of them in a month. If you want to have a better chance in self-defense situations, you’re not going to gain the skills or the habits you need for it until much later. If you want self-discipline et cetera, you’re not going to get much of it from learning falls and a few basic escapes. If you want to get in shape, you’ll barely have started. If you just want to have fun and feel badass… okay, it’s plausible that you could do that in a month, but it’s not going to last once you stop training.
I honestly feel that “learning to fight effectively” is kind of a red herring here. Martial arts does make you better at fighting—but few people, martial artists or otherwise, are good at real, no-holds-barred fighting, because parts of that skillset are so dangerous that they basically can’t be gained without being repeatedly injured or worse. But that goes for the bad guys, too. Self-defense largely isn’t about beating your mugger or whatever in a serious fight; it’s about deterrence, mainly through signaling comfort with conflict situations and by giving you the skills to deal with strongarm tactics short of serious fighting.
And I wouldn’t recommend taking martial arts classes primarily for self-defense anyway, at least if you live in a Western country and not in the worst parts of a high-crime city.
I recommend boxing. Every martial art tries to simulate a different aspect of real fights, and boxing simulates the speed, intensity and scariness of them by banning kicks and grappling which generally slow down a sparring, at least between beginners. Grappling is a lot like “now stop and think what’s next” and kicking is a lot like “wow beware that leg, keep my distance”, but if people are only allowed to punch, it is highly intense storm-of-fists experience.
This is also fun, and scary, and also great at building courage and a fighting spirit.
I would say that RPG’s of the D&D type are correct about the idea of “level”, namely that NOT only different skills exist, but “level” as well, in the sense of a guy who spent a year fighting on a battlefield with a rifle will be also better at an unarmed fist fight as well in a bar. Why? Because of the skills like courage, thinking clear under pressure, this sort of mental hardness. This is what makes a 10th level fighter, not simply weapon or style skil. However, what the RPGs get wrong is that you get XP for fights won. No, in reality, you get XP for every dangerous or dangerous feeling situation you get in. One may say IRL you get Skill Points for hitting a target, but you get real XP only by others attempting to hit you, regardless of whether they succeed of fail. Because only this, the felt danger, trains that warrior’s mind stuff. And this why I recommend boxing sparring, this has the most “holy-shit-OMG-MAMAAAA help!” scary moments per minute.
If you are a professional doing it for 20 years against insanely powerful opponent without head protection, yes. If you spar a not quite full force with people who are not very strong wearing head protection and engage in the occasional amateur match, not. I cannot promise it is completely safe, but the whole number of times force applied * strength of force—Armor Class of the head protection seems to put it into an entirely different ballpark.
I think the dangerous reputation of boxing should be tackled by making head protection mandatory for professionals, just as it is mandatory on amateur matches. Otherwise people think of Ali and get scared away from it even though the difference is as much as driving Nascar / F1 vs. commuting to work.
Most American cities also offer dance, martial arts and art classes through their departments of parks and recreation, I believe. At least, my last couple cities have.
Take a month of martial arts training (aikido, jujitsu, and judo are popular soft styles, Tae Kwon Do and Krav Maga are two very different hard styles (TKD is fun and mostly useless for defense, Krav is super effective for dangerous situations but pretty grueling)).
Join the local swing dancing scene. If you don’t have one, try salsa or Argentine Tango.
Take an art course. Start with a beginner class that does a little with lots of different of media types, then take a class focusing on the medium you prefer. Do this even if you feel you are bad at art. I am terrible but I still enjoy working with clay.
Buy an Audible subscription and fill useless hours with audiobooks. This can improve commutes and other boring tasks.
Buy either a stereo Bluetooth headset with playback controls on it, or a small mp3 player such as the Sansa Clip Zip that has easily accessible controls outside your pocket. This advice is mostly relevant if you listen to media a lot. Having playback controls very accessible lowers the activation energy of starting your music/podcast/audiobook.
I’m pretty skeptical of how much good a month of martial arts will do you once you’re off the mat. Most of the value of martial arts is in conditioning (both physical and mental, e.g. making you more comfortable around people acting aggressively towards you), not technique, and a month of classes isn’t nearly enough to build a strong foundation there. Even on the technique side, that much time will give you a few neat tricks but won’t allow you to systematize them or to generalize them to unfamiliar situations.
On the other hand, a month is just about enough time to get you past the boring introductory lessons (how to stand, how to fall, how to throw a punch that doesn’t completely suck) and into the meat of the art, so that kind of time might be a good sample if you’re on the fence about a longer-term commitment.
I did not much more than a month and it made me feel much more comfortable with my body. Am I going to win any fights? No. But I feel a lot more stable (I basically never fall over now), and more conscious of what I can and can’t do. I even feel like I’m a better dancer/skater because of it.
My thought was indeed “see if you like studying martial arts”.
Depends what you want out of it. If you want to fight effectively, efficient use of training time implies having a tight feedback loop to improve quickly, which means fighting a lot (for real). Fighting a lot is not a pleasant life.
You can get a lot of things out of martial arts training, but I don’t think you can get many of them in a month. If you want to have a better chance in self-defense situations, you’re not going to gain the skills or the habits you need for it until much later. If you want self-discipline et cetera, you’re not going to get much of it from learning falls and a few basic escapes. If you want to get in shape, you’ll barely have started. If you just want to have fun and feel badass… okay, it’s plausible that you could do that in a month, but it’s not going to last once you stop training.
I honestly feel that “learning to fight effectively” is kind of a red herring here. Martial arts does make you better at fighting—but few people, martial artists or otherwise, are good at real, no-holds-barred fighting, because parts of that skillset are so dangerous that they basically can’t be gained without being repeatedly injured or worse. But that goes for the bad guys, too. Self-defense largely isn’t about beating your mugger or whatever in a serious fight; it’s about deterrence, mainly through signaling comfort with conflict situations and by giving you the skills to deal with strongarm tactics short of serious fighting.
And I wouldn’t recommend taking martial arts classes primarily for self-defense anyway, at least if you live in a Western country and not in the worst parts of a high-crime city.
I recommend boxing. Every martial art tries to simulate a different aspect of real fights, and boxing simulates the speed, intensity and scariness of them by banning kicks and grappling which generally slow down a sparring, at least between beginners. Grappling is a lot like “now stop and think what’s next” and kicking is a lot like “wow beware that leg, keep my distance”, but if people are only allowed to punch, it is highly intense storm-of-fists experience.
This is also fun, and scary, and also great at building courage and a fighting spirit.
I would say that RPG’s of the D&D type are correct about the idea of “level”, namely that NOT only different skills exist, but “level” as well, in the sense of a guy who spent a year fighting on a battlefield with a rifle will be also better at an unarmed fist fight as well in a bar. Why? Because of the skills like courage, thinking clear under pressure, this sort of mental hardness. This is what makes a 10th level fighter, not simply weapon or style skil. However, what the RPGs get wrong is that you get XP for fights won. No, in reality, you get XP for every dangerous or dangerous feeling situation you get in. One may say IRL you get Skill Points for hitting a target, but you get real XP only by others attempting to hit you, regardless of whether they succeed of fail. Because only this, the felt danger, trains that warrior’s mind stuff. And this why I recommend boxing sparring, this has the most “holy-shit-OMG-MAMAAAA help!” scary moments per minute.
It seems like boxing with gloves (vs bare knuckles) is very bad for your brain.
If you are a professional doing it for 20 years against insanely powerful opponent without head protection, yes. If you spar a not quite full force with people who are not very strong wearing head protection and engage in the occasional amateur match, not. I cannot promise it is completely safe, but the whole number of times force applied * strength of force—Armor Class of the head protection seems to put it into an entirely different ballpark.
I think the dangerous reputation of boxing should be tackled by making head protection mandatory for professionals, just as it is mandatory on amateur matches. Otherwise people think of Ali and get scared away from it even though the difference is as much as driving Nascar / F1 vs. commuting to work.
Where do non-university-students find these things? (I’m more interested in music than art, but I suspect the question generalizes)
At community college.
Most American cities also offer dance, martial arts and art classes through their departments of parks and recreation, I believe. At least, my last couple cities have.
I’ve done both, and recommend both. When you find a teacher you can really connect with, you can then move into a private tutelage.
If you’re willing to pay, there are a lot of private art (and music) teachers.
You can also google it (along with your city/suburb name) eg ‘(“learn to draw” OR “art class”) san jose’