When I was younger, fights in my town were a daily occurrence, if you didn't fight you were a coward, this situation remained in my town until I went to university in another city, as we grew up new generations came with the desire to prove themselves, unfortunately the new time brings new rules, so knives and other dishonorable things got involved. Anyway, in my time, such things were dishonorable, there were one-on-one or group-on-group fights, attacks with knives and sticks and ambush were dishonorable. Well, when I was younger, I often wondered if martial arts could help in the real situations I faced. Martial arts such as krav maga, systema, kombato and similar self-defense systems did not exist in my small town, but there was boxing, karate, kickboxing, wrestling, aikido, judo, taekwondo, and what most resembled self-defense, traditional ju jutsu, mma arrived in the town much later. I started with aikido, and I managed to defend myself from a guy on the street (read is aikido legit?) but as I grew older, the fights got more and more serious, and with aikido I couldn't defend myself, so I switched to taekwondo, taekwondo is was better than aikido, but it took a long time to train and high kicks are not the most practical for the street, as I saw for myself when two friends from taekwondo got into a group fight, they didn't perform a single kick. I soon started kickboxing, and in the meantime, as I come from a wrestling family, I also practiced wrestling, later I tried karate as well, mostly soon I had a fight in the schoolyard with a guy who liked to bully others, I beat him with only wrestling techniques without a single blow, after the third throw on the concrete, he didn't attack anymore. I solved most of the fights with wrestling techniques, I had one fight with a guy in front of a club, we went outside and fought, he attacked me with his fists and I threw him to the ground, the same as in the last fight, even though I had been training for a while kickboxing, I relied on wrestling the most. Soon I went to university and started to train different martial arts, starting from boxing to savate, mma, krav maga, again shotokan karate, again aikido, uechi ryu karate, etc. I didn't get into fights then, while I was studying, and I didn't train wrestling, in the meantime I was sitting alone with another guy on the street and a guy attacked us on the street for no reason, at that time I enrolled in ninjutsu, and when he attacked somehow I decided in a second that ninjutsu was not effective and went back to my old wrestling habit, I threw the guy and he fell and started bleeding from the head, he got up and we left. After ninjutsu, I returned to boxing and krav maga, which I still train today. So can martial arts help in street fights? Some can, but most can't, what's important is to have as much free full contact sparring as possible in order to understand how the fight works, although the best option is always running away. In the next few posts, I will explain how some karate fighters and aikido black belts have fared in street fights that I have personally seen.