Former UFC heavyweight and comedian Brendan Schaub recently weighed in on a question that many parents find themselves wrestling with, quite literally, should daughters train in wrestling or jiu-jitsu?
During an episode of his podcast, Schaub responded to a fan, who asked which discipline would be more beneficial for his daughter and how to identify a coach who truly teaches the technical fundamentals rather than skipping over the essential building blocks.
Schaub came down firmly on the side of wrestling, though he acknowledged it is not the right path for everyone.
“Wrestling’s not for everybody. It is very tough. It’s going to test their mental capacity. It’s a full kind of body workout. It’s a very tough sport mentally on the kids and it’s tough physically. It’s the toughest, some would say.”
Beyond the physical and mental demands, Schaub pointed to something more specific when recommending wrestling for young girls in particular. He raised concerns about the environment that can sometimes surround newer martial arts gyms, suggesting that wrestling carries a different culture and a longer institutional history.
“There’s also no shenanigans in wrestling. There’s not the shenanigans where you got to worry about someone hitting on your daughter. There’s more morale, it’s very by the book, American, there’s a process, it’s been around forever.”
Part of his reasoning centered on the coaches themselves. Schaub expressed skepticism toward gyms that have emerged more recently without the established oversight and structure that traditional wrestling programs carry.
“It’s not some new wrestling gym popping up with some wrestling coach you never heard of from Brazil and there’s all these girls in there. There’s none of that. Wrestling’s been around forever. The coaches are usually older. The young ones are usually wrestlers themselves in high school or college that came from the head coach and they’re helping out your kid.”
On the specific question of how a parent with no martial arts background can tell whether a coach is skipping over fundamentals, Schaub suggested that coming from a sports background in general gives people an eye for spotting when a coach moves too quickly from one concept to the next without building proper foundations. He pointed to attentiveness and care in instruction as the markers worth watching for.
Schaub wrapped up his assessment by telling the fan:
“It’s a lot safer, I would say, than jiu-jitsu.”
