Two New Studies on Grappling and Neurodivergent Kids: What They Mean for Madison Parents

Two research papers landed five days apart in July. One says martial arts may be among the best ways to help autistic kids build motor skills. The other says most gyms have no idea what to do with those kids when they walk in.

Both are true.

The first study: martial arts and motor skills

On July 22, a team led by Sonia Khurana at Old Dominion University published a review in Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology . A review pools past trials and hunts for a pattern. This one pooled 11 trials of team and class sports for kids with autism.

Martial arts made up 5 of those 11. Balance improved more than anything else they measured. Martial arts and swimming showed the biggest, steadiest gains of any sport. Running and jumping got better. So did catching and throwing.

More than half of kids with autism have trouble with motor skills, per the review’s own background. That is not an abstract problem to a nine-year-old. It’s the stairs, the bike everyone else rides, being picked last and then not picked at all.

How well a kid moves turns out to be one of the biggest levers on focus and confidence . And it’s a skill, not a gift.

What the review can’t tell you is how much of this to expect. “While our review identified promising effects, particularly for martial arts and aquatic training, larger and more rigorous studies are needed to confirm these benefits and guide evidence-based recommendations,” Khurana told News-Medical .

Five of the six best-designed trials carried a high risk of bias. The way those trials were run left room for the results to look better than they were. The balance gains ranged from 0.18 to 4.99, the distance between barely detectable and life-changing.

The direction is consistent across studies. The size is anybody’s guess.

The second study: what coaches see, and what they get told

Five days later, on July 27, a team in Japan published something less flattering in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living . They surveyed 1,104 judo clubs in every part of Japan. That covers 15,360 kids.

Instructors flagged 7.02% of them as needing extra support. About 1 in 14.

The survey gave instructors five specific things to watch for, and asked which kids showed them.

A kid who still can’t do the technique after you’ve walked him through it alone, repeatedly. A kid who can’t stay with practice for even a short stretch without someone prompting him. A kid who refuses or can’t manage partner drills.

A kid who leaves the mat without permission, or shouts through class. And a kid who can’t do a forward roll or a basic breakfall.

The authors say none of those five signs point to anything in particular. A kid might be brand new. A kid might be five. Some kids are just uncoordinated, and this survey has no way to sort them out from the rest.

Nobody in this study diagnosed anyone. The instructors only knew what families, schools, or the kids themselves had chosen to tell them. Add up what they’d been told and it covers about 3 kids in 100: ADHD 1.57%, autism 0.68%, learning disorder 0.70%.

So the coach has been told about roughly 3 kids in a class of 100. Watching those same kids move, he flags 7. That gap isn’t proof that four kids are undiagnosed. It’s the distance between what a family shares and what a coach can see from the front of the room.

Developmental coordination disorder is the clinical name for a kid whose body won’t do what he asks it to. It had been disclosed for 14 kids out of 15,360, fewer than 1 in 1,000. That’s the diagnosis you’d expect a mat to run into first.

The flag rate also falls hard as kids get older: 12.13% of preschoolers, 7.24% in elementary school, 5.21% in high school, 0.79% at university. The authors say plainly they can’t explain it. Kids growing into their bodies, coaches finding ways to help, harder classes filtering them out, or those kids quitting would all produce this same graph.

Only about 15% of registered clubs answered, and clubs that already care about inclusion were the likeliest to bother, so 7.02% may run high. And those five warning signs were assembled by a panel of experts and sent out without ever being tested for accuracy.

In a thousand clubs, coaches were spotting kids who needed something different, and almost none of them had been taught what to do next. They want basic neurodevelopmental training built into instructor licensing. They also want clubs to stop treating a formal diagnosis as the price of admission for extra help.

That second one is the part a parent can use tonight. A gym should be willing to adjust for your kid on your say-so, not on a piece of paper.

Why grappling specifically? A partial answer

One study offers a clue about the mechanism.

In 2019, a team at Bar-Ilan University tested saliva from 68 adults who train jiu-jitsu . They tested before class, right after hard training, and after a cool-down. They were tracking oxytocin, a hormone tied to touch, trust, and bonding. It rose sharply after hard training in everyone, then settled back.

Then they split the group. Some had done ground grappling. Some had done punch-kick sparring. The grapplers’ spike was much bigger. The authors put that down to close contact: how much time two people spend hands-on, solving a problem together, in grappling versus striking.

They wrote, in the paper itself, that this might matter for kids who find social life hard, autism included.

Everyone in that study was an adult. Nobody in it was autistic. It was 68 people. And reading oxytocin off a single spit sample is a method the field has openly argued about for years , as the paper’s own footnotes acknowledge.

What parents actually reported

The closest thing to a real-world look came in 2023. Researchers followed 24 autistic children through about two years of judo . For 62.5% of the kids, parents saw gains in every area the study asked about.

Twenty-four kids is a thin study, so I went looking for a bigger one. There isn’t one. The two largest studies of judo and autistic children are 24 kids and 25 kids , and that is the top of this field.

The 25-kid study followed an 8-week program and was published in 2020. On the behavior checklist parents filled out, scores didn’t move enough to count as real. In interviews, 78% of those same parents described their child’s social skills and self-esteem improving.

Back to the 2023 group. The biggest reported gains were at home and at school. Eye contact was the weakest, and even there, 87.5% of parents said it moved the right way.

One parent told the researchers: “He learned how to play tag with other kids and before he would never acknowledge [them].” Another: “Judo helped my daughter calm herself and socialize with others.” A third: “It has opened our eyes to some hope regarding physical activity.”

Four of those 24 kids also took a real social-skills test. Their scores rose, but not by enough to count. All four were in therapy at the same time, so nobody can credit the judo.

Two studies, three years apart, produced the same split: parents describing change at home, and instruments that can’t detect it. Either the tests are too blunt to catch what parents are watching, or parents are seeing what they hope to see. At 24 and 25 kids, neither study is big enough to settle it.

The thing the studies actually agree on

All of this work points the same direction. What moves a kid is steady, repeated physical practice with a coach who pays attention to that kid in particular. Not the sport. The attention.

A gym can run a beautiful curriculum and still lose your child. The curriculum isn’t the thing that notices him drifting to the back of the line. The Japanese survey is 1,104 clubs of proof. That’s why picking the right gym matters more than picking the right martial art , and why we keep saying that building movement skill beats sport-shopping for a kid who struggles to move.

Three things to do this week

Watch a full class from the side, not a highlight clip: a whole class, start to finish. Don’t watch the moves, watch the gaps between them. What does the coach do when a kid drifts off, or shuts down, or cries? That’s the part you’re buying.

Write four sentences and hand them to the coach before day one: what sets your kid off, what a bad moment looks like, what helps in that moment, what you’re hoping for. The coaches in the Japan survey were flagging kids they’d been told nothing about. Take the guessing away.

Ask one question and listen hard. “What do you do when a kid can’t follow along?” If the answer is some version of “we make him,” walk. If the answer names a real kid and a real change they made, you found someone who has done this before.

None of that requires signing anything. You can do all three in one evening, at any gym in town, ours included.

How we run it at Journey

Our kids classes in Madison run the same order every time: about eight minutes of movement and games, then a move taught and drilled with a partner, then sparring from one position, then open rolling. Same shape Monday, same shape Thursday.

For a kid who finds a room full of surprises draining, the sameness is the whole point.

Balance isn’t a side effect of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Madison, WI. It is the sport. Every sweep, every base, every scramble is a kid learning where his body is.

We’ve written before about what the ADHD research says about martial arts . This new work points somewhere close by, and more physical.

Our kids program has gone without a serious injury since we opened in October 2018. And we’d rather you run those same three checks on us than take our word for it.

If you want to talk about your kid before anyone steps on a mat, you can meet the coaches and ask everything. Or read how our kids program is built and decide from there.

Somewhere in Madison this week, a kid who was never good at sports will learn to stay on balance while someone tries to move him. He’ll fail for a month. Then one Tuesday he won’t. Nobody has proven what that does to a nine-year-old, but every parent who has watched it happen already knows.