Does Martial Arts Make You Smarter? What the Research Shows for IQ
Does martial arts make you smarter? No study shows an IQ gain. Trials find small gains in children's attention and self-control, and none measured IQ.
Dr. Russell T. WarneChief Scientist
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Martial arts have not been shown to make anyone smarter: no study has measured IQ before and after training. What the randomized trials do show is narrower, with school-based taekwondo courses producing small improvements in children's attention and self-control, and tai chi producing a gain of under 1 point on a 30-point cognitive screening test in older adults (roughly a quarter of a standard deviation).
Those are real but modest results, and they concern specific skills more than general intelligence. This page covers where the belief comes from, what the trials in children and older adults found, why the observational studies are hard to read, and how martial arts fit the wider evidence on whether training one activity transfers to general thinking ability.
Why people think martial arts sharpen the mind
Martial arts training asks a lot of attention and self-control. Students memorise long sequences of movements, wait for a signal before acting, hold still when told to, and follow rules about when force is allowed. Those demands overlap with "executive functions", the mental skills used to plan, resist impulses, hold information in mind and switch between tasks.
That overlap gave the idea scientific backing. In a widely cited 2011 review in Science, Adele Diamond and Kathleen Lee listed martial arts alongside computer training, aerobics, yoga, mindfulness and some school curricula as activities shown to improve executive functions in children aged 4 to 12. They noted that children who start with weaker executive functions tend to gain the most. Executive functions predict school success, so the step to "martial arts makes kids smarter" is a short one in popular retellings.
Executive functions and IQ are related but distinct. Executive-function tasks measure narrow skills, often with short computer tests, while an IQ score summarises performance across a broad battery of reasoning, knowledge, memory and speed tasks. A gain on a flanker task (a test where you must ignore distracting arrows) is not a gain in IQ.
What the trials in children found
Two randomized trials in schools carry most of the weight.
• Taekwondo in US elementary grades: Lakes and Hoyt randomly assigned 207 children from kindergarten to fifth grade to three months of taekwondo or to traditional physical education classes. The taekwondo group improved more in cognitive and emotional self-regulation, prosocial behaviour and classroom conduct, and did better on a mental arithmetic test. This is the study behind most later claims, including the martial-arts entry in the 2011 Science review.
• Taekwondo in a UK primary school: Ng-Knight and colleagues randomized 240 children aged 7 to 11 to a standard 11-week beginners' course or a control condition. Afterwards, teachers rated the taekwondo children as having fewer conduct problems and better attentional control, and the children scored better on a flanker test of executive attention. There were no effects on teacher-rated inhibitory control or impulsivity, or on computer tests of response inhibition, verbal working memory and task switching.
The pattern is consistent: some gains in attention and behaviour, null results on several other executive-function tests, and nothing measured on IQ. A 2026 scoping review of 13 karate studies in children and adolescents reached a similar conclusion. Several reported improvements, but the studies were few, varied, often in clinical groups and methodologically limited, so the authors concluded that the effectiveness of karate interventions cannot yet be established.
Diamond's later work adds a caution of its own. In a 2016 review with Daphne Ling, she concluded that executive functions can be improved through practice but that wide transfer to untrained skills does not seem to occur. That is the same conclusion reached for other forms of training, which brings us to the transfer question below.
What the studies in adults and older adults found
Evidence in healthy young adults is mostly observational. Johnstone and Marí-Beffa screened more than 500 university volunteers and compared 21 people with at least two years of martial-arts experience to 27 with none, matched on age and body mass index. The martial artists did better on one of three attention networks tested (sustained alertness) and no better on the other two. Because the participants chose martial arts themselves, this design cannot separate the effects of training from the kind of person who sticks with it for years.
Tai chi, a slow Chinese martial art, has the largest trial literature, almost all of it in older adults. Wayne and colleagues pooled 20 studies with 2,553 participants, 11 of them randomized trials of modest quality. In cognitively healthy older adults, tai chi beat no-intervention controls on executive-function tests by a large margin (Hedges' g = 0.90) and beat other exercise by a moderate one (g = 0.51), though these pooled estimates rested on small numbers of trials. In people with cognitive impairment, the gains on global cognitive tests were smaller (g = 0.30 to 0.35).
The best single trial is more sobering. Chen and colleagues randomized 328 adults aged 60 or older with type 2 diabetes and mild cognitive impairment to tai chi, fitness walking or a control group for 24 weeks. At 36 weeks, the tai chi group scored 0.84 points higher than the walking group on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), a 30-point screening test for cognitive impairment, with a confidence interval running from 0.02 to 1.66. That is roughly a quarter of a standard deviation on a test designed to flag impairment, and it says nothing about IQ in healthy adults.
Near transfer, far transfer and who chooses the dojo
Psychologists distinguish "near transfer" (getting better at the trained skill and things very like it) from "far transfer" (gains in broad abilities such as general intelligence). Sala and Gobet's meta-analyses of chess, music and working-memory training found that apparent far-transfer effects shrink as study quality rises, especially when control groups do an active alternative. The same logic applies to our analysis of whether chess makes you smarter. Martial arts have never been tested against that standard with an IQ outcome.
Exercise in general shows a similar pattern. An umbrella review of randomized trials found an average benefit of exercise on cognition of d = 0.22, which fell to 0.13 after accounting for active controls and baseline differences, and to about 0.05 after correcting for publication bias. Our page on whether exercise can affect your IQ score covers that literature in full.
Selection is the other problem. Children whose parents enrol them in classes, and adults who train for years, are not a random slice of the population. Families with more time and money are better placed to pay for lessons, and people who already find focus and rule-following easy may be more likely to stay to black belt. Any comparison of practitioners with non-practitioners inherits those differences. One further caution applies to combat styles with full-contact sparring: repeated blows to the head carry their own cognitive risks, which our page on boxing and IQ discusses.
Frequently asked questions
Does martial arts make you smarter?
No study has shown a gain in IQ. Randomized trials in children found small improvements in attention, self-control and behaviour, which are narrower skills than general intelligence.
Is taekwondo good for children's concentration?
Two school-based trials found that taekwondo classes improved some measures of attention and classroom behaviour. Other executive-function measures, such as working memory and task switching, did not change.
Does tai chi improve memory in older adults?
Meta-analyses report gains on cognitive tests, and a trial of 328 older adults with mild cognitive impairment found tai chi beat brisk walking by under 1 point on a 30-point screening test. Most trials are small, and anyone concerned about memory changes should speak with a doctor.
Are martial artists more intelligent than other people?
No good data compare the IQ of martial artists with that of non-practitioners. Studies that compare the two groups on attention tests cannot separate the effect of training from the kind of person who chooses to train.
Which martial art is best for the brain?
No trial has compared martial arts with each other on cognitive outcomes. Taekwondo has the best trials in children and tai chi has the most trials in older adults, and neither has been tested against IQ.
The takeaway
Martial arts are a good form of exercise and may help children's attention and behaviour a little, but there is no evidence that they make you smarter in the sense of raising IQ. The gains in trials are specific and small, and studies of experienced martial artists cannot rule out that people who choose to train were different to begin with. If you want an accurate measure of your reasoning ability, try a professionally developed IQ test.
References
1. Lakes, K. D., & Hoyt, W. T. (2004). Promoting self-regulation through school-based martial arts training. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 25(3), 283-302. [doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2004.04.002](. doi.org
2. Ng-Knight, T., Gilligan-Lee, K. A., Massonnié, J., Gaspard, H., Gooch, D., Querstret, D., & Johnstone, N. (2022). Does Taekwondo improve children's self-regulation? If so, how? A randomized field experiment. Developmental Psychology, 58(3), 522-534. [doi.org/10.1037/dev0001307](. doi.org
3. Diamond, A., & Lee, K. (2011). Interventions shown to aid executive function development in children 4 to 12 years old. Science, 333(6045), 959-964. [doi.org/10.1126/science.1204529](. doi.org
4. Diamond, A., & Ling, D. S. (2016). Conclusions about interventions, programs, and approaches for improving executive functions that appear justified and those that, despite much hype, do not. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 34-48. [doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2015.11.005](. doi.org
5. Torzsa, T., Cseh, R., Futo, J., & Balazs, J. (2026). Karate interventions in children and adolescents: A scoping review of psychosocial and cognitive outcomes. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 8, 1840595. [doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1840595](. doi.org
6. Johnstone, A., & Marí-Beffa, P. (2018). The effects of martial arts training on attentional networks in typical adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 80. [doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00080](. doi.org
7. Wayne, P. M., Walsh, J. N., Taylor-Piliae, R. E., Wells, R. E., Papp, K. V., Donovan, N. J., & Yeh, G. Y. (2014). Effect of tai chi on cognitive performance in older adults: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 62(1), 25-39. [doi.org/10.1111/jgs.12611](. doi.org
8. Chen, Y., Qin, J., Tao, L., Liu, Z., Huang, J., Liu, W., ... Tao, J. (2023). Effects of tai chi chuan on cognitive function in adults 60 years or older with type 2 diabetes and mild cognitive impairment in China: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA Network Open, 6(4), e237004. [doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.7004](. doi.org
9. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2017). Does far transfer exist? Negative evidence from chess, music, and working memory training. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(6), 515-520. [doi.org/10.1177/0963721417712760](. doi.org
10. Ciria, L. F., Román-Caballero, R., Vadillo, M. A., Holgado, D., Luque-Casado, A., Perakakis, P., & Sanabria, D. (2023; corrected 2026). An umbrella review of randomized control trials on the effects of physical exercise on cognition. Nature Human Behaviour, 7(6), 928-941. [doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01554-4](. doi.org
Hero image: Black belt tied, by NainDeathlegs, CC BY-SA 4.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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