Ok...before we begin...I am a 22 year old kid who just graduated college...I am 5'7''.
Muay Thai
FMA
BJJ
Shooto/CSW
all under the umbrella of JKD concepts, or taught as the individualized expression of JKD from somebody within the Inosanto line...i.e. Vunak, Barbito, Paulson, etc.
Muay Thai will teach you how to hit and dominate the stand-up part of a fight...if you look at K-1 champs...this tends to be the art they come from. Kyokushin, Seidokaikan, and Ashihara karate in combat sport form are all simply Japanese variants of muay thai. (as the saying goes, good art is borrowed, great art is stolen)...and as a short guy, it'll teach you how to be tough, how to close the gap and beat the living shit out of somebody clinch range. Tall guys are fun to clinch with. TBA schools are the best for technique...fighting camps and gyms with an active stables of fighters will help you learn to apply the technique and cut your teeth.
*An aside- Bob Spour and Richard Grannon focus on working out of what is essentially a muay thai based framework for their self defense paradigm...adding things like c-grips, neck cranks, etc. I actually really like the NLP (psuedo-psychology) stuff they teach too, things like the "fence" and so forth.
BJJ has pretty much proven itself to be great for submission stuff and working the ground...judo has better throws...but that is neither here nor there...basically if you are well versed in positioning, transitions, submissions, and takedowns, you will be a good grappler- no matter what the source.
CSW- along those lines...it's Erik Paulson's art...and it is awesome. Pretty much incorporates all ranges except weapons and it's Sensei Paulson's marketed expression of JKD.
FMA- filipino martial arts, from which I suggest the following: inosanto blend, pekiti tirsia, sayoc, dekiti tirsia, and atienza kali. Weapons work and really nasty empty hands stuff. This isn't brawling stuff, it's combatives and it's geared toward ENDING the person, not just ending the fight.
JKD- Sigung Bruce Lee's set of concepts and philosophies...not to be confused with Jun Fan Gung Fu. Look up Dan Inosanto. 'nuff said, the man's a legend, and those coming from his camp tend to be trained in some or all of the above, with other arts thrown in as well. You know six degrees of Kevin Bacon...it's like one degree of Inosanto when it comes to the leading edge in the martial arts community for the past...er...maybe 4 decades...or...at least twice as long as I've been breathing.
Inosanto guys are like mixed drinks with premium constituents...all parts are top quality, but you'll like certain blends better than others. Here are some examples:
Paul Vunak (PFS)
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Erik Paulson (CSW)
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stay tuned...more to come...