The Top 20 Most Popular Martial Arts in the United States

Scraping Yelp data from all 50 states to see how Americans fight

Fighting in America is truly international, with the most popular styles originating from other parts of the world. A question that I have always been interested in is what is the most popular combat sport in America? Unfortunately, Google didn’t have a good answer, so with the help of Yelp I try to answer the question:

Which combat sport has the most practitioners in America?

Approach: In order to learn a combat sport, you need to train at a gym. So one way to estimate the number of people that practice a sport is to count how many gyms there are for that particular sport.

This is where Yelp comes in — if we can count the number of gyms, studios, dojos, etc. for each sport in America, we can start to get a better understanding what type of demand there is for different combat sports in America. And later in this article, I also take a quick look at how these trends compare within different regions of the US for the most popular sports.

And now.. for the ranking —

#1: Boxing (26% of gyms, 37% of reviews)