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The original was posted on /r/autism by /u/Existentialcrumble on 2024-03-02 17:57:05.
I have been doing taekwondo for the past year and have been increasingly noticing that the sport seems to have a disproportionate number of autistic people in it.
At first I just noticed that the majority of people seemed to work in stem and be very socially awkward, often interested in gaming or d&d (which also have significant neurodivergent communities), but I have found out at least 4 members of our club of about 25 seem have official diagnoses. This is about 4 times the average already, but I am sure that at least 5 others are somewhere on the spectrum.
The weird thing is, other adjacent sports don’t seem to show this pattern. From what I have gathered from people doing kickboxing, jiu jitsu and boxing, the people doing them on the whole seem to be less autistic-leaning.
I was wondering if anyone has also experienced this, with taekwondo or other sports? I just find it really interesting.
Our family all does taekwondo after our kids got into it. The community we are involved with is very friendly, nonjudgmental and inclusive. The surrounding TKD clubs seem to have similar principles. It could be that people on the spectrum who join taekwondo tend to stick with it and other martial arts may have a higher dropout rate due to a more ableist and socially-hierarchical culture.