Bullshido is a term used to describe sketchy or hokey martial arts, some completely fake or of dubious provenance. Bullshido is also the name of a prominent internet forum devoted to identifying martial arts school that may be promulgating bullshido.

A martial art being deceptive about its origins is not in and of itself a crime. It was actual extremely common in older Japanese martial arts ("Koryu"), to tell euphemism about the origin of the tradition, and only revealing the actual secrets or origins of the school to advanced initiates. What differentiates bullshido from good and effective martial arts is usually that it is trying to peddle completely ineffective or fake martial arts to unknowing customers solely for monetary gain, with no concern for the welfare of the students. Should a student of some form of bullshido ever have to use their false skill in a serious self-defense situation, they may suffer injury or worse. At best, students of forms of bullshido are often treated like living wallets, where the school tries to create any number of ways for the student to trade money for illusory skill, like charging money to learn specific kata or to take rank tests, often with no regard to whether the student is actually learning anything.

Often promulgators of bullshido pair some legitimate core of martial teaching with a larger hallucinated curriculum designed to offer a continuous stream of product to sell to their students. This is the most common form of bullshido.

Ninjutsu, the art of the eponymous ninja, is a famous form of Bullshido in the United States. There have been many notorious fake ninja schools that prey upon American ignorance of the fact that there is essentially no extent ninjutsu tradition that ever survived, or ever made it outside of Japan for that matter. Many people are so captivated by the myth of the ninja, however, that many fake ninja schools have popped up and become successful. As much as we would all like to be ninjas, or even samurai, the myth allows us to be exploited for profit, hence Bullshido.

Another common form of Bullshido focuses around various forms of Chinese martial arts, especially Shaolin Kungfu, where a teacher may make extreme claims about being an initiated monk privy to knowledge that almost none other have. Because these arts focus on forms that are not tested in competition, it is very easy for a teacher posing as a monk to create nonsense forms that a student has no way to ever verify if it has any true meaningful content, because they are often given no true idea of what meaningful content would be. Chinese martial arts, when practiced legitimately, can be a wonderful source of body conditioning and health cultivation knowledge that can be found almost in no other traditions, but is often mixed outside of China, and even in China, with a lot of Bullshido.

Other common forms of bullshido focus on "self-defense", as most people who go to self-defense seminars or learn self-defense instruction will specifically want to avoid ever having to deploy such self-defense skills, and for good reason, nobody wants to put themselves in harm's way. But likewise, this allows various ill-meaning profit-seeking self-defense instructors to sell the idea of learning effective self-defense in a weekend, if only the student is willing to pay enough, to learn the all-encompassing self-defense technique. Unfortunately, self-defense is both skill intensive and also environment specific; you can't separate self-defense from who you yourself are and the specific situations you find yourself in.

Bullshido is less common in competitive martial arts that do not focus as extensively on kata, as at least the practitioner has a way of testing their skill against other practitioners, or sometimes practitioners of other arts, to determine whether they are being taught legitimate combat or self-defense skills. Even though these martial arts tend to focus on sport competition, this is generally a more effective means to realistic self-defense for most people that prepares them for the common self-defense situations an unarmed person might encounter in daily life. Even when weapons are involved, such as blades, there are more competitive forms of these types of arts that still allow a practitioner to safely build and test their skills.