If you’re a beginner looking for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu classes, or any martial arts classes for that matter, then you’ve come to the right place. We have a specialist foundation BJJ program that is perfect for everyone, no matter their ability, who is looking to improve their fitness, confidence, self defense ability & have fun whilst doing so.
Find out more about our beginners’ classes below, but if you have any further questions, contact us using the form at the bottom of the page!
1. What will a beginner experience in one of SBG Texas’s foundations BJJ classes?
When you start at SBG Texas you’ll find a few things that set the experience apart from martial arts gyms. Firstly, you’re going to start off in our foundations program where we teach you as if you know nothing about Jiu Jitsu. We start off with an assumption that you came in without any foreknowledge of the martial art itself, and we’re going to start you off in a program specifically designed to give you the fundamentals of the art from the onset. This is instead of trying to show you advanced and complex techniques when you first walk through the door, we tailor our foundations classes specifically to beginners.
Also baked into the foundations program is the assumption that the quality of your movement needs to improve that there are movements intrinsic to the art of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu that are unique. These are things that your average person does not typically use in a day. At the same time, we’re going to approach it and teach it in a way that, regardless of your starting athleticism, you should be able to access these new movement patterns quickly.
They’re movement patterns that you could actually track back to an infancy chart; you could look at scaling movements that a child does to be able to initially stand up and move around, and we teach movements similar to that. Interestingly as adults become more ambulatory, we have a tendency to lose some of the skills of getting from the floor to our feet, and we lose the ability to move around on the floor easily. We have to regain some of those ground skills first, to be able to take on anything more complex.
2. What will a beginner learn in the first month of the program?
In your first month training at SBG you will learn a variety of approaches to the concept of fighting, whether standing or on the ground, and we’re going to break that down structurally and positionally so that you can gain an advantage, without a significant amount of athleticism. You’ll be able to take advantage of a variety of positional hacks right at the onset.
No doubt about it, after just one month of learning Jiu Jitsu, the change in a person is incredible. If you were to compare someone who has trained for a month to someone with no Jiu Jitsu experience, the trained person would easily dominate. It’s all thanks to gaining what we call “positional awareness,” which makes a huge difference in self-defense ability. And the best part? It only gets better from there. We keep improving and moving forward, never stopping.
3. Will you get injured while training in our BJJ Classes?
Since you are training in a combat art and we are simulating aspects of very real combat, we take safety as the highest priority. There’s no sense in training you to be able to defend yourself, but training you to injure yourself in the process of self-defense. Injuring yourself on the way to self-defense is kind of a fundamental failure in terms of the philosophy of self-defense, as you’re trying to be safer!
Your goal is to be safer; we want to make you safer, and therefore want our training to be without unnecessary injury or unnecessary wear and tear on your body. So we make every effort to ensure that we teach you how to be safe with every movement pattern. We do cut back on a certain amount of aliveness in the onset, just to make sure that people know how to move with weight on top of them & so they know how to move connected to another human being. All of these things are not intuitive or instinctual things; you’re going to have to learn a new skillset and we’re here & ready to show you how to do that.
4. Why SBG Texas?
One of the things that sets SBG apart from a lot of other Jiu Jitsu gyms is, although self-defense is often conceived of as a solo act as you are defending yourself & it’s one person against another, we conceive of it as a team sport. It’s impossible to get good at a combat art without teammates & without people that you can interact with. You cannot learn how to take a person to the ground, or you cannot learn how to choke a person without another person to train with.
So, we treat jiu jitsu as a team sport and thus we have a great community of people that have a lot of fun working on their self-defense. I think the fun component is something that is truly important as we don’t really know if you will ever have to use any kind of self-defense technique. So we have a priority on making sure you have a good time when we come into train. We want you to have some fun & sweat a little bit & we want to learn something that expands our horizons. Then after class we call it a day maybe we go get some drinks with our friends & make some new friends at the gym overall.
We want everyone to have a positive experience with everybody else, we’re not here to provide a Thunderdome-like experience, we just want you to learn how to take care of yourself if you ever get in a violent confrontation & we want to make sure you have a good time while you’re learning.
If you’re interested in coming down to the gym to try, fill in the form below and get in contact with us!