New Specialty Classes at Pacific Wave Jiu-jitsu
To mix things up a bit, we’ve decided to add new specialized skills classes to our schedule. These classes will give students the opportunity to add some variety to their training, while learning specific topics in more detail. Originally we were thinking about making one of them a sparring skills class and the other ground grappling skills, but we’ve decided instead to leave the choice up to the students. We’re letting the students vote by telling us their order of preference for the following topics: sparring skills, ground grappling skills, joint manipulation or throws/takedowns. Whichever two are chosen, we’ll be teaching on Mondays and Wednesdays, 6:15-7:15 for 2 months after which we’ll change the topics.
These classes are as much for us, the instructors, as it is for our students. It helps us to go into specific topics in more depth than we get to do in our day-to-day classes, helping us explore our martial art more deeply while also letting us practice skill-specific teaching. It’s also fun for us to teach from a slightly different angle than our usual classes. We’re both really looking forward to teaching these classes.
Are there other dojos out there that offer specialized classes in addition to their regular class types? I’d love to hear about them in the comments. 🙂
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Skill specific special classes are a great idea. My Traditional Jiu-Jitsu school does a off-curriculum special seminar type classes all summer(with guest instructors), and they’re always fun. I wish my BJJ school would do this though. Maybe one class a week that was only takedowns?
Most BJJ schools don’t spend much time on takedowns. I’ve heard of a lot of BJJ-ers who take up Judo or some other complementary style to get more training on takedowns. At least your traditional Jiu-jitsu dojo can help satisfy those needs. 🙂
I hear you. Randori is my favourite part of jiu-jitsu, but my JJJ school doesn’t do very much of it, so that’s why I joined BJJ in the first place, to do more randori! But they almost completely ignore takedowns, even though the competition matches always start on the feet. So I’m left paying for two schools just so I can actually have well-rounded jiu-jitsu training. Expensive and time consuming. :(. Fun though! 🙂