SW Portland Martial Arts teaches Mo Duk Pai (a style that emphasizes ethics, practicality and teaching) and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (a grappling and throwing art).
CrossFit Hillsdale teaches functional fitness with an emphasis on gradual progress and real world results.
Our mission is to provide students with quality instruction, love of learning, and open appreciation for all movement arts.
New to the gym? Want to try our yoga program? How about a 10 class yoga punchcard for $25? BOOM. That’s $2.50 a class. Here you go.
Our Yoga schedule is:
Monday, Wednesday, Friday @ Noon
Tuesday @ 9AM
If you’ve done our yoga before or you burned through your first punchcard, you can buy another one for $100. Still only $10 a class.
This punchcard is ONLY good for the yoga classes, not any of our other programs.
Some martial arts schools wear uniforms, others don’t. Sometimes the uniform is very specific (it must be purchased from the school), other times it’s more general (you can wear any color Gi, but you have to wear a Gi). What’s the deal? What does a uniform accomplish?
Well, it can be a source of revenue for the school. I think a lot of people harp on this as a real strike against strict uniform policies, and I’m sure there are some schools out there who are fleecing their students and making a ton of money off uniforms. It’s something to look out for, no doubt.
On the positive side, I think uniforms help put students in the right mind frame. You put on the same thing every time you train. It’s a ritual. It reminds you of what your role is, what you’re working on. I know for me, putting on my uniform helps me set aside whatever else is going on in my life and to put my mind, body, and spirit into the joy of training martial arts.
Once you’ve trained for a while, you start to gain a sense of what you need to work on. Maybe your footwork is flat. Maybe you do terribly against inside fighters. Maybe you only kick with your dominant side.
Now that you’ve identified an issue that needs work, what do you do? Work on it, obviously. This doesn’t mean you have to come up with drills on your own, and it doesn’t mean you only work on it during sparring (but those are both fabulous things to do), it means tell your coach what you’re thinking. Good coaches will listen to what you have to say and integrate it into the class. They’ll use your feedback to help you improve.
It doesn’t matter if your coach already knows the problem you’ve identified. It lets them know that you have taken charge of your training, that you care about your progress, and that you aren’t simply a passive vessel waiting to be filled.
Identify something you need to work on. Attack it until you make progress. Move on to something else you need to work on. Attack that. Repeat for the rest of your training career.
There are always new techniques and new methods of teaching cropping up in the martial arts. BJJ is no different. Things change. It’s healthy for things to change. The art evolves, just as we evolve as students.
So too we should evolve as teachers. Students are always being pushed to refine what they know and learn new things. Teachers should have the same goal, to improve so that they can pass knowledge more efficiently to the students.
One snag, for both the teacher and the student, is to imagine at some point that they’ve figured it out, that they have achieved the perfect technique or the perfect teaching method. There is always room for improvement.
So which teaching method is the best for BJJ? The method that constantly seeks to evolve. Keep learning, keep rolling, keep visiting other gyms, keep watching videos. Keep going.
There are so many fitness toys out there… medicine balls, kettle bells, barbells, rowing machines, jump ropes. Why? Why not simply do push ups, pull ups, and outdoor obstacle courses?
It’s an excellent question. Given our mission to support the everyday activities of life, what are we doing with these pieces of equipment that don’t appear in daily life? Shouldn’t we be deadlifting garden rocks, sled pushing garbage cans, and doing farmer’s carries with toddlers? Maybe.
Turns out the purpose of idealized equipment is so we can have durable equipment that allows us to overload our capacity. We want to be able to move more weight in the gym than we’ll ever have to lift in our daily lives – thus making our bodies resistant to injury.
Plus, barbells and medicine balls store a heck of a lot easier than bags of garden waste.
6309 SW Capitol Highway, Portland OR, 97239
503 432 7450
