SW Portland Martial Arts Blog

How Come the Teenagers Get Their Own Class?

January 8th, 2024


It’s not easy punching, kicking, and wrestling people. Stack on top of that the self-consciousness of a teenager and you often (but not always) have potential students who are completely against the idea of training with the “little kids” (everyone under 13) or with the “old people” (everyone 20 and up.) So what do you do?

You put some teens classes on the schedule. This doesn’t mean that students who are 13-19 have to train only in the teens classes. Anyone 13 and up is welcome to go to the adult classes. Those same teens are also welcome to train in the kids class. Whatever gets students on the training floor, so long as it is safe for everyone involved, is what we’re into.

What are the teen classes? Right now we’ve got 3 of them: Teen MMA Wednesdays @ 6pm, Teen MMA Saturday @ 11am, and Teen BJJ Sundays @ Noon.

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Technique from all Angles

January 1st, 2024

In Sunday’s class, we were reflecting on how there is a tendency in the BJJ community to teach guard and moves from the guard with attention to technical details. It’s awesome. As a result, the community, as a whole, are solid guard players.

That same tendency seems to paint everything else in BJJ with a much broader brush. Perhaps this is because, anytime you look across the mats in a grappling class, you’re bound to see about 50% of the matches engaged in guard or some related position. Guard is super important. It’s a real strength of the BJJ community generally and BJJ players specifically.

But, we wondered, why not treat all positions with the same lavish attention to detail? Mount position only gets better if you know and pay attention to details. Takedowns only improve with technique. So on Sunday we spent our final class of “rear mount December” discussing the small details of the armbar from the back. We figured it would be a fantastic transition to “Armbar January.”

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What Do Our Kids Camps Look Like?

December 26th, 2023
SWPMA Movement Arts Camps

We like to provide students with variety. In our martial arts classes, we teach grappling, throwing, and striking. So it is with our camps.

At their heart, the camps are martial arts camps. Full day students will receive at least 2 hours of martial arts instruction every day (and more if they opt for extra training.) We also make sure to provide a guest movement teacher every day. Our past guest teachers have included: fencing, gymnastics, break dancing, Capoeira, ballet, and many more.

Besides all the structured movement, students get at least an hour of free time to play outside. As the week goes on, we usually opt for a second recess outside because some of the best play happens when adults just get out of the way.

All that movement is usually only 3-4 hours of the day, so we fill the rest of the time with arts, crafts, and storytelling. Students are encouraged (just as they are with the movement arts) to try out a variety of crafts and if they aren’t interested, there are always tons of books to read or board games to play.

Hopefully that helps to paint a picture of what happens at our camps. If you’ve got questions, for sure send us an email:

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Yoga Special – 5 classes for $45

December 15th, 2023

Get 5 Yoga classes for $45. You only have the month of January to buy them but the punch card itself never expires!

If you want an actual physical card, we can print one for you, but we’ll have your name on file and we trust you to only use the card 5 times by which point you’ll no doubt have fallen in love with the gym and will want to sign up. 🙂

Punch cards
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Unpredictability

November 19th, 2023

Train long enough at a gym and you’ve inevitably sparred everyone dozens, if not hundreds of times. You know how they play, you know the techniques their good at, and they know your game too. This can be great because as you continually shut down each other’s games, things get pushed ahead. They figure out a way to stop your leg kicks, so you have to add in body kicks. You figure out how to defeat their armbar, so they have to move to chokes. It’s like race between predator and prey – except both partners are chasing and being chased.

In these continually evolving conversations with sparring partners, one thing that can really mess them up is to play in a completely different way. If you have one way you like to move and they’ve figured that out, do you have another way? Can you switch between your favorite way of moving and that alternate way? Do you have a third way? Can you weave them in and out, adapting them to what your partner is doing as they are doing it? If you can switch between these three games right before your partner figures out what you’re doing, your sparring and movement become incredibly difficult to predict.

Be unpredictable. Make your partner predictable. Use their “good” reactions to set up your counters. Learn new techniques and expand your repertoire. Watch videos of stylistically different fighters.

As a side note, unpredictability doesn’t mean random. There is a place for random (and even weird) moves, for sure, but don’t mistake twitching spasmodically like a malfunctioning octopus for being an unpredictable fighter.

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