Gym owners: how do you get own training in?
Running a gym seems to quickly turn you from student into permanent coach. You’re organising classes, helping beginners, answering questions, fixing people’s grips, resetting drills, greeting new people, dealing with admin. The tasks to take away from actually training yourself are neverending.
For gym owners here:
Do you schedule specific sessions where you’re just a student?
Do you travel to train elsewhere to get that feeling back?
Do you jump into your own classes and accept the chaos?
Or does your own development inevitably slow down once you run a gym?
I try to get to different gyms in the day but with a full time job alongside the gym business it's difficult. I also make sure to jump in when I can to get plenty of rounds with students in, self constraining myself to focus on my current goals. But it never feels like I'm doing enough.
I’m curious how people balance running the room vs still improving their own BJJ.
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I am not a gym owner. Only an instructor (at the moment for a group over 50yo combat sports/ martial arts seniors. Ofcourse instructing eats your own training time. At the moment I do get some training done, but I am retired from work so I have time.
@crossover Retirement sounds like the way forward! Jokes aside, working with an over-50s group must be interesting. I imagine the emphasis shifts a bit more towards efficiency, safety, and longevity rather than pure athleticism. The kind of environment that can actually produce really technical jiu-jitsu.
Do you still get rounds in with them, or are you mostly in a coaching role during those sessions?
I am working on getting some grapping done. Most of our group are boxers, kickboxers, karate, or hokutoryu jujutsu. Not grappling.
@crossover Interesting, is it the community that you're in (the gym and spaces you've been involved in) or is it more that older people favour the striking arts?
I would have thought the full contact style training would drop off with age, and expect more traditional martial arts or indeed BJJ (maybe not so much wrestling due to the atheleticism inherrent in the sport) to take more of a centre stage in the older demographic.
We work heavy bags and pads. Sparring is tai chi speed. Its what they have done earlier, I introduce some new moves pite by pite. Today is a kind of a takedown but its actually an ukemi drill. Kicking and striking is easier for old body compered to grappling.
Makes sense, things like ukemi and controlled pace definitely give confidence to move without worrying about getting hurt.
The tai-chi speed sparring idea is interesting too. Slowing everything down seems to let people explore positions they’d normally panic in on top of keeping it friendly for the older generations.
I occasionally do a drill I call Chess Jitsu which is just turn based rolling. No strength or real resistance, one person does a fluid movement and this is countered by the opponent and so on. Slows everything down for the younger ones to actually think and improve, taking out all physical attributes but might be a good shout for the older person? I'll even spice it up and randomly shout during the rounds, every time I do so the person who's turn it is must do something completely daft. This puts one person in a bad position to work out of at random to keep it from getting too stagnant.
I train with my students. We also run a public open mat on Sundays that I train at a lot. There are definitely times where I don't get as much training in as I'd like, but I usually manage ok.