I live in Europe in a countryside area. We have one gym in the area only and I know the instructor well.
I’m starting to get really frustrated with how the gym is run.
The gym is totally sport based, which is ok. I’d prefer some level of self defence in it, even if just at a beginner/basics level. But ok whatever.
My main problem is that the white belts are not being taught anything properly imo. They don’t know any of the basic positions, they don’t know how someone would get to closed guard from standing for example. They are being taught things like DLR or lasso on their first time doing the lesson and I can see it makes no sense to them at all, so they give up training and have a bad impression of bjj. There is never any conceptual explanation of why a position is dominant, only to how many points it would score. The technique teaching is also whatever the head coach is kind of into at that time too, so it will be things the coach does not use himself usually, and there is never any great details like I have gotten from seminars with people like Roger where he teach the basics but you always get something from it. I’m not crazy about warm ups, but there are some purple belts in the gym who don’t know how to shrimp properly and use the wrong feet because they are never shown it.
Recently the gym has moved more to positional sparring too, so there are now sessions without rolling or free sparring at the end of the teaching. It is always same scenario for the position training, you are down on points, or you are up on points. This is being done I think to make beginners safer or something of this kind but it has the opposite effect as the white belts go full power and know exactly what the partner is trying to do from the start, so I see more injuries and I also feel more unsafe with people training in this methodology. Finally it is not so much fun I think. I don’t think I would have continued with bjj as a white belt if it hadn’t been for rolling with more experienced people.
i know the instructor really well and he is a good person, but i don’t think he will listen to me if I talk to him at all, I did try a couple of times but it didn’t work. There is nowhere else to train for hours around where we live. I know of a couple of other purple belts who are maybe stopping from training completely I think because they’re not really learning anything during the lessons, and the sparring time is being reduced.
Is there any advice on what I can do? Am I being unreasonable? I could just go to the open mat session once an week and try to learn from submeta or grapplers guide instead, but i would like my school to do well also and have a strong community and I enjoy training with everyone.
I used to coach sometimes at the school, but we are told to stick to the plan always and never to teach in a different way, and so I stopped a few months ago because i cannot agree with the direction of the school.