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For years, the conventional wisdom in martial arts has been that anyone who wants to develop as a fighter needs to earn their skills through blood, sweat, and tears. “Bleed for blue,” was a common phrase you’d hear in the jiu-jitsu gym as intermediate white belts struggled with conditioning or learning the subtleties of new moves. The culture was even more intense in MMA gyms, where people would spar as though their lives depended on it.

Thinking of rolling as playing also allows you to step out of your comfort zone. Far too often, fighters will treat sparring sessions like they are a matter of life-or-death, meaning that they’ll not only push the level of intensity up; they will also become personally invested in their performance. This is inevitable when you allow the ego to get involved in your training.

We typically think of martial arts training that is something incredibly beneficial for children – and rightfully so, but those benefits are not exclusive to children as adults often stand to gain for more from martial arts training than children actually.

You’ve watched the UFC. You’ve had friends telling you about how fun training is. Maybe you’ve even lurked in one of the many BJJ / MMA forums. And now you’ve finally decided to take your interest a little further and actually try out one of the best MMA gyms in NYC, namely ours, Ronin Athletics.

We live in New York City, with its reputation as a ‘tough’ place. You’d think that as an MMA school in NYC, we’d emphasize self-defense and fighting in ‘the streets’ more. Instead, we emphasize the fitness, the fun and the mental aspects of training. Why is that?

Dana White has a famous adage where he says that fighting is truly universal, crossing borders and language barriers. That’s why there’s MMA fighters from every part of the world, each adding their own particular flavor and style to the milieu. Even outside Brazil, the US and Japan, the hubs of the sport, you can still find schools and people training hard. We’ve had international visitors here in our school in New York from Poland, Japan and Ireland among others. Every day, the sports gets bigger, with more and more people everywhere participating in it.

Ronin Athletics is a MMA school in New York, one of the greatest cities in the world, but often enough, also one of the most stressful. Because our students are training BJJ and kickboxing in NYC, we get that most of them have busy, stress-filled lives outside of the gym, and want to let off some steam. That’s why we have so many classes to offer and work on a day system. We give our students the chance to really throw themselves into training to work off all the frustrations of the day in a welcoming environment. It’s also why we always try to foster the friendly atmosphere here. We want folks to smile, to laugh and to have fun here, because sometimes that fun isn’t so easily available elsewhere.

Why do we watch MMA, or for that matter, any combat sport?

Here at Ronin Athletics, our MMA school in NYC, we train all aspects of the sport separately and in tandem. We have classes for BJJ, standup and wrestling, and we also have dedicated training sessions for mixing them together for the MMA ruleset. Coach Christian and a few others have fought MMA, and many of us have competed in at least one of those disciplines. That means that each one of us has spent a significant amount of time and resources training, getting ready for, paying for and actually competing in these combat sports in New York and in other places. But more than just practicioners, players and instructors of the sports, we’re also big fans.

At Ronin Athletics, we always invite prospective students to try a free class, both because we’re confident in what we do here and because we understand that you need to experience the learning process to see if a martial arts school is right for you. We also always invite people in to watch a class and to get a sense of the atmosphere. We believe that our students and instructors are a better selling point that any sales pitch we can make.

It’s New Year’s resolution time, and folks both here in NYC and across the country are checking out new places to work out. They’re raring to go with a new found commitment to losing weight, getting more physically fit and exercising more in the New Year.

Here at Ronin Athletics, we encourage all of our team members to compete. We have a strong Competition Team, with many of us consistently bringing home hardware. We acknowledge that competition isn’t for everyone, but we feel that if you can fit it into your schedule, you should enter one of the many tournaments, both for Submission Grappling and BJJ in NYC and the surrounding areas.

Rolling, or grappling with resistance, is a crucial part of BJJ’s pedagogical model. At any of the many MMA / BJJ schools in NYC, you will see rolling. It’s fundamental to one’s ability to implement techniques and internalize the concepts of Jiu-jitsu. Like in much of life, a person needs to undergo stress tests to be sure that they’re really competent at a skill.

In many of the classes here at Ronin Athletics, you will often hear terms like lever, structure and angle thrown around. It can seem weird to discuss something as obviously physical by using such cerebral concepts. But at the same time, we’re applying the science of physics and its principles on the mat every day. By noticing and thinking about that, we can better wrap our heads around BJJ.

For the longest time, if you were to ask me what I do for a living, I would tell you that “I teach Mixed Martial Arts,” more specifically Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. But I’ve noticed that recently (and by that, I mean in the past few years) my response has changed to “I’m a BJJ Coach” or “I Coach Mixed Martial Arts.”

A student asked me this question recently. He’d just seen one of my old amateur fights on YouTube. Despite losing the decision, it was one of the best performances I ever had, and I was still an amateur (though this was before the big push to regulate Professional MMA via state sanctioning bodies, as is today’s standard).