Blog & News

For people who are just starting to learn jiu-jitsu, it is important to recognize that not all gyms are the same. Though all jiu-jitsu classes will teach the principles of the fighting style, there are significant differences in how some gyms choose to convert these principles into practice. The distinction is especially important if your objective is to learn self-defense.

We’ve taken a very informative 50-minute video where Rener Gracie and Alex Ueda explains the most common injuries when training in Jiu Jitsu and broke it down into two parts.

Sparring, also known as rolling, is what makes Jiu-Jitsu the most dynamic and effective martial art around the globe. Furthermore, it offers the opportunity for limitless growth. In other words, Jiu-Jitsu promotes constant sparring, which enhances one’s skills. Unfortunately, most people quit before they hit the 6-month mark in the academy because of sparring. 

Women who take self-defense classes typically aren’t training to be championship fighters. They take these classes because they want to be prepared to confront dangers in real-world scenarios.

Even though many people believe that Muay Thai and kickboxing are the same, they are quite different in many aspects including fighting styles and the techniques used. Yes, there are universal techniques shared between the two sports, however, the implementation of these techniques varies depending on an individual fighter and the sport.

Most Women consider self-defense an optional skillset that tend to be on the bottom of the list (if at all) of things to learn.  It’s like someone learning to shoot a gun, in case of war or a shoot-out. The probability doesn’t justify the effort – right?

Rener and Ryron Gracie have been head instructors at Gracie University since the age of 18 and 20, respectively.  Having managed all aspects of Jiu-Jitsu training and program development.  They have personally observed the rates at which people are quitting their Jiu-Jitsu journey especially, those above 40 years old tend to have a higher rate of quitting while those just approaching 40 are considering quitting soon.

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.

Though we train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in New York, we train MMA in New York and we train kickboxing in New York, everything that we do is tied to a larger body of work, with its own history and development cycle. This includes a rich, international history of variation, distillation and competition that informs what we do in the here and now.