You don’t need to feel like you’re walking into the unknown by showing up at Gracie Barra Clearwater for your free trial lessons. Here’s what you can expect.
0. Meet the Instructor and Sign a Waiver
Before class starts, you’ll want to meet with the instructor. He can tell you about the school and answer any questions. If you want to join the class, you’ll need to fill out a waiver and you be lent a gi and shown how to tie a belt.
1. Line Up and Bow In
The instructor will call …

Gracie Barra Mission Statement
At the heart of the Gracie Barra Family’s extraordinary success over the years is our strong philosophy and mission as a group, a foundation which our masters laid many years ago, but is constantly made stronger by all of the great people involved in our community.
Jiu-Jitsu is a beautiful art, and we have a vision of how it should be taught, as well as how our community should work together for common, powerful, and positive goals. To achieve this vision, we must remember to come together as …

Some historians of Jiu-Jitsu say that the origins of “the gentle art” can be traced back to India, and was practiced by Buddhist Monks. Concerned with self-defense, these monks created techniques based upon principles of balance and leverage, and a system of manipulating the body in a manner where one could avoid relying upon strength or weapons. With the expansion of Buddhism, Jiu-Jitsu spread from Southwest Asia to China, finally arriving in Japan where it developed and gained further popularity.
In the last days of the 19th century, some Jiu-Jitsu masters …

Many of the major problems with other martial arts doesn’t lie in their techniques but in their training methods—in how they train, not just what they train. A technique may make perfect sense and work “in theory” but be so dangerous or so difficult that there’s no way to practice it realistically. Traditionally, martial arts have tried to solve this by resorting to katas and forms (memorized patterns of movements), cooperative one and two-step sparring (“I do this, you do that, then I do this…”) or highly restricted or formalized …