Quote:
Originally Posted by silverline122
Why not sit in at each school?? Most BJJ places encourage that
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That is the best thing to do, it's the only way to get a feel for each place.
Strongstyle is an MMA gym, I haven't trained there but I've heard they only do nogi. I don't know much about the Popovitch school. I've heard good things about Evolution but haven't trained there personally. I want to stop in sometime but I never have the motivation at 9pm. If you're willing to drive a little farther to the Relson schools they offer a good mix of gi and nogi. The mentor location is in an MMA school and has monday/nogi and wednesday/gi classes at 7:30 from a brown belt. Plenty of people show up with a gi for monday and wednesday and other people do nogi both days as well so they aren't strict about that. They have a saturday class as well that is officially the "intro" class but depending on who shows up it can be more advanced technique. They also just opened a school in willoughby run by some purple belts that is pretty much gi only. Classes monday to thursday at 7:00pm and saturdays at 11am. You can usually find people there on friday nights for open mat as well.
As for your gi/nogi question...lately I've been doing a lot of gi training. I've been training for less than a year and there has been a lot of wrestlers joining recently that like to fly around and power out of stuff. With the gi on it helps me slow them down to my speed and be more technical. Rolling with them nogi turns into a wrestling match and i just get tossed around, with a gi on it's a more level playing field.
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http://www.graciecleveland.com/
I'd still reccommend checking out each place. Before you go in write down a few notes about the location, time to get there, traffic, parking, things like that. Afterwards write down what you liked and didn't like, did you understand the teacher, mat space, was it clean, were people friendly, prices, etc. That really helps when you go to compare later.
