The Honest Guide to Starting When You've Never Trained Anything

There's a particular version of this that stops people, and it isn't fear of fighting.

It's the fear of walking into a room where everybody already knows each other, everybody knows what they're doing, and you're the one person visibly out of place.

That's the real barrier. So let's deal with it properly.

"I need to get fit first"

This is the most common reason people delay, and it's backwards.

You don't get fit and then start martial arts. You get fit by doing martial arts. Nobody has ever arrived at a gym having successfully got fit first — they just spend six months intending to and never come.

Every class scales to whoever is doing it. Being unfit means you're breathing hard in round three instead of round six. That's the entire consequence.

"Everyone will be better than me"

They will be, yes. That's not the problem you think it is.

Nobody in that room is comparing you to them. They're comparing you to themselves on their first day, which was also terrible. Martial arts gyms are strange places in this way — the culture is genuinely built around bringing new people through, because every single person there was carried through their first months by someone else.

The person you'd expect to be dismissive — the big, experienced one — is usually the most careful with beginners. It's the recently-promoted ones who get competitive, and any decent coach manages that.

"I've never played any sport"

Genuinely fine, and sometimes an advantage.

People from other sports arrive with habits — strength habits, ego habits, a body that wants to solve problems by pushing. They have to unlearn those. You don't have any, so you learn the technique clean.

You'll be behind on coordination for a few months. You'll catch up.

"I don't want to get hurt"

Reasonable, so pick accordingly.

BJJ is the safest place to start of the common martial arts, because nothing strikes you and you control the intensity yourself — you tap, it stops, immediately. Muay Thai is safe too if you train at a gym that doesn't spar hard with beginners, and a good one won't.

The injuries that happen to beginners almost always come from ego: refusing to tap, going too hard because you don't want to look weak, trying to keep up. If you're willing to be the person who taps early and takes water breaks, your risk is low.

The single easiest way in

Don't join a regular class. Join a beginners' course.

This is the actual solution to the "everyone knows each other" problem, and not enough people know these exist. On a beginners' course, everyone starts on the same day. Nobody has trained before. Nobody knows the etiquette, nobody knows the names, and nobody is watching you because they're all busy being new themselves.

By the time it ends you know a handful of people, you know how the place works, and walking into a normal class is nothing.

What the first month actually looks like

Week one: overwhelming, slightly fun, very tired.

Week two: you recognise a face. You know where to put your shoes.

Week three: the hard one. Novelty has worn off, you're not visibly better yet, and finding a reason not to go is easy. Go anyway. This is the week that decides it.

Week four onwards: it becomes a thing you do rather than a thing you're attempting.

Just come in and watch

If you're still not sure, this is a completely legitimate option and any decent gym will say yes.

Come and sit at the side for a class. Don't train, don't book anything, just watch what it actually is. Half the fear is of an imagined room, and the real one is usually much more ordinary — a group of normal people, most of them unremarkable-looking, getting sweaty and laughing at each other.

Our Introduction to Jiu-Jitsu course at URBN is built for exactly this — everyone starts together, capped at ten, gi hire included, zero experience only. 4th floor, Al Mariah Mall, Khalifa Street.