Y’all, we continue to have a lot of interest in both our online programs and in our eventual re-opening date. Here’s a comprehensive update on both!
We won’t be opening our downtown space until at least March, and will continue to track the pandemic indicators for guidance on when that will be. I wish I had better news, but Whatcom County is in the midst of an outbreak and all counties are still in Phase One of the re-opening plan. We will continue to hope for March and keep you posted.
In the meantime, we’ve paid in advance for our downtown space through June and we will continue to bring you regular streaming content — classes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with the occasional weekend — as well as technique and strategy videos.
It’s very important to us, especially in these difficult economic times for folks, that we continue to provide value in exchange for your support. For the past few months, we haven’t charged any cards — some of y’all that have been paying noticed. We thank you deeply for both your support and for noticing that we stopped charging.
To help offset our costs, starting on Feb. 1, we will now be offering online memberships for $50 per month. That’s unlimited training from the comfort of your own home, or whatever mat space you have access to, with access to ALL our online resources. And we have some new resources to tell you about!
You can sign up for online training here. If you’re already an academy member, just log in and choose that membership! Or, if you’ve forgotten your password or have trouble, just send me a message and I’ll make sure you get signed up. Several of you have done this already, and I’m deeply grateful. This option will charge your card each month on the 1st, the same way dues worked when we were open.
If you’re a brand new student interested in our Intro to BJJ program, we are offering online Intro classes as well. You can either wait for our academy to re-open so we can do our traditional Intro deal — four weeks for $200, plus a free gi — or you can sign up for the online classes for $50 per month, and I’ll even hook you up with a free gi and grappling dummy while supplies last.
If for whatever reason you can’t sign up for recurring membership, but would still like to support us, you can donate via PayPal (paypal.me/BellinghamBJJ) or Venmo (Jeff-Shaw-7).
Feel free to come to classes regardless of what you can contribute. I don’t want tough economic times to undermine your ability to train or to hang out with your squad.
We’ll get back to regular training once the pandemic ends, and until then we’ll be doing some pretty cool educational programs that are Covid-safe! Let’s start with …
ONLINE CLASSES THREE OR FOUR DAYS A WEEK
We’ll have regular recurring classes throughout February with this schedule:
Tuesday nights: 6 p.m. with Jeff
Wednesday nights: 7 p.m. with Prof. Mauro
Thursday nights: 6 p.m. with Jeff
These classes will be adapted to those in attendance, and will be based around our Intro and Fundamentals curriculum — with some advanced stuff thrown in that’s tailored to the specific needs of the folks who show up.
Those three days will be regular classes, and we’ll do curriculum Q&A streams on occasion, usually on a weekend, for those folks working their way toward belt rank.
We’ll also be experimenting with a solo / partner / dummy drills class called Drill Team, so stay tuned for the day and time we’ll try that out! It will be high-repetition drilling of simple, effective techniques that will get you sweating while locking in the most important basics.
VIDEO REVIEWS OF GRAPPLING FOOTAGE
There’s a cool new video review site called Tekneek that allows you to upload videos for great coaches to comment on. They have lots of talent, including Kristina Barlaan, Robert Drysdale, Gumby and many more — and now, me!
For Bellingham BJJ students only, I’ll be doing video reviews for free! Just upload your video here on Tekneek. This can be a video of you sparring, competing, drilling — or it can be a video not of you, like a match where you’re interested in the particular techniques and tactics involved.
EVENT WATCH-ALONGS
For the past year, I’ve been doing fight breakdowns by request, but we also did a real-time watch-along of an event that went really well — so folks expressed interest in another!
We’re going to do this with a past event, so that we can make sure Internet connectivity isn’t a hassle (I’ll play it off my hard drive instead of through the web). I’ll send along a Zoom link that folks can join, and you’ll be able to watch on your screen without subscribing to anything or paying for anything.
We can watch the matches as a team, with commentary and questions if you want. For our first attempt, we watched the ADCC Absolute division from 2005 — featuring MANY of the greatest competitors ever, including Roger Gracie, Marcelo Garcia, Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza and many more.
For this next one, we’re going to do a By Request Mixtape — meaning we’ll watch several important and educational matches, both that I choose and that you request. If there are matches or events you’d especially want broken down — how did Roger get that choke on Buchecha? How did Bia Basilio submit Ffion Davies? — just let me know and I’ll add your requests to the playlist.
We’re planning this for sometime after Feb. 1, so stay tuned!
ONLINE RESOURCES FOR MEMBERS
We filmed ALL of our Fundamentals curriculum, from white to blue belt. It’s all on an unlisted YouTube playlist — meaning only folks with the link can access it. It’s more than 6 hours of technique, broken up into videos with every technique on our white to blue belt curriculum.
You can see our updated 36-class fundamentals curriculum here (we update it quarterly to keep it fresh). As we change it, we’ll update the videos. Feel free to make video suggestions!
Finally don’t forget Omoplatapalooza, Jeff’s three-hour love letter to the powerful sweeping and submitting position. You get that free with your membership, too.
LET US KNOW WHAT ELSE WOULD BE HELPFUL!
We’ve gotten creative, and will continue to do so. But it’s always useful to know what types of class offerings and events YOU think would help most. So let us know!
Again, I can’t tell you how much we appreciate your help keeping this place afloat during the crisis. We will re-open, and it’s in no small part thanks to all of y’all.
We will, of course, continue to make videos, do regular live-streamed classes, put on events, and produce content to keep folks engaged with jiu-jitsu and the BBJJ community. Check the private Facebook page for more fight breakdowns, or watch for those in these emails.
Once we have a firm re-opening date, we’ll blast that out on all these channels.
Stay safe, stay healthy, and see you on the streams! Best,
Jeff