Dealing with Commercial Schools

Here is a bit of advice that is often overlooked. This advice is a bit generic as it covers boxing and other martial arts. Basically this is advice for those students learning boxing in a very poor learning environment and is stuck there.

This is a blog for people that discover boxing as a hobby, cross over into boxing from other martial arts, etc…so the place where you are learning boxing may not be a traditional amateur boxing/kickboxing gym. In fact, it may turn out to be a commercial gym that really isn’t a gym. It is a 1980’s style martial arts environment where the goal is to get as much money as possible while making sure no one gets hurt. (By hurt, we mean a microscopic abrasion about 1/11661617733838 of an inch) Simply put, these schools are not the best learning environment. Actually, they are an environment for getting into a lot of bad habits. Serious minded boxers would be best served getting the hell out of such schools as soon as possible. However, there are those students that are unable to leave. This is because they may not live in an area where there are many options. A small town, for example, may not have many venues to work out at. Then, there are larger towns that have a number of schools but work schedule, transportation problems, etc make switching schools impossible. So, what is someone to do in such a scenario?

Attend the classes and go with the flow. Just be aware of how poor the instruction is. But, how do you learn if the instruction is poor? We’ll cover that in the next installment.