how to find a quality dojang

[Gnarlie]

In my experience, a lot of people will take a free trial who have no intention of signing up for anything, just because it's free. While someone that's seriously interested will be willing to pay something, since they value what they're getting and are planning on paying for it at some point.

If people don't want to sing up that's their prerogative. If they come in with no intention, you have a month with your awesome training to change their mind. If they don't sign up, it is no great loss. In my experience, most do.

 

[Dirty Dog]

I would want to know how often each aspect of the curriculum is trained. A week can be misleading.

You could ask...


Sent from an old fashioned 300 baud acoustic modem by whistling into the handset. Not TapaTalk. Really.

 

[Gnarlie]

You could ask...


Sent from an old fashioned 300 baud acoustic modem by whistling into the handset. Not TapaTalk. Really.

People aren't always truthful at the point where they are keen to get you onto a contract.

 

[Dirty Dog]

People aren't always truthful at the point where they are keen to get you onto a contract.

"Hello, I'm looking for a new school. Can you tell me how much time your school spends on poomsae, sparring, self defense, and bag work?"

Lying would require them to know your personal preferences for the breakdown of time spent on each activity.
If they know, they must be telepathic, and I'd ask if they could teach me that skill. I think it would be really helpful, and not just in self defense situations...

 

[Gnarlie]

"Hello, I'm looking for a new school. Can you tell me how much time your school spends on poomsae, sparring, self defense, and bag work?"

Lying would require them to know your personal preferences for the breakdown of time spent on each activity.
If they know, they must be telepathic, and I'd ask if they could teach me that skill. I think it would be really helpful, and not just in self defense situations...

Their perception of how much of each is done, and how much they actually do might be quite different - and quite often is in my experience. I prefer to try before I buy, and not buy the proverbial pig in a poke. Nothing wrong with that, and I have never had a problem negotiating that trial period, even when it is not normally offered, and even when I have been honest about trying other schools too.

If schools aren't open to negotiating that trial, I wouldn't really want to train there. I look for two way trust and integrity in the school - student relationship. If I train for a month and like the product, I am there every day. It is an investment.

 

[WaterGal]

Eh, that's why we offer a trial period. My experience is that almost everyone knows how they feel about the training after 2 weeks, and are usually willing to shell out a small amount of cash for it.

But then, I can also generally give a person a pretty accurate sense of how much we spend on what stuff during each class, in actual minutes. Sparring classes are 5-10 minutes of warm-ups, 5 minutes on forms, 5 minutes to put on sparring gear, and then 30-40 minutes of sparring. Forms classes are 5-10 min warm-ups, 20-40 min on forms, and any remainder of class on bag/pad work. Striking classes are 5-10 minutes warm-ups, 5-10 minutes on forms, and ~30 minutes on bag/pad work, board breaks, etc.

 

[Gnarlie]

How long I need depends on how big the syllabus is, and how deep the material covered goes.

I want to have an idea of how long it is before the same material crops up twice, and how often the less-often-covered material comes up.

Also, I want to see how the trainers act and react in a wide variety of situations, and how feedback and correction is handled in those circumstances.

I also want to have a chance to fit into the social circle, and get a feeling for the people outside of the training session. That can take a while, but you can learn a lot about a place / instructor from the little things people say.

I find a month to be the right amount of time for me to make a reliable judgement about a place. Any less and I am not so sure. Just my personal view, but I have tried a lot of places before I found one that really works for me and where I really fit and feel fully engaged, and I couldn't have done that with a trial period that was too short for me personally.