Gi classes: Tuesday mornings, Friday nights
We open tomorrow, and the gi classes now have times. Tuesday 9:00–10:30 and Friday 19:00–20:30, from opening week. I run them.
That’s been the one honest gap on this website for a while — a gi program with no times against it. It’s filled now, so here’s everything worth knowing before you turn up to one.
Why those two slots
Neither is an accident, and neither is a leftover.
Tuesday morning is for the people the evening timetable quietly writes off. Eastbourne has a lot of them: shift workers, self-employed trades, people on school hours, people who finished work at six in the morning. If your week has a hole at nine on a Tuesday and every gym in town only opens its doors at half seven at night, you don’t get to train. Now you do.
Friday night is the other end of the same idea. Most clubs treat Friday as a write-off and half-staff it. I don’t think it’s a write-off — it’s just a session that suits a different set of people, and it’s coached exactly like any other.
Two sessions a week, at either end of the day. Between them, most people’s weeks have room for one.
If you can only make one of the two, that’s still a real training programme rather than a compromise — the maths on that hasn’t changed.
What a gi session actually is
The gi is the jacket and trousers. That sounds cosmetic and isn’t: the moment there’s cloth to grab, the whole sport changes. Grips become the argument. Everything slows down, control lasts longer, and escapes you’d scramble out of without a jacket simply don’t come free any more. You get more time to think and less room to move.
No-gi is the opposite trade, which is why it’s worth saying plainly that neither one is the real version. They’re two sports that share a body of knowledge, and doing both makes you harder to deal with in either. If you’ve only ever trained one, the first month in the other is a useful sort of humbling.
What you need to bring
A gi. That’s the only difference from any other session here.
Don’t spend a lot on your first one — message us before you come and we’ll tell you exactly what to get, and roughly what it should cost. There’s no club-branded gi you’re expected to buy, and no requirement that it match anyone else’s. Beyond that it’s the usual: mouthguard for live rounds, water, something on your feet off the mat.
Rank, because people always ask
Belts here are earned against a written syllabus — performance criteria, not time served. One rank, valid across both sports, so what you do on a Tuesday morning counts the same as what you do on a Monday night.
Gradings are awarded by Ben Zarif, the club’s head coach and a BJJ brown belt — brown belts may grade coloured belts. I run the gi classes; Ben handles rank. That’s a division of labour, not a chain of command, and it’s the arrangement we both wanted. The syllabus itself is available to members: you’ll know exactly what you’re being measured against, which is the whole point of writing it down.
There are no ceremonies. And if you already hold a belt from somewhere else, it’s yours — we recognise it and we’re not going to ask you to start again. Ben’s written about why at more length than I would.
Come as you are, at whatever rank you already hold. Nobody here is going to make you audition for it.
Come and try one
The first two weeks are free, and they cover both sports — so you can do a gi session on the Tuesday, a no-gi session on the Monday or Thursday, and work out which one you actually want. Plenty of people end up doing both.
Here’s the full gi program, and the whole week’s schedule. When you’re ready, book your free trial and I’ll see you on a Tuesday or a Friday.