No tradition for tradition's sake
Walk into a lot of martial arts gyms and the first thing you do is bow. Then you line up by rank. Maybe you address the coach with a title. None of it has taught you anything about grappling yet, and some of it never will.
I’ve got nothing against history. I’ve spent my life in combat sports and I respect where the arts come from. But respecting the past isn’t a reason to keep doing something in the present. The question I ask about everything we do in the room is simple: does this make you better, or is it just here because it’s always been here?
If it makes you better, we keep it. If it’s only there out of habit, it goes.
What we dropped, and why
We don’t bow. Bowing is a deference ritual borrowed from traditions that aren’t ours, and it quietly sets the gym up as a place where you defer rather than ask questions. I’d rather you asked questions. Shake my hand, shake your partner’s hand, get to work. Respect here is turning up, training safely, and giving your partners good rounds — not a ritual at the door.
We don’t run belt ceremonies, and we don’t organise the room around rank. That one has enough behind it to deserve its own post. The short version: your ability is real, and it shouldn’t depend on how anyone feels about you — so rank here is earned against written criteria, never handed out by mood, and never used as a lever. The rest of the time, your training partners already know exactly how good you are.
And the sport I coach is no-gi — I wrote about why last week. Gi grappling is its own sport, and people who love it should train it. That’s exactly why gi BJJ runs at Rebel too, run by Adrian, as its own thing — not a jacket bolted onto submission grappling. Two sports, each coached on its own terms.
This isn’t rebellion for its own sake
Dropping the ceremony is the easy part to notice, so it’s the part people fixate on. But we’re not contrarians. We didn’t strip these things out to make a point — we stripped them out because your time on the mat is finite, and I’m not going to spend it on things that don’t move you forward.
Tradition is a good reason to remember something. It’s a poor reason to keep doing it.
Plenty of what looks like tradition is actually good practice that earned its place: warming up properly, tapping early and often, looking after newer partners, drilling before you spar. We keep all of it — not because it’s old, but because it works. The test is the same every time.
What you get instead
A room that feels like a serious training environment, not a ceremony. No hierarchy to climb before you’re allowed to feel like you belong. Just coaching, honest feedback, and rounds against people trying to get better the same as you.
If you’ve bounced off traditional martial arts culture before — the formality, the deference, the sense that you’re joining a club with a lot of unspoken rules — this is built to be the opposite of that. Here’s more on what we’re actually about.
Come and see how it feels to train without the ritual. The first two weeks are free — book a trial.