Why BJJ is so expensive

The only? you sure about that? of the multitude of martial arts out there, you think that bjj is the only marital art that makes money?

Ahh so you are one of those who think they are entitled to someone's sacrifice of time and work under the excuse of "oh you are a martial artist you should allow me to get what i want for free" I mean. Do you work for free? Are you a ghetto child living on welfare that needs charity? If so, i completely understand. My understanding is that you are a grown man. Why an able bodied grown man would want charity is beyond me.

Please name a non olympic marital art that is free. Fact is, no matter how you want to twists facts. Martial arts were never free. It wasnt free in japan, none of the kenjitsu schools were free and none of the numerous jiu jitsu schools were free. As a matter of fact JUDO isn't free. It is subsidized by the government. Thats what kano did, that's what made kano ingenious, the fact he got government sponsorship.

We all know this. You know this, yet you just choose to ignore all these facts because of your flawed sense of entitlement . Or maybe im wrong. Maybe you are a ghetto child who grew up on government assistance and doesn't have two pennies to rub together.

bjj instructors for sure have the right to make money, but at the same time i think they have a responsibility to prevent the sport from becoming one that's only for wealthy hobbyists. for example, plenty of community rec centers would be glad to help provide free bjj for underpriveleged kids, whether done onsite or via free tuition at your gym
 
I feel like everyone wants to put the burden on instructors but any purple or above in this thread could go teach for free at a rec center if they wanted.
 
I feel like everyone wants to put the burden on instructors but any purple or above in this thread could go teach for free at a rec center if they wanted.

We basically covered this multiple times over but.........................

The difference in pricing between a non profit club and professional gym is the cost of commercial real estate.

If one owns or leases space for a gym, you need to charge accordingly to stay afloat.

If you are organized as a volunteer club sport with all volunteer instructors that have day jobs and the gym is free because your club brings mats to a public school gym, overhead will be lower.

But even then, in Judo as a club sport we fund raised like crazy. Bake sales were definitely a thing.


All it takes to get a non profit club rolling is semi competent people willing to teach free classes in a public space.
 
bjj instructors for sure have the right to make money, but at the same time i think they have a responsibility to prevent the sport from becoming one that's only for wealthy hobbyists. for example, plenty of community rec centers would be glad to help provide free bjj for underpriveleged kids, whether done onsite or via free tuition at your gym

Or you can volunteer to pay 10~20% in additional tuition fees and that will pay for scholarship students.

So are you personally willing to pay more?

If so, how much more are you wiling to pay?
 
Or you can volunteer to pay 10~20% in additional tuition fees and that will pay for scholarship students.

So are you personally willing to pay more?

If so, how much more are you wiling to pay?

bjj gyms, like many educational and service entities, are able to offer 'scholarships' with no significant extra cost since the facilities are already paid for, the instructors are already there, et al.
 
bjj gyms, like many educational and service entities, are able to offer 'scholarships' with no significant extra cost since the facilities are already paid for, the instructors are already there, et al.

Many educational institutions have benefactors and alumni that donate money for scholarships ect.

So my question stands:
Are you willing to sacrifice for underprivileged children?

How much are you willing you pay more?
 
bjj instructors for sure have the right to make money, but at the same time i think they have a responsibility to prevent the sport from becoming one that's only for wealthy hobbyists. for example, plenty of community rec centers would be glad to help provide free bjj for underpriveleged kids, whether done onsite or via free tuition at your gym

Actually I would disagree.

We don't the responsibility to prevent the above.

In fact, teaching for free can be counter productive.

It is like giving free puppies, if people don't have to save money and sacrifice for it ...they might not appreciate it.

I have been running my own club and teaching for the past 7 years.

While I make it clear that it is a hobby and will not associate with full time instructor s for personal reasons.

I still understand that there is a need for their services.

But if you want to teach bjj for free, good on you. I would respect that.
 
Actually I would disagree.

We don't the responsibility to prevent the above.

In fact, teaching for free can be counter productive.

It is like giving free puppies, if people don't have to save money and sacrifice for it ...they might not appreciate it.

I have been running my own club and teaching for the past 7 years.

While I make it clear that it is a hobby and will not associate with full time instructor s for personal reasons.

I still understand that there is a need for their services.

But if you want to teach bjj for free, good on you. I would respect that.

Free is generally bad. As in my experience you get uncommitted people. Uncommitted students make it hard to build a culture. Part of grappling is the community. It cant be helped. We trust these people not to break our limbs. We trust them to touch our bodies. There is no where else in life where I put my face against another person other (other than an intimate partner). Going "ear to ear" is everyday business. Full time instructors are great. Many of the guys I work out with cross train with other instructors, myself included.

At the end of the day, those guys need to make 50K per year to have a reasonable life. Thats a really hard thing to do for most places. Thats more than 40 students paying $100 per month just to cover one persons salary full time. Add rent, insurance, marketing, etc... it becomes hard. The next financial downturn in the US will likely change our business model IMOP.
 
I here a lot of people complain about how expensive BJJ is where they live and, honestly, I think often the complaints are reasonable. After all, if you train at a Judo club in the same area you often pay, what, 1/3rd the amount.
The difference, I think, is profit. Most Judo clubs I have come across are run by people who are not looking to make money of it. After all, how could you make money teaching Judo to people at $50 a month unless you had huge classes?
If I ever become qualified to be an instructor (at my current rate of progress probably sometime next decade) I want to start a club style program and, hopefully, share space with either a Judo or Wrestling club. How is our sport ever going to become as mainstream as either Judo or Wrestling until kids have access to cheap quality training? Just my two cents.... I wanted to procrastinate rather than write a research paper about
What do you think? Can BJJ ever become a truly mainstream sport with instruction as expensive as it is?
Why would you do that? If the market value is a certain rate in an area, you coming and charging way below market value, fucks it up for the guys trying to make a living off teaching.
 
Many educational institutions have benefactors and alumni that donate money for scholarships ect.

So my question stands:
Are you willing to sacrifice for underprivileged children?

How much are you willing you pay more?

I run a business that provides in-home tutoring services for kids with Special Needs. Most of my clients are well-off families, some very much so, but I always keep a few slots open to serve poor families, and personally make a couple weekly trips out to the Sunnydale projects at no cost. If I ran a jiu-jitsu school I would definitely recruit from this area and worry about tuition later.
 
Actually I would disagree.

We don't the responsibility to prevent the above.

In fact, teaching for free can be counter productive.

It is like giving free puppies, if people don't have to save money and sacrifice for it ...they might not appreciate it.

I have been running my own club and teaching for the past 7 years.

While I make it clear that it is a hobby and will not associate with full time instructor s for personal reasons.

I still understand that there is a need for their services.

But if you want to teach bjj for free, good on you. I would respect that.

I think you're right that you have to draw a firm line with tuition, because otherwise everybody will have a sad sack story about why they need a break. However, this does not change the fact that we are dealing with an expensive sport that automatically disqualifies a huge portion of the public because of it. I'm not a gym owner, but I am a business owner, and I just don't see the problem with cultivating a few free spots for those who might truly need it. Again, if you run a gym the lights are already on, the instructors are already there, etc.
 
I think you're right that you have to draw a firm line with tuition, because otherwise everybody will have a sad sack story about why they need a break. However, this does not change the fact that we are dealing with an expensive sport that automatically disqualifies a huge portion of the public because of it. I'm not a gym owner, but I am a business owner, and I just don't see the problem with cultivating a few free spots for those who might truly need it. Again, if you run a gym the lights are already on, the instructors are already there, etc.

I know a few places, including my previous school, that had scholarship programs that you could apply to in order to get your tuition waived for X amount of time.
 
I would say it's not really that expensive now.

My sister teaches fitness classes in NYC -- basically the bike riding ones. She was surprised at how much cheaper BJJ was compared to her classes. I'm not talking about BJJ gyms in a lower cost market; I showed her the rates for NYC BJJ gyms like Marcelo's. Training 3x a week at Marcelo's costs a lot less than taking her hour long classes 3x a week. Marcelo's works out to be about half the price.

BJJ instructors are also generally more qualified. I mean she has spent her whole life doing fitness/athletic stuff, but she is not actually involved in the sport of cycling. She has not won cycling championships at various levels, etc. So that is another gap to adjust for that makes BJJ seem relatively cheap.

The gym I train at also has a regular fitness gym out front. So I know the going price for just gym access without an instructor. That price covers the space, insurance, utilities, capital investment for the equipment, cleaning, bare bones staff just to lock/unlock the door, etc. That's about $35/month in our real estate market.

That $35/month is subsidized too by the fact that a lot of people feel pressure to maintain some sort of regular gym membership even when they don't go. If the gym only accepted memberships from people who showed up at least once a month, it would probably have to rise to $50/month or so just to cover those fixed costs.

We only charge $100/month for BJJ, so the difference is an extra $50/month to cover the extra labor of having people teach classes. That's the BJJ instructor premium right there that pays the instructor after expenses. So for a medium sized gym of 100 students, that's $50K/year actually paid out to a full time instructor. That seems pretty fair to me? I mean I am not sure how much cheaper we actually expect it to be.

This holds across different markets too. Where I used to live it was $150/month. But the real estate market there was also about 2x as expensive. So it was probably roughly the same $50/month BJJ instructor premium that actually pays the guy -- maybe $75/month at max. And this instructor was quite a high level coach on the competition scene.

People say wrestling is so much cheaper, but I was just at a wrestling camp last month. The price for a week long camp for the kids was comparable to the same price we charge for a week long BJJ camp. About the same hours too. The wrestling camp also gets a huge discount on the facility because one of the main organizers is the athletic director at the high school we rent out. BJJ doesn't usually have the same subsidies in place.

Overall I just challenge the notion that BJJ is actually expensive. It's one of the cheapest activities I've ever been involved in. I spend more on skiing for four months than someone would spend on BJJ all year. People who golf, shoot, race cars, etc. all pay more. The guys who play recreational hockey at the rink next door to our gym spend more for their ice time and equipment.

I don't really see it getting much cheaper. I've seen a lot of people open up their own schools for a million different reasons. Somehow they always seem to magically charge the market rate, more or less. Even when they said they were going to be way cheaper when they first had the idea to open up, once they actually get the space and start paying the bills, the price magically adjusts to market rate just like that.
 
Supply-and-demand-Equilibrium.jpg
 
I see a lot of non business hours just magically saying, "the lights are on, the instructors are paid"

Are you kidding yourselves?

The lights are on because the electric bill was paid. If you're training in a hot climate in the summer, AC or at the very least serious ventilation fans are adding to that cost.

Cost of the space is MASSIVE. Most people do not own the land the school is one, most schools are paying a commercial lease. Even if they own the real estate outright they need to recoup the cost of investment. If they have an arrangement with the owner of a larger gym, they are paying for the use of the space.

All of this isn't free.

Judo was cheap as dirt when I was a kid because the club fundraised like crazy and had deals to use middle school and high school gyms for our class.

We brought the mats, set em up, trained, broke em down, and loaded them back into the vans at the end of each class.

When I've trained judo at a professionally owned gym, the rates were standard for pro BJJ gyms in the area.
 
I run a business that provides in-home tutoring services for kids with Special Needs. Most of my clients are well-off families, some very much so, but I always keep a few slots open to serve poor families, and personally make a couple weekly trips out to the Sunnydale projects at no cost. If I ran a jiu-jitsu school I would definitely recruit from this area and worry about tuition later.

Its all nice but you haven't answered my questions:

Are you willing to sacrifice for underprivileged children?

How much are you willing you pay more?

Only these two questions. I'm not interested in your claims on how you run your business. I'm asking specific questions on what you are willing to give to your bjj school.
 
I think you're right that you have to draw a firm line with tuition, because otherwise everybody will have a sad sack story about why they need a break. However, this does not change the fact that we are dealing with an expensive sport that automatically disqualifies a huge portion of the public because of it. I'm not a gym owner, but I am a business owner, and I just don't see the problem with cultivating a few free spots for those who might truly need it. Again, if you run a gym the lights are already on, the instructors are already there, etc.

Or if you really care so much about "cultivating those who need it" ; you can offer to pay more. You yourself can sponsor a student or % of his tuition, inspire the school and others to do the same.
 
I think you're right that you have to draw a firm line with tuition, because otherwise everybody will have a sad sack story about why they need a break. However, this does not change the fact that we are dealing with an expensive sport that automatically disqualifies a huge portion of the public because of it. I'm not a gym owner, but I am a business owner, and I just don't see the problem with cultivating a few free spots for those who might truly need it. Again, if you run a gym the lights are already on, the instructors are already there, etc.

I charge like 20 dollars per week. It is like 12.50 for a big Mac combo or a subway in my country .so I don't think i am terribly expansive.
I refund half of the entry fee to the competitors. I give discount to students, family package, police officers . I have no sign up fee and contracts.
I sell all my merchandise at cost.

But yet, we have people that will go to a full time professional instructor and easily pay 2 to 3 times more with none of the above deals and discounts.

Like I said there is a need and supply for both different format of bjj gym.
 
The issue of it is the business owner's responsibility to give back to society by working for free OR making the customers pay more if they choose too so the business owner can get paid to work more is very interesting.
 
Its all nice but you haven't answered my questions:

Are you willing to sacrifice for underprivileged children?

How much are you willing you pay more?

Only these two questions. I'm not interested in your claims on how you run your business. I'm asking specific questions on what you are willing to give to your bjj school.

you and i may be talking about slightly different things. i'm saying that, as a gym owner, you can (and i think should) offer tuition breaks to poor kids who wouldn't get past this barrier to entry otherwise, and without requiring a sponsor to cover their entry. as a business owner i regularly make this sacrifice to those who need it, and i do not consider it something that requires compensation from my other clients.
 
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