Training at East West MMA
My son (Ty) and I are always looking to improve our game. We have been doing Judo and some Jiu Jitsu for nearly two years now, and definitely plan to continue doing that.
But we have tried several other things recently to round our game out a bit.
There is a gym that opened up relatively near my home in Riverton that I had been meaning to check out. This weekend I did, and here’s my report:
East West MMA (The sign out fron says “Karate”, but they teach a lot more than that.)
When I walked in to the the building, and started looking at the facilities I was really amazing by how big it is. The way the building is set back off the street, and down ina bit you really don’t realize how lare it is until you really get down into it.
The space for training was big enough that with a large numbe of us there was still plenty of room not only for everyone to train, but also for everyone to spar, at the same time. This is really unique in comparison to some gyms/dojo’s.
Also, at the back of the room in this picture was a trampoline that allowed you to jump into a foam-filled pit. this ended up being really nice. My kids had a blast on friday night while I was sitting in on my first class.
Though you can’t tell form this picutre, the floor has great padding under it, and we were able to take some pretty good falls without gety hurt. I did end up with a few carpet burns, but I think that a long-sleeved under-armor style shirt and my Gi pants should primarily eliminate that.
Oviously I have not been attending for a long period, so I can’t tell you a lot about their training, but I will tell you what I know so far:
It was nice to see them doing training in striking, as well as in ground work. I have absolutely no Mauy Thai background, and not a ton of Karate, so the workout was not only very instructional in my technique, but it really got my heart pumping. This seems like a great place if you are looking to burn off a lot of calories. A fair amount of the workout seemed to include pushups and things like that. Some people like that type of training because it builds strength and cardio, others hate it and want to focus on technique. I won’t throw my bias in one way or the other, but just let you know what seems to be included, and then let you decide.
We also had some great sparring. We put headgear, and had to try to take down an opponent who had boxing gloves on and was pummelling us with strikes. Obviously being a big guy with a Judo background was nice in this exercise, but it was an amazing workout, a ton of fun, and really built good relationships between class members.
A lot more takedown and ground submission sparring and training followed.
The gym is very clean and new, the people friendly, and the skills of the teachers seemed to be very good (Bryce arm=barred me about a hundred times I think 
I still love my Judo class and will be sticking with it, but I intend to attend East West regularly as well to learn new skills. I was very impressed, and will be writing more about my experiences in the coming weeks and months.
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