Freestyle Wrestling, all levels
Coached by someone who actually wrestled
Plenty of jiu jitsu gyms list wrestling on a timetable. Far fewer have someone qualified to teach it. This is the single strongest thing this club has, and it is worth being specific about why rather than asking you to take it on trust.
Twenty seven years coaching wrestling. Not a takedown session bolted onto a jiu jitsu class.
The reason this class exists
UK national champion. Great Britain international. Coaching since 1998.
Plenty of jiu jitsu gyms list wrestling on a timetable. Far fewer have someone who competed at that level to teach it. This class runs on that record, not on a photograph.
When it runs
- Wednesday18:30 to 20:00Freestyle Wrestling and No Gi
- Saturday09:00 to 10:30Freestyle WrestlingAll levels
Times come straight from the club timetable, so this page cannot drift out of date on its own.
See the full timetableWhat a wrestling session actually looks like
Ninety minutes on Saturday morning at all levels, plus a midweek session shared with No Gi. It is a wrestling class, taught as wrestling.
Stance, motion and hand fighting
The unglamorous foundation, taught properly, because everything else fails without it. This is usually the first thing missing when somebody has picked up takedowns informally at a jiu jitsu gym.
Takedowns, drilled to a standard
Entries, finishes and the detail in between, broken down and repeated. Wrestling is a technical sport with a coaching tradition behind it, and it is taught here the way it is taught in a wrestling room.
Scrambles and getting back up
What happens when the first attempt fails, which is most of the time. Chain wrestling, reversals, and getting off the floor. For a jiu jitsu player this is often the most immediately useful part.
The conditioning is a by-product
Nobody runs a separate fitness class here. Wrestling builds the engine on its own, and it builds a specific kind of durability that carries into every other session on the timetable.
Who this is for
- Grapplers whose standing game is the weakest part of their game, which is most of them
- Parents of a competitive kid who needs proper wrestling coaching, not an approximation
- MMA hobbyists who have worked out that the fight starts standing up
- Complete beginners, since this session runs at all levels
The credentials, in full
Is this a token class?
No, and the way to settle it is to look at who is running it.
Adam Toole started freestyle wrestling at eight years old in Manchester. He became a UK national champion and represented Great Britain internationally on numerous occasions. He has been coaching wrestling since 1998, which is twenty seven years of coaching the sport specifically, quite separately from his jiu jitsu.
That combination is rare. There are not many jiu jitsu gyms in Perth with a former Great Britain wrestler taking the wrestling, and the difference between being taught takedowns by someone who competed in the sport and being taught them by someone who picked them up along the way is obvious within about ten minutes of a session.
For a parent of a competitive child, that is the part worth weighing. Coaching quality at that age either builds good habits or bakes in bad ones, and bad ones are much harder to remove later.
What to bring on the day
Shorts and a t-shirt
Or a rash guard if you have one. No singlet required to train.
A water bottle
Wrestling is the hardest session on the timetable for conditioning. Bring plenty.
Short nails, bare feet
Same as every session here. Cut them before you arrive.
Any level
Saturday runs at all levels and beginners are expected, not tolerated.
Come and get taken down
The quickest way to judge coaching is to be coached by it. Your first couple of classes are free, all levels train together on Saturday, and there is nothing to sign.