How to Shop for a Good Karate Club

Most people choose a karate club by proximity and a website. Both are poor instruments. The good news is that a single visit, spent watching rather than training, answers nearly everything.

Watch for correction, by name

This is the single most informative thing in the room.

A good instructor stops the class, or walks the floor, and corrects specific people about specific errors: your rear heel, your elbow, you are arriving before your hip. It happens constantly and it is unmistakable.

A weak class looks busy and impersonal. Everybody performs, the count continues, the instructor demonstrates from the front, and no individual is ever addressed. Students leave fitter and doing the same thing wrong they did last year.

Watch the seniors

Line the black belts up in your head and ask whether they look like different people.

In a club where progression is real, senior students have visibly different timing, different preferences, different ways of moving that suit their bodies. In a club that only ever teaches to a grading standard, everybody performs an identical copy, and the copy gets no better after shodan.

Ask three questions

They are dull, they are polite, and the answers are worth more than any demonstration.

Who awarded the chief instructor their grade, and does that organization still exist? Does anybody ever fail a grading here? And what is the total annual cost, including grading fees, license renewals, association membership and anything compulsory?

Nobody reasonable minds these. Watch how they are received rather than only what is said, because a club that treats a question about money as impertinent has told you what happens the next time you ask anything.

The signs that are not signs

A small club is not a bad club. Individual attention scales inversely with class size, and some of the best instruction happens in church halls with eleven students.

A shabby venue is not a bad club either. Rent is rent.

A very slick operation is not automatically a bad club, but it is the case that a school with a large front-of-house and a sales process is optimizing something, and it is worth establishing what.

And the obvious one

Try to watch a class where nobody is expecting a visitor. It is remarkable how often the trial lesson is a better class than the ordinary Tuesday, and the ordinary Tuesday is the one you would be buying.

What a trial class cannot tell you, and how to cover it

A single visit is a small sample, and it is biased in a predictable direction: the class you watch is the class the school is happy to be watched during.

Two things are worth doing about that. Go twice, on different days of the week, because a Tuesday adults’ session and a Saturday family session can be run by different people to different standards under one roof. And ask to watch a grading, or at least ask when the next one is and whether visitors can attend. A school that gets its assessment right is usually pleased to be watched doing it; one that hesitates has told you something without meaning to.

There is a third question that costs nothing and cuts deep, which is what happened to the students who left. Every club loses people, and a healthy answer is specific and unbothered — someone moved, someone had a baby, someone went to university. An answer about commitment and modern attitudes is a school explaining in advance why it will be your fault.

None of this needs you to know anything about karate, which is the point. You are assessing a small business that teaches children and adults, and the ordinary questions work.