Your first BJJ class, and which one to book

The short version: book a fundamentals or beginners class rather than an open mat, and ask the gym to lend you a gi, because most people start in the gi and most gyms keep spares for exactly this. You will almost certainly roll at the end of the session, which is normal and is nothing to worry about, and you will be out of breath much faster than you expect for reasons that have nothing to do with being unfit.

The thing worth knowing before you walk in is how close the sport is. Within about ten minutes of your first class you will be lying on a mat with your body pressed against someone you met twenty minutes ago, with their weight on your ribs, both of you working quite hard. Nobody in the room finds this remarkable. It is a grappling art and that is simply what the training looks like, but it is the single biggest surprise for adults arriving from a gym or a running club, and it is much easier if you have pictured it in advance rather than discovering it on the floor. It also stops being a thought you have at all, usually inside one session.

Which class have you actually booked

Jiu-jitsu timetables use a handful of words that mean very different things, and most gyms assume you already know them.

Fundamentals, sometimes called basics, beginners or intro, is a taught class built around a small syllabus, usually with drilling and limited live rounds. This is the one you want. All levels is the main class, taught, with everyone from white belts to black belts in it, and it is perfectly fine as a first session if there is no fundamentals option. Open mat is not a class at all. It is unsupervised sparring where people turn up and roll, and while it is one of the best things about the sport later on, it is the wrong first session because nobody is teaching.

Here is the practical problem. Around half of jiu-jitsu gyms do not have anything on their timetable labelled as a beginners class, based on the 1,010 gyms with published schedules in our directory, which we looked at in more detail in what gym timetables actually contain. That does not mean those gyms are bad for beginners. Plenty teach beginners superbly inside an all-levels class. It does mean the timetable will not answer the question for you, so ask it directly: which class should I come to first?

Almost every gym will answer that in one line and will be pleased you asked.

What to wear and what to bring

Most academies teach their fundamentals syllabus in the gi, so that is what you will most likely be training in. You do not need to own one. Almost every gym keeps a few loaner gis for exactly this situation, and asking to borrow one is a completely normal request that people make every week. Underneath it, a plain t-shirt or a rashguard.

Buy your own once you know you are staying. It is a real purchase, and plenty of academies have a required brand, colour or patch, so buying in advance is how people end up with a gi they cannot train in.

Some gyms run no-gi as the main class, and a few teach no-gi only. For those, wear athletic shorts with no pockets and no zips, and a rashguard or t-shirt. The pockets and zips matter more than they sound: fingers and toes catch in pockets and get sprained, and metal zips tear mats and cut people, so most gyms will turn you away in ordinary gym shorts.

Bring flip-flops or sliders, a water bottle, and a towel if you want one. And cut your nails, fingers and toes, before you leave the house. That one is not a preference.

What actually happens in the hour

Most sessions follow the same shape and it is a comfortable one once you know it.

There is a warm-up, usually some running, shrimping and bridging, which will feel strange because these are movements from lying down that no other sport uses. Then the instructor demonstrates a technique, breaks it into steps, and you drill it with a partner, taking turns, slowly. Your partner is not resisting, and this cooperative part is most of the class.

Then the class rolls. Live rounds are usually five minutes with a change of partner between them, and beginners take part from the first night. This is the part people are nervous about beforehand and it is almost always the part they enjoy most. You will be put with someone experienced who will go light, let you work, and spend most of the round making sure you are alright. If you need to sit one out, say so and nobody will think anything of it.

Tell whoever is running the class that it is your first session as soon as you arrive. This is the single most useful thing you can do. You will be paired with someone experienced and calm rather than another beginner, the instructor will check on you, and the whole evening gets easier.

You will also be partnered with people much better than you, which is the normal way the room works and not a hazing. A good training partner at any belt spends a first roll making sure you are alright.

Tapping is how the sport works

The one thing to understand before you start is the tap.

When something hurts, or you are stuck, or you simply want to stop, you tap your partner firmly two or three times with your hand, or tap the mat, or just say "tap" out loud if your arms are pinned. They stop immediately. That is it. That is the entire safety mechanism of the sport and it is completely reliable.

Tap early and tap often. Nobody is counting, nobody thinks less of you, and everyone in the room taps constantly, including the black belts, because tapping is how you learn where the edges are. The people who get hurt are usually the ones who hold out from pride, which is worth knowing on day one rather than in month six.

The tap is also the reason jiu-jitsu does something almost no other martial art can. Because there is a reliable way to stop, you can train at full resistance against someone genuinely trying to beat you, several times a week, from early on. You are not taking it on faith that a technique works. You find out on Tuesday. That is what turns most people from someone trying a class into someone who trains, and it usually happens the first time something you learned an hour earlier works on a person who is actively trying to stop it.

The hygiene rules that are not optional

Jiu-jitsu is a skin-contact sport on a shared mat, so the etiquette here is stricter than in most martial arts and it is taken seriously.

Nails short. A clean gi or rashguard every session, not yesterday's from the bottom of a bag. Shower afterwards. Wear flip-flops any time you walk off the mat, especially to the toilet, and never walk back on barefoot from outside, which is the main way anything unpleasant reaches a mat in the first place. Cover any cut before you train.

If you have a skin condition, a rash you cannot explain, or an open wound, sit out and get it looked at rather than training through it. Everyone in the room will thank you for it, and it is the one piece of etiquette that every gym takes seriously, for obvious reasons.

Why you will be out of breath

You will gas out in about two minutes on your first live round and conclude you are unfit. That is almost never what is happening.

Beginners grip with everything, brace rigidly against pressure, and hold their breath whenever someone is on top of them. The result is that your forearms burn out, your air goes, and you feel wrecked while the relaxed purple belt you are rolling with is breathing normally. Fit people from other sports find this particularly annoying, because their cardio is not the problem.

It improves quickly, usually noticeably within a few weeks, as you learn to hold less tightly and keep breathing under load. It is a skill rather than a fitness level. Knowing that in advance saves a lot of people from deciding after one session that they are too out of shape for this, which they are not.

What to ask before you go

Four questions, and one message covers them.

Which class should I come to as a complete beginner. Is it gi or no-gi, and can I borrow a gi for my first few sessions. Can I come and try a session. And how many beginner-friendly classes are there in a week.

That last one matters more than it looks. Jiu-jitsu gyms run more sessions than almost any other martial art, at a median of 18 a week, but if only one of those is a fundamentals class then your real timetable is one night, not eighteen. That is the arithmetic that decides whether people are still training six months later, which we went into in why white belts quit, and the same evening maths applies to training around a full-time job.

If you want to compare a few gyms before you send anything, our directory lists jiu-jitsu gyms with their published timetables where they have one, so you can see which ones run beginner classes on the nights you are free.