Your first karate class as an adult

The short version: wear tracksuit bottoms and a t-shirt, buy nothing, and expect an hour of repetition rather than fighting. The thing worth checking before you go is which style of karate the club teaches, because a Kyokushin club and a Shotokan club will give you very different first nights, and the timetable will say "Karate" either way.

That is the part almost nobody tells you, because almost everything written about starting karate is written by a dojo about its own classes. Karate is not one sport. It is a family of them that share a name, a uniform and a belt system, and the differences between them are larger than a beginner would ever guess from the outside. Booking the wrong one is the most common way to have a bad first night and decide karate is not for you.

Which karate have you actually booked

There are four or five styles you are likely to meet, and one distinction between them matters more than all the others on your first night: how hard they hit each other.

Kyokushin and its offshoots are full contact. Sparring is bare-knuckle to the body and legs, no punches to the head, and it is genuinely hard. People who love it love it for exactly that reason. People who wandered in expecting a traditional class do not come back.

Shotokan is the largest style in the world and the one most likely to be running in your local sports hall. Long stances, strong emphasis on kihon and kata, and sparring that is usually controlled and point-scored rather than a fight.

Goju-ryu, Wado-ryu and Shito-ryu sit between the two in various ways, with more close-range work, more evasion, or a bigger kata syllabus respectively. For a beginner the practical differences are subtler than the contact question.

You can settle this in one minute. The style is almost always named on the club's website or on the association badge in their photos. If it is not, the question to ask is not "what style are you" but "do beginners spar, and how hard?" That is the question whose answer actually changes your evening.

A club or a school, and why it matters

The other split is not about karate at all. It is about how the place is run.

A large share of karate happens at volunteer-run clubs training in leisure centres, church halls and school gyms two or three nights a week, often with an instructor who has a day job. The rest happens at commercial dojos with their own premises, daytime staff and a full timetable.

Neither is better and the coaching at a good club is frequently better than at a mediocre commercial school. But they behave differently and you should know which you are joining. The club will usually be cheaper, more informal and more social, and it will have fewer sessions, sometimes only two adult nights, occasionally in a hall shared with a badminton league. The commercial dojo will have more classes, better facilities and a proper beginners programme, and it will cost more and be more likely to ask you to sign something.

This is worth checking rather than assuming, because karate clubs run a median of nine classes a week, among the fewest of any art we counted when we looked at what gym timetables actually contain, and a good share of those nine will be the children's classes. Ask how many nights the adult class runs, not how many classes are on the timetable. If the answer is one, that is a once-a-week hobby whatever else the schedule says.

What actually happens in the hour

Most first sessions follow roughly the same shape, and the shape itself is the thing worth being ready for.

You will line up in grade order, with the highest belts on one side and you at the other end. There will be a formal opening: kneeling, a moment of stillness, a bow to the front of the room and to the instructor. Then the class proper, which is usually three things.

Kihon is basics, and it is most of your first night. You will move up and down the floor in a line doing the same block, the same punch, the same step, over and over, being corrected on the angle of your foot. Kata is a set sequence of movements performed solo, which you will find either fascinating or baffling for a good while. Kumite is sparring, and on a first night you will most likely watch it rather than do it.

Be ready for the repetition, because it is the honest answer to "what is karate like". You will do the same block forty times. That is not a warm-up for the sport, it is the sport, and whether you find that meditative or tedious is the single best predictor of whether you will still be there in a year. It is also why karate suits some people enormously and bores others who would love an hour of live grappling.

Three things surprise almost every adult on a first night and nobody warns them. You will be expected to shout. Karate uses a sharp shout on committed techniques, and a room of thirty people doing it in unison is startling the first time and self-conscious the first few times you join in. The class will count in Japanese, ichi, ni, san, and you are expected to count along, badly, from session one. And you will bow toward the front of the room, often at a photograph of the style's founder. That is a mark of respect for the lineage rather than anything religious, but it is worth knowing before you are asked to do it rather than in the moment.

You will also be corrected a lot, immediately and in front of people, on things you did not know were things. That is normal and it is not criticism. And you will be at the end of the line, which is the correct place for you to be and the fastest way to learn, because you can see what everyone else is doing.

The etiquette that catches people out

Karate is more formal than most martial arts and the formality starts at the door. None of it is difficult, but not knowing it is the thing that makes a first night uncomfortable.

Bow when you step onto the mat or into the dojo, and again when you leave. Take your shoes off before you reach the training area. Remove all jewellery, cut your nails, and tie long hair back. Do not walk between someone and the front of the room when they are bowing. Arrive early rather than on time, because walking in after the class has formally opened requires a small ritual of its own that nobody wants to perform on day one.

Address the instructor by title rather than name unless told otherwise. And be careful with osu, the all-purpose grunt of acknowledgement you will have heard in videos. It is standard in Kyokushin and in plenty of Japanese dojos, and it is considered incorrect or actively rude in many traditional Okinawan clubs. Do not import it. Listen to what the people around you say and copy that.

That is the general rule for the whole first night. Watch the person next to you and do what they do half a second later. Everyone in the room learned it exactly that way.

What to wear, and what not to buy yet

Tracksuit bottoms or leggings, a plain t-shirt, bare feet. That is it.

Do not buy a gi before your first class. Almost every club expects beginners in ordinary kit for the first few weeks, most have a preferred supplier or an association requirement, and a gi bought in advance is frequently the wrong weight or the wrong cut. Wait until you have been three times and then ask what to get.

There is one more thing worth knowing about the belts before you start, because it shapes the first year. Karate has a long ladder of coloured kyu grades below black belt, and clubs commonly test every three or four months, so a first grading often comes around three months in. That is a very different rhythm from jiu-jitsu, where a blue belt typically takes a couple of years and there is nothing formal in between. If you like visible progress you will find karate encouraging. It also means the fees recur.

When you do commit, there are three costs rather than one, and only the first is obvious. There is the class fee. There is a gi, which you buy once. And there is an annual licence through whichever national association the club belongs to, plus a fee each time you grade for the next belt. Gradings are the ones people do not see coming, because they arrive every few months and are quoted separately from everything else. Ask what a typical year costs including gradings, rather than what the monthly fee is. A club that answers that question straightforwardly is telling you something useful about itself.

Whether you are too old or too unfit

You are almost certainly neither, and the more useful version of that answer is what will actually hurt.

Karate is gentler on the body than the grappling arts, because you spend very little time bearing another person's weight, which is where much of the wear in jiu-jitsu and judo comes from. The soreness in your first month will be in your legs, from stances that ask your knees and hips to hold positions they have never held. Expect to walk downstairs carefully for a few days after the first session.

What the dojo websites tend not to say is that you will get hit anyway. Even in a style that spars lightly, blocking drills mean two forearms colliding at speed several dozen times a night, and bruised forearms are the standard first-month souvenir. It is not dangerous and it stops mattering once the bone toughens up, but nobody mentions it and everyone experiences it.

The real constraint is not age or fitness. It is time, and specifically evenings, which is the thing that actually decides whether beginners keep going. We wrote about what training around a full-time job really costs if you want the arithmetic before you commit.

What to ask before you sign anything

Five questions, and you can ask all of them in one message.

Which style do you teach, and do beginners spar. How many nights a week does the adult class run. Is there a beginners course, or do I join the main class. Can I try a session before joining. And what does a typical year cost, including gradings and licence.

Those five will tell you more than any amount of reading, and the manner of the answers will tell you almost as much as the answers. A club that is happy to say "two adult nights, we spar light, come Tuesday and see" is a club worth visiting. If you want to compare a few before you send anything, our directory lists karate clubs with their published timetables where they have one, so you can see which ones actually run on the nights you are free.