SW Portland Martial Arts Blog

CPR and Safety Classes for Kids and Teens

June 12th, 2026

Safe Sitter, Sitter CPR, Safe at Home Trainings with Safety Side Up

We’re thrilled to host again this summer with LaToya Hampton of Safety Side Up, CPR and Baby Sitter Training for Kids & Teens at our location.The three classes offered are Safe Sitter, CPR for Babysitters, and Safe at Home.

Here is the description of the classes taken from their website:
Safety Side Up offers a variety of classes that address youth safety, including the always popular Babysitter Training, as well as CPR/First Aid for Babysitters and At Home Alone safety. These classes not only provide youth with safety information to assist in accident prevention and emergency preparedness, they also equip them with general life skills they will be able to use beyond the theme and duration of the course and into and across other life experiences well into their teens and adulthood.

Classes will be offered the weekend of June 27th and 28th as well as the weekend of August 8th and 9th.

Be sure to register at the Safety Side Up website. If you can’t make the dates at our location, LaToya has tons of options on her website.

Posted in Kids | 0 Comments

Community

June 5th, 2026

Everyone says that one of the best parts of joining a good gym is the community. Read enough reviews of enough gyms and you’ll come to see that it is, in fact, the most repeated cliche.
Is there any truth behind it? How does gym create community and what are the benefits of being part of a community?
The truth of community building is obvious. As a coach, I hear the students having conversations about their lives outside of class. I see them becoming friends, hear about them hanging out and going to coffee, plays, musicals, and drinks. It’s real.
How does it happen? Shared hard work creates bonds. Exercise releases endorphins. If you put people together in a group and make them do challenging things, they tend to grow fond of each other.
The benefits of community are well documented in research and quite visible anecdotally. Individuals gain a sense of belonging. When things get tough, people have a network of friends to share their difficulties and help solve their problems.
So yeah, join the gym to get more awesome at martial arts and movement, but also join the gym because having a community also makes you more awesome.

Posted in All school programs | 0 Comments

Summertime

May 25th, 2026

Summer is coming! Sing, cukoo, sing. The meadow is blooming, the woods are throwing out all the leaves, and it’s time to train at Southwest Portland Martial Arts.
Pretty sure that’s how that poem goes.
Anyway, terrible paraphrases aside, we’re running an amazing special. Pay us $100 and you can train from now until August 31st. You get 100% of our classes – yoga, martial arts, and CrossFit.
What’s the catch? No catch, but the offer is limited to new students only, and only to folks 13 years old and older. Sorry, no kids for this special (check back in when the next school year starts.) Go here to sign up.

Posted in CrossFit, Martial Arts, Yoga | Comments Off on Summertime

Bow and Arrow Choke

May 24th, 2026

There are so many ways to choke out someone in BJJ, it’s probably impossible to know them all but there are also a core group of chokes that most folks should know. The bow and arrow choke for the Gi, in my opinion, is one of those that you should probably learn.
Why? Because it isn’t a dead end. You can use it after failing other chokes, and there are chokes that come off of it if it fails.
A dead end move is what it sounds like: you try it, and if it doesn’t work, you have to settle back into whatever position you tried it from. There should be a name for moves that lead to other moves… a connector? A lego? A progression? Whatever we call it, submissions that lead to other submissions, or to improvements in position, are generally more useful than those that don’t.

Posted in grappling | Comments Off on Bow and Arrow Choke

Row

May 17th, 2026

Since the rower is just a machine, there’s no technique to it, right?
Wrong. We’re going to spend the next 10 weeks working on rowing technique. That doesn’t mean we’ll do it everyday, but there will be rowing in at least one workout a week and we’ll try to use it as a warmup and talk about technique at least two times a week.
For today, we talked about the speed of the pull versus the speed of the return. As a general rule, you should pull the handle about twice as fast as you let it return. Why? Because then you can put more power into each stroke. If you don’t let the rower spin down, you can’t make it go faster.
Try it. I was shocked to see I was keeping a faster pace and getting a longer rest between pulls.

Posted in CrossFit | Comments Off on Row

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