Onboarding

Every new student arrives with a different history, a different body, and a different reason for being on the mat.

The job in those first few sessions is not to introduce them to the class, it's to begin understanding them as an individual.

Think of it less as a trial and more as a foundations assessment. The group setting doesn't change that. What changes is where your attention goes.

Before anything else, have the conversation. Goals, injury history, stress levels, previous training; there's no shortcut for any of it, and no assessment replaces it.

From there, a simple physical picture starts to form quickly. Basic hip mobility tells you a lot. A few postural control checks with them in standing, half-kneeling, and tall-kneeling, tell you more. Add a base retention drill, and something that gives them a taste of controlled positional pressure, and you now have a 30,000 ft view of

where they are physically and mentally. Specifically, you're looking for body awareness, panic response, and composure under mild stress. Those three things open the door to everything else.

With that information, you should have a few things ready to give them depending on what you saw:

Something survival-oriented, where they need to find space, and breathe. Something they can escape with that doesn't require technical depth or memorising a sequence of steps. And one idea for how to begin controlling a position.

That's the whole picture for now.

If they moved well and handled the pressure, let them feel it with a little resistance. The goal is for them to leave having genuinely experienced something; not overwhelmed, and never lost, but with the clear sense that they did a thing. That feeling is the foundation everything else gets built on.