Keeping Your Classes Interesting

By MAIA Division Manager Melissa Torres

Not quite sure what you’re going to teach tonight? Tomorrow night? Next week? I don’t blame you. Teaching as much as you and your other instructors do, plus running a full-time school, training, and trying to balance a home life, can leave you mentally drained and lacking in the creative area.

Are you afraid your students are getting bored or losing interest in the day-to-day drills and techniques? Retention is a huge pain point for so many schools. We hear it all the time. Schools can get students in the door, but the main struggle is keeping them for a week, a month, a year and many years beyond that.

It’s time to break out of some of your routine teaching habits and make keeping your classes fun and interesting a top priority. If students are having fun, they will come back. If they are learning new techniques and see themselves improving, they will come back.

Bring back that first-day excitement to your mat, every day. I want to introduce you to maDrills.com. You may have heard of it before; it’s not a recent addition. This service was developed to combat the issues I addressed above.

This platform contains hundreds of drills, with more added constantly, to help give you the creativity and ideas you are craving. If you have a to-do list a mile long and have even more things to worry about, then let us help lift that burden. Allow yourself to get help.

This digital library of drills and techniques exists to inspire instructors to teach great classes and keep their mats “fresh.” As an instructor, you probably know some variant of many of the drills or techniques, but this is there as a quick-access resource for you to be able to see how the “pros” do it.

We have experts like Harinder Singh, Melody Johnson, Apolo Ladra, Dave Kovar, Mike Swain, Mike Chat, Chris Rappold, members of Team Paul Mitchell, Ricardo Liborio and many more.

As you can see, it includes a variety of disciplines. When you want to just get ideas for a warm-up, you search for “warm-ups” and get results! Or, specify a discipline in the search box like “BJJ” or “Taekwondo” and check out the results!

I know I mentioned that this is not a new service, but there are a couple of things that are new about it. First of all, the price is lowered! So if you have checked it out in the past and didn’t want to make the commitment, it is now half the cost. Second, there is now an app for iPhone and Android so all these drills are right at your fingertips!

We have made it as simple as possible to keep your students excited about coming to class week after week. You can also try it for free! If you still have reservations, visit maDrills.com and sign up for the seven-day trial.

If it’s not for you, then just cancel. But at least check out all the drills and instructors that the platform has to offer. I believe you will bring back that fun and excitement to your students. Happy browsing!

Melissa Torres can be reached at [email protected].