Nearly anywhere you go, culture plays a huge role in the experience you have – whether it’s a country, a city, a neighborhood or a school. This proves especially true when it comes to martial arts academies, where close contact already puts you on a fast track to connection and community.
In martial arts specifically, culture is more than just the art itself; it’s the environment, the values and the spirit that permeates every academy, gym and dojo around the world. No matter the discipline, from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to Muay Thai to Karate, culture serves as the invisible force that either nurtures or hinders a student’s journey.
When you step into a martial arts academy, you’re stepping into a living, breathing organism shaped by decades, sometimes centuries, of tradition, community and shared struggle.
This makes culture one of the most crucial elements in martial arts training. It’s the way respect is shown, the way teammates treat one another, the way excellence is pursued.
A strong culture not only improves the technical prowess of its students, but also shapes their character, resilience, and ability to work through adversity both on and off the mats. An academy’s culture can either make you fall in love with the sports or make you never want to come back.
At Easton, we prioritize building a culture rooted in excellence, stewardship, and camaraderie — values that align with the deeper traditions of martial arts across history while creating an environment for students today to thrive.
Key components of martial arts culture
First and foremost, a thriving martial arts culture starts with leaving your ego at the door. Growth on the mats isn’t about “winning” or “losing” — it’s about improving together. When we check our egos, we create space for honest self-assessment, better partnerships and a collective focus on progress rather than competition. Part of being a good partner is giving others a chance to learn.
Second, culture and community go hand in hand. The values we uphold — kindness, respect, discipline and stewardship — aren’t abstract ideas; they’re embodied in the way we treat each other. A welcoming environment can be the deciding factor for newcomers, and a strong, inclusive community becomes a living representation of the academy’s values wherever its members go.
Training also teaches us to navigate boundaries and advocate for ourselves — communicating needs, setting pace with partners, and ensuring a safe space for all. Martial arts can be intense and demanding, and the close contact can be a challenge or some. Communication strengthens trust and fosters deeper connections.
It’s important to know your limits and feel empowered to speak out when you’re feeling uncomfortable. This holds true for everything from setting the pace by telling your training partners about an injury to tapping when you need to and expressing if something makes you feel uncomfortable.
Shared struggle makes up another core piece. While leadership often sets certain aspects of a culture – the tone, the stage, the expectations – other things get set by those who fill the room. One of the biggest factors being that we’re often defined by what we’re willing to struggle for.
Everyone on the mats chooses to endure challenges in pursuit of excellence, forging bonds that often turn into lifelong friendships and even partnerships beyond the academy. There’s a sense of camaraderie in struggling together for something and a shared joy in accomplishment.
Finally, culture never stays contained within the academy walls. Whether traveling to train elsewhere or competing at tournaments, we carry our values with us. Every interaction is a chance to represent our home and elevate the larger martial arts community.
While it may feel easier to assimilate to the home school’s culture when you’re visiting, it’s also an opportunity to step it up and create a good example just by being an awesome visitor and training partner.
In this way, the culture created on our mats not only improves the temperature in our rooms here, but anywhere our students take it, making a better name for the martial arts community as a whole.
In the end, martial arts is more than technique — it’s about the community we create through humility, communication, respect and shared effort.
Easton’s approach to culture
At Easton, to guide our community and instill the sort of culture we want to nurture, we have these core values in place which act as our guides:
Excellence: Excellence means we will never stop learning and growing in our pursuit of obtaining the highest level, battle-tested Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai we can.
Trust: In the world of combat sports, we voluntarily put ourselves in precarious situations everyday. Working in such close proximity to others cannot take place without an element of trust, and we need to be able to trust that our coaches, students and partners have our best interests at heart.
Compassion: We want everybody, regardless of their path, gender, age or race, to feel comfortable in our academies. We want people to feel seen, and to feel like humans when they walk through our doors and for that grace to extend onto the mats as well.
Stewardship: We empower others. This means nobody comes up without bringing others up with them. At Easton, this can mean higher belts working with lower belts taking care of the new kid in class.
Adaptability: We allow ourselves to redirect to hit our goals. Adaptability is essential in martial arts as the circumstances are constantly changing. If you can’t adapt to a partner or opponent’s game, you will struggle.
In 2017, consultant Larry Dressler came on board to help us get clear on what we wanted out of a culture and help us develop systems to lay the groundwork for the sort of environment we wanted to create. He helped us understand that to have a really cohesive, unified culture throughout all of our schools (we have eight!) we first need to get extremely clear on our vision:
To build the greatest Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu academies through an unrelenting dedication to the students and staff.
With this as our North Star, we could grow intentionally from the inside out and set a real example for our students to follow. The result became a mixture of killer martial artists with kind, studious attitudes who welcome beginners and take care of their training partners.
If Easton is the only martial arts school you’ve ever known, this may seem inherent. Yet we’ve heard it from numerous people who have come from other academies – what we have is rare.
We prioritize safety over ego and technique over brute force. We want our students to crush their goals and win fights, but we also want them to behave as solid ambassadors of our community and our school. The more honor and dignity you bring to the room, the more memorable an opponent you’ll be, regardless of the outcome. This is the sort of culture that we bake into our community and aim to spread throughout Colorado and beyond.
