Wow…
The first thing i want to say is it depends on the kind of student you are as to what suits you best. Now that’s out of the way…
Our training takes a completely different approach altogether to most people’s here. And i mean completely different. But it is non-traditional…
Being directly attached to the university though, also means our class only contains adults.
In short, after you’ve paid money, we do whatever we really want. You don’t want to turn up, don’t turn up. You don’t want to spar, don’t spar. You want to spend the entire time working on drills, fine. Everyone does what they want to do, at whatever level of intesity they want.
Basically in training, we only do that which you couldn’t do by yourself. So that means we don’t do fitness stuff, you don’t have to do pushups, or sit ups, or anything like that (of course some choose to anyway) because its up to you to do that stuff during your own time outside of class, either at home, or in a gym or whatever. In a class, we’ll start with some kicking against shield thingies, then move on to our different punching drills against targets (kicks are sometimes thrown in in varying ammounts), then after that move onto grappling/chin na/special drill type things, and finish off with either sparring, wrestling, or continuing on what we were doing earlier. During each section, how hard you go is up to you, and the teacher will come around, tell you what your doing wrong, or if you’re doing it right, demonstrate different points and applications and such and be open for absolutely any questions we have to ask. If you want to punch with huge gloves on, you can, but if you want to go barefist to try and simulate reality(which usually results in bloodied knuckles in begginers when they try to do it despite being warned against it) then you can. If you want to resist in the grappling techniques, go for it, since it helps with the realism, but if your partner asks you not to, have the courtesy to do so.
We don’t have belts or rankings. I mean sure we’ve got begginers, and senior students and the teacher, but their really non-set definitions, since everyone works to help everyone else, sort of like one big happy family. If someone asks for help in a certain area, they always get it, and if someone wants to train a specific point or technique different to that which is being shown, they can.
We don’t have any punishments (hell the bruises on the fore arms from blocking is often punishment enough).
We can curse if we want and talk perfectly normally.
We even pay each other out and occasionally make fun of each other when something stupid or funny happens, just like friends do.
In the end, you get out of it exactly what you want to. Everyone helps everyone else, senior students help begginers, begginers help seniors, sparing/grappling goes however hard or fast you want it to, and our teacher is always there to offer hints and tips about what is most likely to work, what happens when people resist or are too strong, etc.
The only real “traditional” part we have is the bowing at the end of class. But that’s it.
Everyone there is mature and adult enough, and it works out absolutely perfectly. No disputes within our class, and everyone enjoys coming. And we all learn something. And in the warm-down part at the end of class, its like a small gossip session where we seem to talk about whatevers going on in the world or any topics on anyones mind, all of course while people are stretching and such so they aren’t as sore the next day.
I’m not big on discipline. Someone else said it makes the people that don’t want to be there leave faster, while i generally find the opposite to be true. In our club, its ONLY the people who want to be there who turn up, and its great.
For someone like me and for most other people in the class, it works out magnificently 
