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If you have previous experience in martial arts, please pay attention to this section.  Time for a few fair warnings:  if this is your first time switching martial arts schools, you will be in for an adjustment period.  Some things we do will be different from your old school, perhaps radically so.  Some people figure their first school did everything exactly right and cannot handle the change.  Others enjoy the difference in perspective.  You'll make that call for yourself when you get here.

As a general rule, our club is less formal than a lot of martial arts schools.  While we are not laid back to disrespectful extremes, we don't stand so much on ceremony.  People who come from more rigid schools sometimes find this jarring; nobody's telling them how to act!  It is our philosophy, however, that our students are adults and do not need to swear oaths and the like.  There are better paths to self discipline than the enforcement of unyielding tenets and regulations.

If you hold a black belt in another style, your belt will be recognized.  We do not expect you to conform to our way of doing things if you don't want to.  (If you want to spar with us it will be by our rules, however, no exceptions...more on that below.)  Visiting black belts are allowed to choose their level of participation with the club; some just want to do their own thing and get a workout in, others are interested in learning our forms and techniques and actually becoming club instructors. 

For WTF Tae Kwon Do stylists:  while the UGA Karate Club is a WTF member school, we do not train strictly under WTF / Olympic style rules.  Unless we're preparing for an Olympic rules tournament, our in-class sparring is continuous light to moderate contact, and hand techniques to the head are legal.  We practice trapping, leg checks, sweeps, and any number of other things that are blatantly illegal in WTF sparring.  If you are looking for an Olympic style school here in Athens, we suggest the following:  

Live Oak TKD:  Located at the Chase Street Park Warehouses on 160 Tracy Street.  Classes are taught from Mondays though Thursday.  Classes are presided over by Jason Hughes, an experienced instructor with impressive tournament credentials.  Visit the Live Oak webpage here, and send email to liveoakmartialarts@gmail.com.  Live Oak is affiliated with the AAU.