My advice is though, if you are not comfortable in that school and were not comfortable with the instructors but can't quite put your finger on it, still go with your gut feeling and move on. I learned that more often than not my gut feeling is right. The why is really unimportant. It's not like you could change the situation.
Were the schools owned by the same people? Or from the same lineage?
It sounds like they were probably the same style of martial art. So I suspect there was a relation as to why they looked alike.
As for material. I can't speak for other styles but can tell you that in Uechi Ryu that a typical class will follow a routine that we all do. That's a lineup, warmups, basic exercises, Sanchin, then breaking into groups or other instructor specific activities often by rank, etc. So the material is all familiar to a student no matter the dojo they go to.
So i have been doing martial arts now for about 3 years and before this i have done boxing. I ran into two schools that looked the same. The only difference was price and how well the instructers were. I first went to oom yung doe, then later i found out that their school was a con. As time passed i switched to body mind systems. They had the same lesssons THE SAME LAY OUT OF THE PLACE. (How it looks like and how they priced it) the only thing that was different were the instructers. They were better and they were nicer but they came off to strong. They tought the same thing had the same everything accept the instructers. Why is this ? I have heard of mcdojos but there has to be some law that says a school can not copy lessons from another school? Otherwise everyone would just copy everyone and anyone could be an instructer. How do i determain rather or not its a good school?
