What I hear is someone who thinks martial art is some sort of social club and wants to only associate with people his age. Martial art is not a social gathering. You study martial art to improve yourself for yourself and that means the best qualified teacher should be the only consideration.
So... how many of these classes have you actually gone and experienced?
Excuse me for saying but it doesn't rub off on me that you've actually checked these places out.
What I would do is just check around the place for a class that I enjoy and stick with it.
You don't have much else you CAN do to be honest.
Also, just because a discipline is considered a sport doesn't mean that it's not useful as a martial art. Boxing for one is a sport, but would you take a boxer's punches? Wrestling, too; wrestling is a sport, but being slammed hurts well enough.
Traditional martial artists piss me off when they go on about how something being a sport means it's useless for self defense. Wrestlers and boxers frequently roll/spar at full intensity and this is the best way to train combat in my opinion.
"Someone with only a year of training in boxing and wrestling could easily defeat a martial artist of twenty years experience." --Bruce Lee
Guernsey looks like a very beautiful place to live though, lucky you.
As for Martial Arts, I'd probably go for the BJJ Class if I were you, since you said it was good, so what if the rest of the students are older? If anything you are lucky to be able to start at a young age.
I've been passionate about Martial Arts for the last few months, I haven't started taking any yet, but I'm going to soon. For most people, it's a case of "What martial art should I take? So many choices!".
Living on Guernsey, a tiny island, it's basically horriffic.
There's One Shotokan Karate Class and One boxing Class, both run by some Goverment thing made to train sports starts. I don't want to do martial arts to get good at sport, I want to do it for general strength, practicality and the mental discipline.
Then there's one really good BJJ class, shame everyone who goes there is over 30 (I'm 15), one shotokan karate, which isn't very good and an Aikido class that has about 4 55 year old men.
I would be happy to do anything like Muay Thai, or any martial art at all really that had people my age doing it and was an actually martial art, not a sport. Seriously, when did Karate become a sport... Kumite's, regardless what others say, is a terrible form of competitive sport. It's a similair system to boxing (If it was more similair to boxing it would be better), but much worse,
So my only option is to take private classes, which are going to cost an absolute ton...
Wasn't really a question, just asking what you would do and how much you would say private martial arts classes normally cost.
