A man in his late thirties has watched the timetable page four times this month. He was reasonably athletic once, has not trained in a decade, and has decided he will start once he has lost some weight.
He will not. He will still be intending to start in two years, and the school will never know he existed.
Myth: you need a base level of fitness
Reality is that fitness is what training produces rather than what it requires, and almost every school would rather have a beginner who turns up than one who waits.
Myth: everybody in the class is in their twenties
Reality is that adult classes in most schools span decades, and a website showing only a competition squad has answered this question wrongly without meaning to.
Myth: you will spar in the first session
Reality is that beginners spend weeks on basics, and the fear of walking in and being hit is almost entirely unfounded and almost never addressed.
Myth: everybody else will know what they are doing
Reality is that adult beginners arrive continuously, and saying how many started in the last three months is more reassuring than any amount of welcome language.
Myth: you need to commit to a contract
Reality is that most schools offer a trial, and burying it behind a membership page loses the people who would have come once and stayed for years.
Myth: previous injuries rule you out
Reality is that training adapts around most things, and a school that asks about injuries and modifies accordingly is stating a competence rather than a limitation.
Myth: you must be coordinated
Reality is that nobody is at the start, and the honest version, that everybody looks awkward for several months, is far more encouraging than claiming it comes naturally.
Myth: it is only useful if you compete
Reality is that most adults train for fitness, stress and the pleasure of learning something difficult, and schools that only talk about competition exclude them.
Myth: the equipment must be bought first
Reality is that beginners usually need nothing for the first weeks, and saying so removes a cost barrier that exists only in somebody's imagination.
Myth: the class will be full of very serious people
Reality is that the atmosphere is the strongest selling point most schools have and the one they least often describe.
Myth: adults and juniors are the same enquiry
Reality is that they are entirely different, and a school whose website speaks only to parents loses every adult reading it, which is the flip side of contact and sparring questions parents worry about.
Myth: they will ring and ask
Reality is that they will not, because the questions are embarrassing to say out loud, which is the pattern also seen in adult beginner classes and the fear of starting late.
Myth: the trial class handles all of this
Reality is that a trial only helps somebody who books one, and the assumptions above are what prevent the booking, as covered in trial class enquiries for martial arts schools.
Myth: this needs a person on the end of a line
Reality is that the enquiry arrives at eleven at night and needs an answer then, which is the comparison drawn in website receptionist versus phone receptionist. An assistant that addresses the fitness fear directly, says who is actually in the class and takes his request for a trial class reaches the man who has read your timetable four times.
What naming the fear produces
Enrolments from people who were waiting to be fit enough to start getting fit. See features, start at try, and the sector view sits under fitness.