This week, Freeport Martial Arts was featured on FREEPOD and TimBeck2 to discuss our new location.
Transcript
TIM CONNORS: As a school teacher of over 33 years, I always love the friendships that I have with former students. I love chatting with them online, talking to them, but it makes me feel even more special when those students come back home and start businesses on their own and really become successes and stones, rocks in the community. And that’s someone that I’m speaking with today.
I am with John Garvens, who is owner, Grand Poobah, whatever you want to say of Freeport Martial Arts with a brand new, beautiful location that we’ll talk about in a little bit. John, thank you so much for being here.
JOHN GARVENS: Thanks for having me. Tim.
TIM CONNORS: So John, I guess the first question is, when you were my student many, many years ago and did many things, were you involved with martial arts then?
JOHN GARVENS: I wanted to be.
TIM CONNORS: Okay. So why are you involved with martial arts now?
JOHN GARVENS: So from the time I was a little kid, Ninja Turtles were all the rage, and later on, it was the Power Rangers who were not as good as the Ninja Turtles. But that notwithstanding, I always wanted to be involved in the martial arts. I’d watch documentaries about it. I’d read about it in the encyclopedia.
The challenge was, at the time, cash was tight, and my family couldn’t afford it, so it just never happened. Later on, I joined the Army Reserve. I spent 12 years in the Army Reserve as a trombone player. During basic training, and then later on, I was able to do some introductory combatives classes, which then sparked an interest in jiu-jitsu, which is a martial art that I started studying actively in 2011.
I had a few pennies to rub together and a whole bunch of time, so I had dedicated a substantial amount of my 20s to training outside of career stuff, thinking that at one point, part of my career was managing the gym that I had started training at. And at the time, I thought, “Man, wouldn’t it be cool if one day I would own my own place?”
I thought the same thing when I got into consulting, as well, and now I have that as a second business, too. But I started training and eventually trained at a few different spots in Chicago; I took a job at Madison, and I trained up there. And then, when the pandemic happened and cities were going wild, I thought, “Let’s go where things are a little calmer and not quite as exciting.” And that brought me back home. Plus, I wanted to spend more time with family, and I was here from mid-summer of 2020, when I moved back, to now.
After about a year of being back, the idea of I want something to do, things are getting a little more safe. I want to train, but there’s no place to train jiu-jitsu in town. What do I do?
But I sat on that idea for a while, but over the next year, I let this idea of ferment and grow and mature in my mind. I thought through all these different angles. I started doing a lot of research, and eventually, after a year, one of my mentors kind of pushed me off the ledge and said, “You know, you’ve been talking about this for a year. Go ahead and give it a shot.”
And so, in October of 2022, Freeport Martial Arts opened its doors in the Rawleigh building. We rented a small office space, about 10 by 15 feet. There, you barely get a couple of people sparring at the same time. A few months later, we moved upstairs to the third floor to a much bigger space and were there for the next two years.
And then, in December of 2024, we made the decision to move to this new location, which, as you mentioned, is beautiful. We’ve spent the last month working diligently to make this space our own.
TIM CONNORS: It’s beautiful. It’s on Main Street. It’s across the street from the Greater Freeport Partnership near Mahoney & Mahoney and the [Hampton Inn] hotel. It’s just this beautiful brick building with so much character and so much personality, and even as a watchdog, Summer, who’s sitting looking out the bay window at all the traffic going by. So it just has everything.
So you have some really big festivities that are coming up next week. What’s going on?
JOHN GARVENS: So now that we have moved into the space, we’ve made it our own.
We’ve got new mats in as well. We have 1300 square feet, over 1300 square feet of mat space, plus another 2000 square feet in the basement that will be updating next year.
Next week, starting February 3, my 40th birthday, is our grand reopening. So on Monday, we’ve got my birthday Shark Tank. Our tradition here is that when it’s your birthday, you take that many years and convert them to minutes, and then, one person after another, every minute on the minute, you’re going to spar with them. So 40 straight minutes of sparring.
The next night–I’m very excited for this–we’re starting a women’s only self-defense class that focuses on domestic violence and sexual assault scenarios to help women learn how to defend themselves in those worst-case scenarios. We also invite them to bring their children as well as well as boys up to 12 years of age, if they want to be part of that training as well.
On Wednesday, we’ve got our ribbon cutting with the Greater Freeport Partnership.
On Thursday, we’ve got a Bring-A-Friend day when everybody can bring somebody they know and help us celebrate.
Friday is going to be our standard jiu-jitsu game night, followed by a Wii Boxing Tournament, which should be a lot of fun. We’ll have Wii boxing on a projector, and we’ll all put a tournament together. And then on Saturday, at 1:00 PM, we’ve got our open house and open mat, where we will spar with neighboring jiu-jitsu schools as far away as Sterling and Rockford and Monroe. Some people are even coming out–friends of mine–from Chicago. And then we’re gonna watch the fights that night and hang out. And then at about seven o’clock, once I bring some pizzas in, we’ll also do a roast because I thought it would be hilarious to do a roast and have some of my students make fun of me. Why not?
TIM CONNORS: Why not? That’s always the way to go. That sounds not only exciting, but it sounds like you’re already creating a family-like atmosphere when it comes to Freeport Martial Arts. Why is that important to you?
JOHN GARVENS: That’s important to me because I believe that the family that trains together stays together, and I want something positive in the community that is social, that doesn’t involve partying, and it doesn’t involve alcohol or anything like that.
There’s a growing trend of people living a sober lifestyle where they choose not to drink alcohol, or we need something fun for people who are underage to do other than just going and walking around Walmart. Why not hang out with your friends, get healthier, learn a skill, and, most importantly, build a community?
And so we have families where the parents and the children train together in the same class. They build relationships with other people. You quickly become brothers and sisters together, and then that turns into family.
And it’s, I think, at an important time. You know, as we have more and more of these apps and distractions taking us away from the real world, we need more and more of the real world. We’ve never been so connected, yet felt so disconnected. An environment like this really helps us feel like we belong to something, and we build those relationships in the real world that are going to carry us through our lives.
TIM CONNORS: Why is it important with mixed martial arts? How can it make people healthier? How can it make people happier?
JOHN GARVENS: Martial arts is a vehicle towards personal and professional development, as I see it. It is a metaphor for life.
In life, we win, and we lose over and over. Sometimes, it feels like we’re losing more than we’re winning, and sometimes, we’re on top of the world, but martial arts teaches us how to cope with wins and losses. It teaches us how to face adversity, be in uncomfortable situations, and still find a way to persevere, to realize that we are stronger and tougher and more resilient than we think.
And through that, when you leave these walls, and you go out into the rest of the world, things don’t bother you as much. You have a healthier mental and emotional well-being. You have healthier physical well-being unless you get an injury or something like that, which is part of life. But I would rather hurt from doing something than from doing nothing. And if you stop moving, you stop moving.
So, I see martial arts as it is for most people, it begins as a practice of self-defense and physical wellness. You’ll get stronger, you’ll get faster, you’ll get more flexible. You will develop more cardiovascular endurance just from being able to sustain things. But then it transcends and evolves into a mental, emotional practice, where now you get to the end of that stressful work day, and you go, “Man, I got to go train. I need to be around my friends.” Eventually, it becomes sort of a philosophical, spiritual practice, where it gives you something to aspire to. And there are deeper truths in martial arts that you can realize through the experience of doing things.
TIM CONNORS: So I’m 57 and kind of out of shape, and thank you for not agreeing. And so, am I too old to come down and do it? Or no?
JOHN GARVENS: Not at all. I’ve had people as old as 60 reach out with interest, and I’ve even seen this video floating around on Instagram or someplace of a gentleman who received his black belt at 80 years of age. He started training when he was 40. But I have a member who is 56 years old, still a white belt beginner. People will come in with no martial arts experience or athletic experience. This is maybe their first experience at all with any sort of athletic endeavor or team athletic endeavor.
And we welcome everybody with open arms; come on in and try it out.
TIM CONNORS: So just for the heck of it, if I came in on the first day, what would you have me do?
JOHN GARVENS: The first day, the first thing we would have you do, is meet everybody else. “Hey, everybody. This is Tim. Tim. This is everybody.” We go around the horn, introduce you, meet lots of different people, and work with them.
The first thing that we do and teach for a total beginner is to talk about “What is jiu-jitsu? What are the basic positions that you might find yourself in in the grappling match, or if it’s a competition or an altercation on a street?” We’ll talk about managing distance and timing and how all of those things play together. We’ll talk about basic movement patterns that you’re going to use again and again on your jiu-jitsu journey. We’ll review some techniques and discuss not only what the technique is but how it works and why it works that way and get into the mechanics of the body and how the body works and doesn’t work to show how someone who is perhaps older or smaller or weaker can protect themselves and ultimately overcome someone perhaps far younger, stronger, faster than they are.
TIM CONNORS: So if someone wants to get a hold of you, wants to come down, wants to check it out, but would rather call or email or text. How can they get a hold of you?
JOHN GARVENS: Sure, there are lots of ways to get a hold of us. The quickest way is to go to our website, freeportmartialarts.com.
We’re on Facebook as well: Freeport Martial Arts. You can search that on Facebook. We’ve got an Instagram, as well, if you like to follow on social media.
You can also give us a call, 815-200-8818, at any time. You could call; you can text. That goes directly to me, and we can have a conversation, go back and forth. You can message us on Facebook.
You can send me an email. So there are numerous ways for you to get a hold of us.
You could also just come down here to 107 West Main Street and walk through the front door. We’ll be happy to meet you.
TIM CONNORS: Well, he’s not only one of the nicest guys I know, he’s a fabulous musician, and he is a downtown on Main Street business owner. Congratulations, John. Take care.
JOHN GARVENS: Thank you very much, Tim.