BJJ holidays with kids: What a family training camp is like
For years almost every one of our camps was adults only. That was not a principle. A camp week with six to ten hours on the mats, open mats until late and a party at the end is simply not built for a seven-year-old. But we kept hearing from people who had stopped coming once they had children, or who could only come if the rest of the family was happy to spend a week somewhere they had no interest in.
So in 2019 we tried it once, at the summer camp in Austria. It went well enough that the summer camp in the Alps has been a family camp ever since, and since January 2026 there is a winter version too. Here is how it works.
The setting
The family camps are in Wagrain, a village in the Salzburg Alps. We rent an entire hotel with its own sports hall, so there are no other guests and the mats are a short walk from the rooms. Around it there are playgrounds, mountain hikes, lakes, castles to visit and a waterpark next door. In winter the area is a ski resort.
Having the whole hotel to ourselves is what makes it work for families. Kids can run around the building, parents know most of the other guests by the second day, and nobody is bothered by a group of grapplers in the dining room.
What the adults do
For the adults it is a normal BJJ Globetrotters camp. There are classes and open mats from morning until evening, around ten hours of Jiu Jitsu on the schedule each day, with several instructors and both gi and no-gi. Nobody has to do all of it. Most parents pick the classes they want and spend the rest of the day with their families, and that is fine.
At the first family camp a lot of the participants had no children with them at all, and the camp works fine for them too.
What the kids do
There are kids’ classes every day, At the first family camp they were taught by Stevie Antoniou, Nelson Puentes and Hillary Witt. Besides that there has been parkour, a free-play open mat where kids can roll with each other and their parents, a movie night, and a disco that the kids took very seriously. Kids who have never trained are welcome. Most of them spend half the day on the mats and the other half at the waterpark or the playground with children they met that morning.
That last part surprised a lot of parents. One father wrote about it after the first family camp in 2019: within ten seconds his daughters had made friends with a Norwegian family’s daughters, and they spent the week together. You can read his account in “Disneyland is overrated”. It covers the camp better than I could.
Partners who do not train
Plenty of people bring a partner who does not train, or who has done five classes over the years. They usually find more than enough to do: the waterpark, hiking, the lakes, the mountain bike trails, or the hotel terrace. Some of them end up trying a beginner class. Nobody is pushed to.
The winter version
The summer family camp became popular enough that we tried a winter edition in January 2026, at the same hotel, directly before the last adult Winter Camp. It was the first time we had done a family camp at that time of year. There were lots of kids and adults on the mats and on the slopes all day, and we decided right after to repeat it. The Family Winter Camp 2027 page has the details.
A few practical things
Families stay together in family rooms, and meals are eaten together at the hotel, which keeps things simple. Bring a gi or rashguard for the kids if they have one, and swimwear. If your children have never been to a camp, they do not need any experience.
You can find all our current camps, family and adults only, on the camps page, and more about how the camps are run in How our camps work.
Adapted from our newsletters 2020 to 2026.
Upcoming BJJ camps
- Arizona Camp 20262-7 Nov 2026 · Tempe, Arizona, USA
- Family Winter Camp 20272-6 Jan 2027 · Wagrain, Austria
- Caribbean Island Camp 202718-24 Jan 2027 · Saint Barthélemy
- Spring Camp 202712-17 Apr 2027 · Tallinn, Estonia
- USA Camp Maine 20277-13 Jun 2027 · Maine, United States
- Midsummer Camp 202722-27 Jun 2027 · Lahti, Finland
- Summer Camp 202726-31 Jul 2027 · Heidelberg, Germany
- Zen Camp 20274-10 Oct 2027 · Przedbórz, Poland
