Fighting Back, Moving Forward
Bellingham Mixed Martial Arts offers free weekly self-defense classes, teaching women how to find strength and confidence within themselves
By Alison Eddy
A group of women gather on the mats laughing and talking about their week and what amazing food they had for dinner on Tuesday. Soon the talking and laughter fade as they start warming up for class. Not a sound can be heard except for a slap that echoes through the gym as the instructor flips her partner over her body and pins her to the ground.
This is the first takedown of the day at the free self-defense and jiu jitsu class at Bellingham Mixed Martial Arts.
Lara Carter is the co-owner of Bellingham Mixed Martial Arts and started this weekly program in June 2019. She said it began with two people and has steadily grown to about 15 to 20 women per week. She recruited Penny McMahon, the women’s jiu jitsu instructor, to teach the self-defense class.
“After the first one, we had such a big turnout,” McMahon said. “We had all these women who were so interested and had such a strong desire to learn and feel empowered that we decided a free every-Saturday seminar is the best way to give a safe space of learning for women that is actually beneficial to them in the long run.”
Model Mugging is a global self-defense training program and has graduated over 60,000 women. Of these graduates, 98.3% have never reported assaults and only seven students reported ever being victimized. Some graduates were also found to have stopped their attacker without resorting to violence.
Carter decided to start a self-defense program because she noticed a lack of self-defense classes and serious limitations to existing classes. She said other self-defense programs are expensive and are only offered one day every few months. Carter also dislikes the message embedded in other classes. She has seen posters at her friend’s gym that show women running for their lives and are portrayed as helpless.
“How about we teach women that they are not victims, but that they can be empowered,” Carter said.
McMahon teaches these classes with the intent of building strength and confidence, and has found most women who come in say they want to feel more empowered.
McMahon competed in mixed martial arts for six years and is trained in kickboxing, jiu jitsu and a variety of other fighting styles. She uses her knowledge of jiu jitsu to create a foundation for the self-defense class.
Rachel Lopez, 28, decided to come to this self-defense class because her brother does jiu jitsu and encouraged her to learn the movements in case she was ever in a bad situation.
She also started listening to a serial killer podcast earlier this year and found a commonality with many of the victims portrayed in these stories.
“Each story that I heard, the description was literally me, 5-foot-5-inches tall and 120 pounds,” Lopez said. “I have never been in a situation where I felt like I was in danger, but I don’t want to get there.”
Lopez enjoys the small class size and the fact that there are no men in the room.
“I thought I would get paired up with some guy who is super big, who has done this before and he would throw me around like a rag doll,” Lopez said.
Not only were there no men at this class, but there are no men allowed in the building during any of the classes. McMahon teaches self-defense skills in which most cases the attacker is a man. She thought having men present during these classes might intrude on the safe environment she tries to create.
Another part of that environment is having a group of women who feel comfortable working and practicing with each other.
“You can build a safe enough environment with a core group of people so when new ones come you have people who are already there who knew what we are about to talk about and can help each other grow,” McMahon said.
Esther Tjoelker, 23, has been coming to these classes for about a month and a half and is a part of that core group. She is also a law enforcement recruit training to get into the police academy.
She started taking these classes because it is essential to staying safe and secure in her job.
“I am small so I am not necessarily going to be able to fight a 300-pound man by just brute force hitting him,” Tjoelker said. “But if I can control his body and get him on the ground I have a lot more to work with.”
Tjoelker came into these classes feeling strong, but she has since learned how to use that strength to her advantage. She has learned how to get out of grips, get into a dominant position and get someone to submit or give up.
“It teaches you a lot of confidence in being able to control someone and not be scared of them,” Tjoelker said.
This program has grown substantially since the start, and McMahon attributes a large part of that growth to the women’s desires, like Tjoelker’s, to learn.
“This is the one sport I have taught where the drive to learn is so strong and so tangible,” McMahon said. “They can tell when they are learning something and doing it correctly rather than when someone is letting them do a maneuver.”
Even though McMahon teaches self-defense skills, she emphasizes that those skills do not and should not be used in every situation.
“There is a time and a place to engage, and there is a time and a place to leave,” McMahon said. “By no means should you ever engage in a physical altercation with someone who is bigger and stronger than you just because you need to prove a point.”
She said a large stigma of self-defense is that if you know it, you have to prove it. She struggles with this stigma as an MMA fighter. If anyone, particularly men, hears that she knows jiu jitsu, they immediately want her to prove she can fight them.
“I know what I can do, but I also know there is a place for it,” McMahon said. “If you are 250 pounds and you come at me, it is not in my favor to engage. But because I know what I know, I am not an easy target.”
McMahon uses this fight versus flight mentality to guide her lesson plan each week. She believes it is not in a woman’s advantage to engage with someone twice their size, but women can learn the fundamentals of getting out of bad positions.
“If someone is on top of you, how do you get out of that?” McMahon said. “If you can’t get out of that, how do you submit them there?
Before Carter co-owned and operated Bellingham Mixed Martial Arts, she was a domestic violence counselor. She worked with young women who were drug addicts and were often in dangerous environments.
“A lot of the situations they ended up in, where they were sexually assaulted or abused, could have been prevented if they knew how to defend themselves,” Carter said.
McMahon can see a difference in the way she and other women carry themselves outside this class because they know they have the ability to defend themselves.
In addition to providing them with those skills, McMahon also encourages the women to take other preventative measures as well. Her biggest piece of advice is for women to put their phones down and be aware of what is going on around them.
“If you don’t have that spacial awareness, you cannot address a threat before it is too late,” McMahon said. “Your mentality will protect you before your body has to.”
Carter’s tip for women is to listen to their instincts and know it is okay to say no. As a young girl, she was walking home from school one day when a strange man approached her and said her mother told him to pick her up. She knew her mother would never do that, so she told the man no.
“Women are taught to be very cooperative, often to the detriment of ourselves,” Carter said.
Both Carter and McMahon emphasize the importance of saying no and being assertive. McMahon also says that if someone wants to hurt you, you should not feel bad about hurting them back.
Even though the reality of women needing to protect themselves is daunting, McMahon tries to approach these classes with humor and light-hearted messages to help break down that fear. She wants to address the reality but also work to change it.
“You can’t stop your life in fear of other people. I firmly believe that the way to get past that is to embrace it,” McMahon said. “We don’t need anybody to make it better for us. We can adapt.”
These free self-defense and jiu jitsu classes are offered every Saturday from 12:30 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. at Bellingham Mixed Martial Arts.