Tosetti Institute of MMA & Fitness

Best community for MMA and HEMA in the bay area. The coaches are very attentive and knowledgeable - you can tell they really care about their students and their development. I took both the MMA striking and fitness classes and both are amazing workouts, and teach you many practical techniques. I'm so much stronger and more skilled than when I started. Everyone is respectful and friendly.

I fell in love with HEMA immediately upon trying it out at Tosetti. It's possible I would have if I had gone anywhere for it, because learning about and fighting with swords is enormously fun on a level that's hard to describe, plus it's a great way to trick yourself into getting in shape :) But I think the community and coaches were also a huge part of it -- it's somewhere I really feel I belong, and I know that many other people (who might be quite different from me in a variety of ways) feel the same way. People here are welcoming and generous -- with their time, their expertise, their gear, and their kindness. You're never too nerdy here, and you're never not nerdy enough. Good vibes, good fun, great workout, and a serious sport if you want to go down that path. Recommended!

Tosetti has the best HEMA community in the Bay. The coaches are great, the students are engaged, and the facility is clean and well cared for. I can't recommend this place enough for anyone interested in HEMA or just trying to get a bit more fit!

Trained here for ~1 month when I was staying in the area. The class is fun, engaging, and quite intense (in a good way!). The coaches are very good at explaining what to do and I was able to learn a wide variety of useful exercises during my short training there. I really enjoyed my time here exercising, sweating, and learning more about kickboxing.

Let me preface anything I say here with the fact that I am neither a natural athlete, nor have I ever liked working out. With that said, the Tosetti team has somehow gotten me to a point in my life where I can’t imagine a life NOT doing squats, punching bags, wrestling, and swinging swords. It’s probably high time I left a review, since I’ve been going here since September 2018. Fitness classes are like a giant game of “Simon Says.” Coach Melissa and Coach Geralyn are amazing, and some of the warmest, most welcoming people I’ve ever met. Their patience and encouragement when I started these classes went a long way to bolster my confidence. Again, I’ve never liked working out, so I also had no idea what I was doing, and being told what to do did me a whole lot of good. They were happy to start me off with baby steps and add challenges as I progressed, and are always ready to show you alternatives if you have certain limitations, such as joint issues. Wrestling classes—when I say I knew nothing about working out, I knew even less about wrestling. I actually started these classes because of the sword classes (that’s a long story). Coach Paul officially teaches these (with the occasional supervised wrestling sessions from… another Paul), and has somehow shown me, at 5’4’’, how to throw people who tower over me. The classes tend to be a mix of all levels of experience and weight classes, and Coach Paul will often cater his lesson that day to the needs of the class demographic. It’s a whole lot of fun. Lastly, sword classes are what I joined Tosetti Institute for (and since I joined, they’ve added a polearms class to the weapons repertoire). These are not the kind of sword fighting classes that usually come to mind in the modern era, such as the foil fencing you see in the Olympics. We’re talking historical martial arts here, with swords in a variety of sizes and styles—and Coach Paul definitely emphasizes the martial part of the art. This was EXACTLY what I was looking for. He draws form historical texts, but he’s a fighter first and foremost, and that’s what I think really sets his teaching off from other historical fencing schools—if you want to learn how to fight, he will teach you how to fight. I’m going to do a bit of bragging here, but some of our sword fighters are competition-winners (I’m not among them—I’m actually mediocre at best, but I love being able to learn from these awesome people). Really, I could go on and on about how much I love Tosetti Institute, and the people there. This was unfortunately the shortest I could keep this review while doing them any sort of justice, and it’s only an inkling of how much I love this place. Even sadder is the fact that I’ll be moving out of the area in the spring/ summer—of all the things in the SF Bay Area, Tosetti Institute and the people I’ve met there are what I will miss the most, and I don’t think I’ll ever find their equal.