Tatame
Our story
Tatame opened in 2017 in a warehouse on Rua Brito Capelo that had been a net-maker's workshop. Rui Salgado was coming back from ten years of competing and teaching abroad — Rio de Janeiro first, California after — with a black belt, a container of mats and the conviction that Matosinhos had nowhere you could train seriously without being treated as a number.
It started with the mat, twelve students and one session a day. The bag room came in the second year, when Carla brought Muay Thai and Diogo brought Kickboxing; the kids' classes in the third, when the students' children started turning up at the door. Today there are seven coaches, seven disciplines and more than forty sessions a week.
What has not changed
The bow on stepping onto the mat, the clean gi, the handshake for whoever just caught you. The rule that nobody is pushed into competing — and that whoever wants to has a team. And the one that says the first session is free, because the only way to know whether this is for you is to step onto the mat.