Monday 28 June 2010

Richie "the Neck"

The club has been closed for the past two weeks as the water has been contaminated with legionnaires or something like that but as I have been having treatment with a Chiropractor on my shoulder maybe it’s a good thing.
I met up with a friend of mine, Richie who I used to train freestyle Kung Fu with some years ago, at the weekend. Richie took up Judo about 6 weeks after I did but as he lives somewhere up north (Nr Liverpool I think) I don’t get to see too much of him. Anyway he came over to my place and we watched some UFC and checked out some BJJ DVD’s that Boris sent me and then we decided it would be a good idea to try a few things out.


As there isn’t really enough room for throws in my “Den” we decided to look at some groundwork techniques as I was interested to see what he had learned in his Judo lessons and compare that to what I had learnt.
Also as it was 30c outside I had no intention of wearing a gi so we just grappled in our t-shirts, no-gi style if you like.

We started off with me on my back and Richie in my guard. Straight away I noticed he was very compact and wasn’t leaving my much to go for but maybe not having a gi had something to do with it. Richie said his favourite technique was Ude garami (Kimura) and tried this on me even though he was in my guard. I’m not sure if it’s possible to pull this off when you are inside someone’s guard but he had a go. I hadn’t told him about my bad shoulder on my left side but I was ready to tap to protect it but luckily I didn’t have to as I managed to escape and then almost pulled of a nice reversal but the coffee table got in the way lol. Richie was still working and making himself heavy so I tried to isolate and arm and threw up an attempt at Juji-gatame (arm bar) but I was never really in the right position for this and Richie easily got out of this and almost got side control but luckily I was able to quickly retain full guard.

At this point I showed Richie the benefits of San-gaku-jime which is my “go to move” so we broke this down and both tried it on each other. When we used to train in freestyle we did some chokes and strangles and Richie was/is very hard to submit with a choke which is why he was nicknamed Richie “the Neck”.
“the Neck” was still evident as although I got the triangle on him pretty tight and he said it wasn’t comfortable there was no way I was ever gonna get him to submit.


Not a bad little workout really but it is such a shame he lives so far away otherwise we could both really improve our Judo dramatically.


Hopefully Judo will be open this week as I haven’t had a proper Judo lesson for 2 weeks now. I would normally go to another club to get some training in but when you have an injury like I do its hard turning up at a new club and asking them to take it easy on you.


Just to add, I’ve ordered myself a cheap white single weave gi as in this heat my double weave will be unbearable. Hopefully it will arrive before my next lesson.