A frozen neck kept me away from doing any training last week so I was eager to get back to class tonight especially following my last lesson, which was basically a one to one private with Ynez. Unfortunately it was bit of strange lesson tonight as, yet again the turnout was pretty bad, in fact I was the only student with Peter, Ynez and black belt Stuart as instructors. I think I’ve worked out why Ryan hasn’t been to Judo since June and that is because his BJJ club now has two dedicated Judo lessons a week so it would make sense if he attended those especially as they precede the actual BJJ classes that he takes. This will be a great loss to our club though, especially as he brought with him some good newaza skills and was similarly matched, skill wise, to myself. I still think it would be a good idea to invite a BJJ club to come and give us a BJJ class as something different to the normal Judo that we have. If nothing else we may get one or two BJJ’ers who maybe live locally that might then start taking Judo.
Back to tonight’s lesson and following on from my lesson two weeks ago, Peter decided I should go over some techniques from the green belt syllabus. We went over all the various entries to Juji-gatame which I feel I have got down pretty well. We then went over Ude-gatame, Waki-gatame and Hiza-gatame, all of which are fairly simple techniques but ones that I haven’t used much before so they do need a little perfecting. Tachi-waza wise I was shown Morote-eri-seoi-nage and I must admit this did not come easy to me. I’d like to think it was because Stuart’s gi is so thick that I couldn’t get a proper grip on it but I’m sure it’s more than that and besides, if I can grip and throw people wearing heavy double weave gi’s then throwing someone wearing a single weave will seem fairly easy in comparison.
As I said at the beginning of this post, tonight lesson was a bit strange and Peter decided to finish 30 minutes early tonight. I guess I can’t complain as again I had effectively had my own private lesson with three black belts. Maybe that’s one of the positives of having such a low turnout in the senior class, that I am getting a lot of personal instruction and if this keeps up I will likely start my green belt grading sooner rather than later.
