It appears that someone has taken offence to my blog and has therefore taken it upon themselves to email my club and complain. I haven’t seen the offending email but from what I’ve been told by the instructors, the anonymous emailer thinks that my blog is somehow damaging to my club and disrespectful to Judo due to the links I have to other martial arts like BJJ. There is an option to leave comments on my blog so should you take offence or disagree with anything that is written within it then please use this as a way of contacting me and we can then have a sensible discussion.
Just to add, all of the instructors have now read my blog and cannot see anything in it which in anyway damages the club or Judo. In fact they are of the opinion that it is a useful way of promoting Dorking Judo Club and they encourage me to keep at it. One thing that was pointed out to me by Black belt Stuart was that I have been spelling his name incorrectly as he spells his name Stewart. So from now on he will simply be referred to as Stewart, which means I can drop the black belt part.
On to last night’s lesson and it was a sort of Newaza master class. After we were warmed up I was paired up for some Newaza first with Oli and then without pause Stewart and then Peter. Following this Peter proceeded to show me various ways of applying Waki-gatame and Ude-gatame, specifically from a standing position. Although these techniques are not always successful when standing they can cause your opponent to move to a position where they are easily thrown or at the very least, give your opponent something to think about and put them off of a certain grip.
We then moved on to Ude-garami and finished with Hadaka-jime before Peter asked me to try and use the techniques I had just been shown, in some Newaza against himself, Stewart and Oli. Again I did this without any pause in between so it was a good workout but I really enjoyed it. I did have some success in applying these techniques but I cannot remember what technique I performed on whom. Stewart commented that I had a fairly good defense off of my back and in the most part I was able to stop anyone passing my guard.
Although we didn’t work specifically on my green belt syllabus tonight I felt like I got a lot out of the lesson, specifically with regards to my groundwork. I have commented in the past that I needed to learn some collar chokes as they seem to be presented quite regularly but I have rarely been able to finish them due to my lack of understanding of them, so hopefully this is something that I can start to address and improve on.
At the end of the class Peter said that he might show us some Kata in the upcoming weeks as it’s a good way of improving our technique and as Peter has won national Kata championships I’m sure he’ll be the right person to teach us.
