Waki-gatame

The club was closed last week due to the half term holidays so most of us had had a rest. I say most of us as both Oli and Big Stuart are competing a lot at the moment attempting to gain enough points to get their black belts. Big Stuart managed another 10 points but injured his back in the process so was absent tonight. Oli didn’t manage any additional points as all his fights (4 in total) ended in draws. Oli did say that he had some success with the double lapel grip that Brian Jacks had shown us a few weeks previously and it’s a grip that Oli will continue to practice and use.




Back to tonight’s class and we started doing the leg movement for Uchi-mata and practiced this by holding on to your partners shoulder and swinging your leg backwards. This then progressed in to turning in fully for the throw but instead of reaping the leg we went past the rear leg and reaped the air. Once we had both drilled this for several minutes we got the crash mats out and completed the throw a number of times on both sides.

We then progressed to throw for throw randori, using just Uchi-mata and finally we were told to add O-uchi-gari as either the first or second attack. It was nice to get lots of lots of repetitions of these throws in and by doing them in a randori situation is was a lot more realistic than doing the throws statically. Oli and I both practiced right and left sided throws, which we very rarely do, but is encouraged a lot when we have trained at Yoshin Ryu and was further encouraged by Brian Jacks recently. I was actually quite pleased with some of my left sided Uchi-mata’s and I will make a conscious effort to practice both sides going forward.



We then practiced some turnovers and I asked specifically to practice this one as it is in the blue belt syllabus and it’s a technique I have never tried before but have wanted to for a while now. It was relatively easy to perform and get the tap so it’s definitely one I’ll be trying in Newaza.

Stewart then showed us some nice set ups for Waki-gatame. One attacking the turtle and another one attacking from the turtle. I believe these were techniques that were shown to him by Steve Gawthorpe, who is apparently a Newaza specialist, it's very difficult to explain them in words but the one attacking from the turtle was similar to this.