I missed last week’s training due to a nasty ear infection which left me deaf in one ear, apart from my own voice reverberating in my head, and also gave me bouts of vertigo. I still wasn’t 100% and still haven’t got my full hearing back yet but at least the vertigo has subsided, which makes doing Judo a little easier.
Jaden was back tonight for the first time since he became a dad and he was sporting his new orange belt which he attained from Guildford Police Judo Club.
After a quick warm up Stewart had us partner up and practice the reaping movement for O-soto-gari. I paired up with Andrew and after several minutes we progressed to the actual throw. We were told that we would only spend a few minutes on this throw as the O-soto-gari was only to be used as a set up in to Harai-goshi, which worked pretty well. When I was doing the throwing I felt I was able to control Andrew sufficiently enough so that his landing was fairly soft, much the same way as Oli has always been a good Tori to me.
We moved on to some Newaza techniques and Stewart showed us a couple of turnovers followed by what BJJ’ers would refer to as the “stack pass”.
Stewart mentioned that I liked to be on my back and have people in my guard where I could attack them and this was therefore shown as a way of getting past my guard. If people get good of this I will have to go away and look at the defence’s against this guard pass.
At this point I was supposed to start my blue belt grading however as they were just about to start some Newaza randori I asked Graeme if I could just have one quick roll with Jaden, something I’ve been wanting to do for some time now.
I spent most of the quick roll we had trying to stop Jaden from passing my guard by pushing back on his hips with my right hand. He eventually caught me in some sort of cross collar choke, oddly enough just as I thought I had thwarted his guard passing efforts and had turned the tables on him. He finished the choke with me in side control. I was trying to work out if I could roll out of it but the pain was too much, so I tapped.
At this point Graeme took both Ivan and I to one side to start some of our grading. I felt particularly un-prepared, due to my recent illness, but the techniques I was asked to perform were the ones I was fairly comfortable with anyway so I needn’t have worried. Ivan and I joined the rest of the class with a few ticks to our grading sheet but I know I will really need to swat up over Christmas so that I can pass the more difficult techniques, counters, combinations etc that the blue belt syllabus requires.
Following on from the O-soto-gari in to Harai-goshi that we did earlier Stewart showed us O-soto-gari in to Yoko-wakare. This is a throw I have seen Peter perform before and Stewart did mention that it’s a particular favourite of Peter.
Ivan seemed to have got the hang of this throw fairly quickly but by the end I was also pulling this one off fairly well.
We finished the class with some light randori and I stayed paired with Ivan. Unfortunately Ivan tried what I believe was a sacrifice throw like Sumi-gaeshi or tomoe-nage, but only succeeded in pulling me on top of him with my forehead hitting him square on his nose, which duly broke. So whilst Ivan was hurried off the mat to get some medical attention I paired up with Jaden for a really interesting and enjoyable little tussle where we both tried lots of different throws, with me catching him with a perfect Hiza-guruma and Jaden getting me with a double lapel grip version of the Yoko-wakare that we did earlier.
This was the last senior class of the year and the club is now closed until January so expect me to be training elsewhere next week. We were also told that Stewart would be retiring from coaching due to a change in his work commitments, which is a real shame as I enjoy his no nonsense way of teaching. Hopefully he will be able to pop in to the club from time to time, if only to take part in the class as a student.
I also wanted to add that I hope Ivan’s broken nose heals quickly and that it doesn’t keep him off the mats for too long
