Last night was the first Judo session of the new year and as eager as I was to get back on the tatami I knew that despite losing 4kg in weight, I wasn’t in the best shape. I did a fairly normal gym session at lunchtime and was really blowing out my arse afterwards so, with only a few hours rest, I figured I would struggle should we do any randori. Luckily Graeme took the class and went fairly easy on us all.
We started with a few circuits but nothing too intense. I was warm afterwards but certainly not tired, although I was aching from my Monday weights session and my Tuesday lunchtime circuit training.A quick couple of rounds of Newaza followed but we were told we couldn’t use armlocks or strangles and any pins should only be held for 10 seconds before transitioning to another pin. This is a good exercise in keeping control of your opponent and learning to transition from one position to another. I was quite impressed with Andrew as he seems to have a pretty good base despite his relative inexperience and I found it quite difficult to sweep him although I did get him in the end.
Graeme then said that this term we would be going over the basics, which is never a bad thing. Tonight, he said, we would work on the Kesa’s.
I paired up with Chris as we worked on Kesa-gatame and Kuzure-Kesa-gatame and then the escapes from both. I actually found this escape from Kuzure-kesa-gatame, whilst looking on Youtube, which I haven’t seen before.
After a change of partner (I was paired with Meho) we progressed on to:
Ushiro-kesa-gatame
And then
Makura-kesa-gatame
With it being the first lesson back after the Christmas break Graeme didn’t continue with any of my grading but we spoke after the lesson and he said we would continue it in the coming weeks.
