I was back at Judo last night after two months of training solely BJJ and was very much looking forward to it. Upon arriving we were given the good news that one of the clubs brown belts, David, got the final 30 points needed for him to get his 1st dan black belt, which at just 17 years of age is a great achievement. David is the son of one the clubs coaches Graeme and will be presented formally once all the paperwork is completed and signed off by the BJA. I will post photos of his presentation in the coming weeks.
After we warmed up I was paired with Andrew for some Newaza randori. We started with one kneeling up right and the other standing behind them. The person standing pushed the other to the floor and once they hit the mat the Newaza begun. I started in the kneeling position first and Andrew attacked. I went in to the turtle position but turned the attack on him and quickly got his back. From here I secured a collar grip with my right hand across his neck and swung my leg over his head to finish the choke. I got the same submission on him when we restarted and finished off with a nice Juji-gatame. Now it was my turn to attack him. I tried and San-gaku turnover but he managed to squirm out, however he left his arm behind and I finished with another Juji-gatame. We restarted again and this time I turned him over on to his back and held him in mune gatame but my grips were not great and he was slowly escaping so I moved to tate-shiho gatame , pushed him arm across his neck and sunk in a Kata-gatame. To finish I moved from Tate-shiho to side control and he duly tapped.
Next up was Jadon. I attacked first but his turtle was good and he managed to grab my leg and use that to get me on my back where he was quick to pass my guard and mount me. Now if this was BJJ I would have defended my neck and waited for him to attack before trying to escape but as this was Judo and I was in a losing position, the emphasis was on me to escape, which I tried in vain to do. When Graeme called matte Jadon had one cross collar grip in place and was seconds away from applying his usual choke on me. I do struggle to escape from the mount, or tate-shiho-gatame, and this is something I need to work on. I could of course roll over on to my front, which would mean I have escaped the pin but would then expose me to being choked. Not only that but, from a self-defence point of view, I really don’t want to get in to the habit of escaping this way. That said, if I was losing in a competition I would certainly use it as a last resort.
Anyway here are some simple escapes from the mount demonstrated by the excellent Roy Dean.
We restarted, this time with him attacking and somehow we ended up in the same position, me on the bottom and him sitting on top waiting to pounce. Again he secured one of the cross collar grips and I knew it wouldn’t be long until he sunk in his choke. I tried to push his hips back but they wouldn’t budge and eventually I made the mistake of pushing his chest with a straight arm which he collected up and put me in Juji-gatame. I tried to escape from here but it was on tight so had to tap. When we stopped I realised that his foot had hit me in the face and my nose was streaming with blood. This meant I had to sit out the next 10-15 minutes until my nose stopped bleeding.
After my nose stopped gushing blood I paired up with Andrew again for some on the move Uchi-Komi, concentrating mainly on Tai-otoshi. Then Graeme got out the crashmats and had us do an interesting exercise with our partners whereby one of us (Andrew) would assume the turtle position and I would do a rolling breakfall over Andrew towards the crashmats. Then Andrew stands up and moves quickly towards me where I take a grip and immediately do a forward throw. I really enjoyed doing this as it got us all working hard doing multiple repetitions of throws and encouraged us to grip and throw. We changed this around after a while so that the person who had been in the turtle got up and did a rear throw on the one standing by the crashmats.
The class finished with 4 rounds of Randori. Jadon and I had a really good scrap, with multiple throws for both us and not too much attention paid to grip fighting.
Against Andrew I was allowed to follow my throws in to groundwork which was good fun. I managed quite a few successful Harai-goshi’s, which was encouraging and was the perfect ending (Nose bleed aside) to a perfect Judo class.
