My physio told me I was free to return to Judo providing I took things easy, the rest of the conversation was a blur as I was, at that point, just excited to be able to get back on the tatami.
In my absence Ivan had returned from a very long injury lay off (Cruciate knee ligaments) so it was especially nice to see him return. Also one of the juniors had since received his junior green belt, which was well deserved.
I worked in a three for most of the night with Andrew and Ivan and we mainly focused on two techniques, one tachiwaza and one newaza.
The tachiwaza technique was Tai-otoshi which we warmed up for by doing plenty of uchi-komi with uki first walking towards tori and then uke walking away from tori. We also drilled a nice counter to tai-otoshi using a right handed, left sided tai-otoshi.
On to the newaza technique and we revisited a strangle that we were taught last year that Graeme calls Hell Strangle (Jigoku-jime) or chokehold from the Crucifix position for my BJJ cousins. We were shown two entries in to this, both attacking the turtle and also two ways of finishing, both of which are shown in the following video.
In my absence Ivan had returned from a very long injury lay off (Cruciate knee ligaments) so it was especially nice to see him return. Also one of the juniors had since received his junior green belt, which was well deserved.
I worked in a three for most of the night with Andrew and Ivan and we mainly focused on two techniques, one tachiwaza and one newaza.
The tachiwaza technique was Tai-otoshi which we warmed up for by doing plenty of uchi-komi with uki first walking towards tori and then uke walking away from tori. We also drilled a nice counter to tai-otoshi using a right handed, left sided tai-otoshi.
On to the newaza technique and we revisited a strangle that we were taught last year that Graeme calls Hell Strangle (Jigoku-jime) or chokehold from the Crucifix position for my BJJ cousins. We were shown two entries in to this, both attacking the turtle and also two ways of finishing, both of which are shown in the following video.
I also found this video which shows different entries in to Jigoku-jime, some of which look very nice indeed.
We finished up with some randori and as I was keen not to breakfall with my left arm (due to my elbow injury) I was going to make getting thrown particularly difficult for everyone I sparred with.
One throw I managed to pull off a couple of times, following on from the competition I was in a few weeks back, was Osoto-gari. I mentioned then that I got thrown with this by a guy who hooked his leg in and despite being too far away to complete the throw he quickly jumped through and dumped me on my back. This guy did this to other people on the day so it’s clearly his tokuwaza but nonetheless with my long legs it should be a technique that I could be good at. I will continue to work on this in randori but it is a risky throw as quite often uke can counter it with the same throw and no one likes getting thrown with a big osoto gari.
The class finished with two long rounds of newaza randori and I decided to try and get as many subs in as possible. I think I ended up with two ude-garamis, two Juji-gatames, one kata-gatame and a nice sangaku jime.
