The day after my last lesson I embarked on a weekend’s trip to Snowdonia in Wales for a bit of climbing with a mate. Unfortunately I returned with a serious case of Man flu which has meant a delay in updating my blog and due to my head being all scrambled with various cold/flu remedies I cannot remember much of what went on so please excuse the briefness of my report.
The first thing I noticed when I turned up for last week’s lesson were two new faces who were already on the mat. One of them was a brown belt from Crawley Judo club who was trying to get as much training in as possible to get his black belt and the other guy, also from Crawley, was a white belt.
Following last week’s Newaza based lesson we had another one this week. Peter told us to start with some light randori and I paired up with the new brown belt guy. He decided to pull guard against me and then tried to work some sweeps but due to me posturing up well and being a few stone heavier than him I was able to resist his attempts. He then decided to get back to his knees and I was more than happy to pull guard myself. Now it was my turn to look for sweeps on him but he did a pretty good job of resisting my attempts until Peter reminded us both that it was light randori and subsequently called matte.
Peter then had us working through various holds on each other, for example I would start in Kesa Gatame and then move in to Mune-gatame then Yoko-shiho-gatame then Kuzure-kesa-gatame and finally in to tate-shiho-gatame. The person being held would slowly increase resistance until they were either able to escape or the person on top got bored and gave them ago. I think this is a very good exercise as being able to hold someone in a pin isn’t that difficult but to be able to move from one pin to another whilst keeping control is a different kettle of fish entirely. Of course in Shiai you wouldn’t give up a pin but there are times when you know you are slowly losing a pin and being able to switch to another one with minimal effort is advantageous.
We went through a couple of changes of partners and eventually went on to do some free Newaza before Peter decided to show us some Kata. We have done a little kata before but not for a while now. There is a big difference between the Kata one does in Judo to that which I performed in Karate or the form’s I had to do in Wing Chun and that is Judo kata’s are performed with another person.
I think the name of the Kata that we performed was Katame-no-kate and we only went through some of it but what I did find was that it was very useful for teaching us the correct position for the techniques.
Following the Kata we did some randori and finished up again with some more Newaza. As I said earlier my brain is slightly fuzzy due to cold/flu remedies so I can’t go in to any detail.
An interesting lesson with plenty of sparring and it was great to have some additions to the senior’s class. I hope they both return next week.
