Review of the year 2013

With me being out for the rest of the year through injury (Superficial Thrombosis in my lower leg) I may as well write my review of the year early as I won’t be getting in any more Judo training.

I started the year as a green belt but was eager to grade for my blue. The club saw the return of Duncan, a 2nd dan, who had trained and taught Judo extensively in Japan. Duncan has been a very welcome addition to the coaching staff at Dorking Judo Club and his son has been a very welcome addition to the cadets and has great promise and some lovely Judo.

The only competition I entered this year was the Surrey Open Blue Belt and below ( I got a silver last year) but unfortunately due to the lack on entrants it was cancelled for the seniors.

I managed to get some training in at the following other clubs throughout the year:

• Witley – Run by the excellent Pete Swettenham, who also visited and took several of the classes at Dorking.

• Yoshin Ryu – My number two club really. I have only attended their Randori session on a Thursday night but can thoroughly recommend it to anyone who wants some hard randori and also an excellent work out at the same time. All the coaches here are very friendly and have some excellent Judo and this is reflected by the high standards of the students. On a good night there are a dozen or so dan grades on the mat and another dozen kyu grades.

• Nova Forca – My number one and only BJJ club. After an absence of a couple of years I managed to get a summers worth of training in with Ricardo and his excellent team in Epsom, Surrey. I don’t think there was a single night when there weren’t at least forty guys present. I’m always made to feel very welcome by Ricardo and will of course be back again sometime next year. Who knows, one day I might actually have the time to commit properly to BJJ.

That's me, back row, 5th from the right

In March I attended an excellent seminar held by Aneta Szcepanska, a former Olympic Silver Medallist from Poland. This was held at Yoshin Ryu where we had upwards of forty people present.

April saw me receive my blue belt which made me think I should actually start to feel like I’m getting good at Judo.

I missed Brian Jacks visit to Yoshin Ryu in June because the arrival of Edward, my son, was imminent. He duly arrived on the 1st July.



My boy, Edward

Black Eagle very kindly sent me their new Judo gi to review. Subsequently I was also asked to review some products from a new company called Martial Herbs who, according to their website, are the premier British sport supplement company providing unique formulas designed especially with the martial artist in mind. I was sent approximately 1 months’ supply of their strength and recovery supplements but due to lots of different injuries, some more serious than others I haven’t been able to finish this review as yet.

September was greeted by the good news that Graeme’s son, David, had earned the final 20 points needed to gain his first dan black belt. The BJA decided to change their grading syllabus, without much, if any, prior warning. The main difference affected the brown belt syllabus, which I was working through and included several throws which I had already performed to get my blue belt.

A car crash saw me miss some weeks in November with whiplash and although I returned to Judo and completed half of my brown belt syllabus I missed the last class of the year and the chance to get my brown belt due to the injury I have now, a Superficial Thrombosis, which is basically a burst vein in my lower leg. This has resulted in a very large swelling, where the blood collected and massive bruising down my leg and in to my foot. Three visits to my GP and one to A&E confirmed that all I can do is take pain killers and wait for my body to heal itself, which could take anywhere between 3-6 weeks.

Andrew received his yellow belt on the last session of the year and he has shown some steady improvement in his game and his overall fitness. Some of his pins are particularly crushing and I’m sure that if he continues to train regularly he could make newaza his forte.

At the beginning of the year my main training partners were Oli and Meho but unfortunately both have since left the club for various reasons. Ivan, another regular, who has an incredible fighting spirit, saw injury ruin his year as an operation to fix a damaged cruciate ligament put paid to any training whatsoever. Big Stuart has been another casualty and has been absent the whole year, again due to a knee injury. Also Black belt Stewart has retired from Judo due to work commitments. This has meant that my main training partner for most of this year has been Jadon, a fellow blue belt, although his main club is Guildford Police Judo club. As I’ve stated before, Jadon is the reason that this blog started as I found myself reading his excellent blog in BJJ several years ago now. Jadon stopped blogging but continued to train BJJ at Andy Roberts’s club in Farnborough and was a high ranked blue belt in BJJ before some personal issues got in the way of him training there and subsequently saw him return to Judo, something that he had trained in before as a child.

Having someone like Jadon to train with has helped keep me motivated this year and has filled the gap left by Oli. With his BJJ training Jadon obviously has some very good skills on the ground and can normally submit me at will. A victory for me is being able to survive a three minute roll without tapping, something I have occasionally been able to achieve. On our feet Jadon makes up for his lack of size by using his speed. We have had some excellent randori sessions this year and usually we both manage to throw each other with good technique. Jadon has also written some excellent blog posts for me this year which was particularly welcome when I was too busy with work commitments to keep my blog updated.

Looking forward to next year I hope to get my brown belt early so that I can concentrate on making a start towards getting my black belt. Hopefully I’ll be accompanied by Jadon, who should be getting his brown belt soon as well.

Nate Diaz throwing Gray Maynard

Apparently Nate has had some Judo lesson from Ronda Rousey, the result of which can be seen above.
As for naming the throw, its a mixture of Harai goshi or Harai maki komi. Any other ideas?

Injured again!

Yes I must be cursed as I am injured again but hopefully not for too long, anyway more about that later.

Graeme was back coaching, after doing his best Phileas Fogg impression over the last 5-6 weeks if not 80 days. The warm up flowed in to uchi-komi and that flowed in to throwing our partner with the 3rd repetition. We started with tai-otoshi, changed partners and went on to Seoi-nage and then changed partners again before going on to o-uchi-gari. Graeme was using this as a way of grading a number of us for our next respective belts, myself included. I would then be asked to demonstrate a throw, for example sumi-gaeshi, to the class before we all went on to practise it. This was repeated for a number of the throws from the brown belt syllabus and carried on when we changed to newaza. Graeme asked me to demonstrate my favourite submission, San-gaku-jime, to the class and also the complex entry where you attack the turtle. Whilst the rest of the class were practising this Jadon showed me a nifty little escape which I’ve never seen before, demonstrated below.

I need to drill this so I’ll be putting myself in to san-gaku-jime’s as much as possible when doing newaza randori to test its effectiveness.

We finished up with some light randori, with Jadon and I going throw for throw and getting plenty of nice techniques in. We changed partners a number of times until we had all been with each other. Then Graeme called two pairs out and said it was winner stays on randori. I got the better of Jadon to start with before I went through all the cadets and faced Jadon again. This time he threw me and he then went through most of the cadets before being nice to one of them and allowing them to throw him. Matte was called shortly after on what was an excellent class, full of high tempo randori and plenty of throwing practice and half my brown belt theory completed. Mojo restored:)


Now back to this injury. I woke up the nest morning and found a large cricket ball size lump on my left shin. At this point it wasn’t painful, however as the lump got smaller the pain increased so I went to my GP who diagnosed Superficial Thrombosis. I have been prescribed painkillers and antibiotics and have been told to rest for 3-5 days. However some websites state it can take 3-6 weeks before returning to normal which would be very frustrating and would mean waiting until next year before finally get my hands on that brown belt.

Guest Coach



This was another session taken by excellent coach Pete Swettenham (3rd Dan). He told us the focus was going to be more on physical training than technique. We went through quite a few techniques, which is something I am normally critical of. However they all flowed well and were using complimentary skills and the emphasis was on sustaining a good work rate while being effective.


It was nice to see more faces tonight. Some adults returning from injury and my friend Tim, who trains at Guildford and Witley, also made it to Dorking for what was his first training session there.

Randori was light and relaxed with all partners trading throws and trying things out. Newaza was particularly good as we did some pressure drills from a variety of positions as well as having an additional four minute roll which allowed us to experiment a little.

Myself and Stuart had a good tussle where I spent a lot of time playing guard. I particularly was trying to set something up from spider guard (feet on biceps rather than closed behind opponent) rather than my usual closed guard. Trying to either lock up a san gaku or a sweep. Stuart, however, wasn’t having any of it and was wise to most things I did.

I had a short roll with Pete which was great. He has a very tight strong top game, and uses the lower gi lapels very effectively in reducing my hip movement. So playing off my back just wasn’t going to work. At one point I am attacking his turtle and I feel a popping grinding sound in my ribs and let out a “Aaaaaaaarg”. It wasn’t particularly painful, but it just felt horrible, like the ribs had moved in a way they were not meant to. I checked to feel if I had broken one and was reasonably sure I hadn’t, probably a inter costal injury or cartilage. So I carried on! Went for a suicide single lapel choke against his turtle which felt tight but unfortunately he had tucked his chin and I was just crushing his face instead.

A lot of good stuff from the youngsters who are showing good aptitude on the ground and are just absorbing everything. Pete had a lot of complimentary things to say about the Dorking youngsters which is good to hear as he works with some high level players.

Mojo

I was involved in a nasty car accident at the weekend, the details of which I won’t go in to other than to say that thankfully no one was seriously injured. Both my wife and kids were in my car so it was a pretty scary experience, especially with both of my kids screaming their heads off and my wife and I unable to immediately determine if they were injured or not.

This has resulted in some mild whiplash for me which has obviously meant I have been unable to attend Judo or do any other form of exercise. This is proving very frustrating.

At the moment I’ve lost a bit of my Judo mojo, due mainly I think to the absence of a lot of the seniors from the club and partly from not being able to train. Looking at the club photo that was taken last year, i'm the only kyu grade still regularly attending the club, which is a real shame. At the moment Jadon, who is not in the photo, is the only thing keeping me interested.

Anyway that’s all for now folks. Not a lot I can do until my GP gives me the all clear to train again. Hopefully it won’t be too long and hopefully by then I will have rediscovered my Judo Mojo. Until then 切断

One Handed Tai-otoshi - Yoshin Ryu



With DJC closed for the half term holidays I made my way to Yoshin Ryu for another randori session and this time I was accompanied by Jadon.


Last week I mentioned that there was a low turnout, for this club anyway. Well this week there were only seven of us present. 3 dan grades, 2 brown belts and 2 blue belts. This was most likely due to it being half term and Halloween. However as per last week this didn’t affect the quality of the coaching or the lesson.

Following the warm up, which lasted about 15-20 minutes, we practised the footwork entry for tai-otoshi. This was done with a partner walking up and down the mat. We first practised it walking backwards and then did it walking forward and also moving sideways.

Sensei Neil then had us add the arm movement but instead of taking the normal collar grip with our right hand, assuming you are doing a right handed Tai-otoshi, we instead planted our right hand in the crook of ukes left arm.

Here’s two time Olympian, Travis Stevens, doing the exact variation of Tai-otoshi that we practised.

We got plenty of practise in with this throw, doing it first statically and then on the move, both left and right sided. We also swapped partners a number of times so we got to practice on different shaped people.

We then had spell of about 5 minutes were Sensei Neil called out throws which we had to do on our partner. Last week the throws were all dan grade theory level with names I had never heard of but this week they were a lot more familiar. I like this drill as it gets you to think on your feet and use throws that you wouldn’t normally choose to do.

Before the newaza randori started, the crash mat was brought out for some Ura-nage practise. Despite my uke being 102kg I managed to get him airbourne enough. Next up was Kata-guruma, a throw I found a lot harder to perform on my considerably heavier uke. I remember struggling with this in my blue belt grading and unfortunately the throw is now part of the brown belt grading so there’s no escaping it for me.

3 rounds of Newaza randori followed, all 3 were against dan grades. The first two ended largely in a stalemate, with me on my back trying in vain to sweep or submit. On the plus side I was able to nullify their submission attempts and keep them in my guard. My last spar was against Sensei Neil who slowly set me up for virtually the same pass every time. Putting his left arm under my right leg and grabbing my collar he stacked me and slowly passed to my right where he kept hold of my right leg and pinned me. I tried a San-gaku-jime on a couple of occasions but never really had enough control to do this. One thing he did point out to me was that I need to attack more quickly when I’m on my back, before he gets settled. Attacking him first would put him on the defensive and make him weary of doing anything against me.



My first round of tachiwaza randori was against Jadon and we both executed a few successful throws on each other. I caught him with an O-uchi-gari and a tani-otoshi and he caught me with a nice uchi-mata feint to Sumi-gaeshi. The last two rounds of randori were largely uneventful but I did at least attempt a few throws which were duly blocked by my dan grade ukes.

So that’s two weeks running I’ve been to Yoshin Ryu, will I make it a hat trick next week???

Jadon


I’ve been very keen on revisiting the club as I really enjoyed the training on my last visit.

Yoshin Ryu has the strongest general level of newaza out of any club I have trained at, so it’s a great opportunity for me to learn to adapt to the judo style of groundwork, and they don’t have any secret to it, they clearly just put the time in on the ground. Can’t have upstart BJJ folk think they know it all!

Standing wise I received some useful corrections to my Tai otoshi and Uchimata.

Something that stuck with me this training session is not only are the dan grades helpful, they are also very encouraging. As a full time professional outdoor instructor I feel I have quite a bit of knowledge on good coaching and instructing, and positive encouragement is very important. We all like to pretend we are big tough men or maybe I’m just a wuss, but when someone compliments me in training it makes me feel good. And that makes me want to train harder to improve even more, and that makes me a better judoka.

So kudos to Yoshin Ryu, I feel battered and exhausted. I left a lot of DNA on the mat and I am going to hurt tomorrow. But mentally I feel reinvigorated to do MORE!.

Harder, better, faster, stronger.

Crushed again - Yoshin Ryu

I was a little disappointed that on my return to Yoshin Ryu Judo club there wasn’t more people on the mat (only 8) compared to the 20-30 that are normally there on a Thursday night. However the quality of those 8 persons present (not including myself of course) was what really mattered and this insured I had a high level lesson.

The warm up tonight was more intense than usual with lots of breakfalls, shrimping, shuttle runs with press ups and exercises that involved pulling your partner across the mat, with the duo finishing last getting press-ups for their efforts.

After we were suitably warmed up or knackered in my case, we worked on the set up for O-uchi-gari, practising pulling uke in to position to be able to execute the throw properly. Sensei Neil also stressed that we shouldn’t be hooking the leg but taking it out wide to the side, the same way Duncan showed me at DJC which I wrote about here . We then did a drill where, following the O-uchi-gari, we pulled uke up and then did a two footed Tomae-nage on them but instead of throwing them we did a number of reps of leg presses with Uke being the weight. This started off fairly easy but as the reps piled up and the lactic acid built up it got progressively more difficult.

Then, with our existing partner (I was already paired with a dan grade), Sensei called out techniques which we had to perform. Most of these techniques were dan grade theory level and as such I hadn’t heard of or seen them before. The Kyu grades, of which there were three present, were told to try and copy what our black belt partners did to us. I was particularly impressed with how easy I was able to replicate these throws, especially as I had never tried them before. I was also able to complete the throw with a decent amount of control and my uke mostly got a clean soft landing, as did I when I was thrown.

I was feeling pretty good about my Judo after this but a few rounds of Newaza randori soon put an end to that as I was ritually crushed by everyone I rolled with. To be fair I didn’t roll with anyone under 1st dan so I guess it was to be expected. My first spar was probably my most successful as I was only pinned once and was mostly able to keep my opponent from passing my guard. The next two people I sparred with were both 3rd dans and as such they were able to do pretty much whatever they wanted. My guard against them was passed in seconds and if I was able to get top position I was quickly swept and pinned, choked or arm barred.

Following a very quick water break we progressed on to Tachiwaza randori and I didn’t fare much better here either. I tried in vain to move my opponent in to a position where I could execute any of my throws but again they were all black belts so I shouldn’t be too harsh on myself.

Another hard but enjoyable class at Yoshin Ryu.