I always planned on picking up another martial art once I reached shodan in Aikido (which happened in April). I couldn't decide whether to return to Judo or start studying karate again. I decided on Judo, and today we resumed my training. I made it to green belt a couple years ago, before quitting to focus on Aikido, so it's going to take me a little time to shake the cobwebs off.
We started with a couple of excercises from koshiki no kata. Really cool demonstrations that disrupted uke's balance in simple ways. Next we practiced our footsweep drill, as well as some solo walking drills. I need to remember to "wipe away uke's footprint" during footsweeps.
We worked on deashi barai, and that one felt surprisingly good to me. We did kouchigari from a failed deashi, and while I was no expert, kouchi felt better to me than it used to. Kosotogari, on the other hand, seemed more difficult than I remember. We played with hiza garuma for a while, and that felt fine. The gentle "foot prop" felt better than I remember. We played with relaxing as a counter to hiza, and being patient to make the foot sweeps work. We took a brief look at ippon seoinage; I've never been great at that one.
We ended the class by looking at getting a modified osotogari from Aikido's release 1, and release 1 into choke or control.
The plan is to take some time to catch me up to where I was before I quit. If I use a 5 point scale to describe how the basic techniques felt to me today (5 being only as good as I've ever felt about the throw before I stopped training, and 1 being feeling like the first time I've tried it), I would rate them:
Deashi: 5
Kouchi: 3
Kosoto: 1
Hiza: 4
In any case, I'm really excited to be doing Judo again. With the perspective of my longer training in Aikido, I can be a little more patient with my feeling like such a newb in Judo; I'll get it eventually.
You did great today.
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