Judo, 1/10/09

In today’s Judo lesson, we started off with the ground mobility cycle, to warm up. We did some more low-flow ground randori that was really fun. It was “positional randori”, so we weren’t trying for submissions or chokes, just trying to achieve and maintain a superior position. Fun, fun, fun, but again, extremely exhausting. There were a couple times I said “Ok, I can’t breathe anymore.” It was really wearing me out! Pat talked about how sometimes, positions can be submissions. I look forward to him blogging about that.

I found that I’m really having trouble shrimping / hip escaping with someone’s weight on me. That’s pretty fundamental, so I really need to get better at it. Pat gave me some pointers about getting my center out from under top guy’s center. We worked on a few specific things like the uphill escape, and how I need to sort of roll my weight onto the opponent’s head to make it work better. That was something I was leaving out.

I asked Pat what he thought I needed to focus on for yellow belt level proficiency. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not just concerned about rank. I’m just pretty OCD about stuff, and I try to track my actual progress compared to where I should be for the number of classes I’ve attended. By my reckoning, I will have the minimum number of classes required for yellow belt by the end of January. My goal has been to have achieved yellow belt proficiency by the time I have the required number of classes, whether I get the belt or not. I don’t care that much about the belt; it’ll just be a different color. And if it takes me longer to get to the next rank then so be it…it’s just a certain skill level I’m shooting for. Anyway, the things Pat mentioned were:

1) Working on the ground mobility cycle while controlling bottom guy’s arms, and placing my arms and hands where they need to be.
2) My escapes from kesagatame and munegatame.
3) More practice time with training partners (there’s only so much I can do at home, solo, but I do what I can)

We moved on to standing randori, which I still stink at, but I’m getting more used to it. We worked on deashi barai, and how when you escape from one, it becomes a deashi of your very own to use against your opponent. A few times in randori we had 3 or 4 consecutive escape/counter cycles, and it looked like “partnered clogging” or something from Riverdance.

Pat talked about 3 types of foot techniques:

1) sweeps, which affect unloaded (non-weight-bearing) feet or legs
2) Reaps, which affect loaded feet or legs
3) Props which stop a moving foot or leg, or prevent a foot or leg from moving in the first place

Then Pat showed me how deashi barai and kosotogari, which are sweeps, could be done as props instead. Really cool stuff. For instance, If I sweep uke’s foot too far in deashi, I can let it come back down and stop it (prop it) just before he steps down with it. It’s so sneaky! This requires changing your foot from a “doer” to a “feeler”…from an “effector” to a “detector”. It will take a lot of practice before I can do it on the fly, but what a great concept. Blew my mind with how well it was working (when Pat did it, anyway).

Another really fun (and tiring) Judo lesson!