There are many things that contribute towards your success as a judo player. For sure you need strength and stamina. You need to have gripping skills. You need technical skills for throwing and groundwork. You need mental strength -- patience, perseverance and self-belief are all important. But there's one other element you need that is often overlooked. You need mat sense.
What is mat sense, exactly? It refers to instincts and abilities that allow you to react to situations during a randori or shiai. It's not something you can train up doing uchikomi or nagekomi. Those are usually done from a static situation and do not contribute to mat sense. Even when done in a moving situation, there is no resistance involved and it's usually done in a very controlled situation. So that doesn't really help either.
To develop mat sense, you need to do a lot of randori. You've gotta spend time on the mat, doing newaza randori and tachi-waza randori. And of course ideally, you do randori with a lot of different training partners (always a challenge in Malaysia where most clubs don't have many members).
When you look at judo players from sports schools, they have excellent mat sense. Whatever their opponents do, they know how to react instinctively, without hesitation, without having to think. In a flash, they react appropriately to win the match. If you were to ask them afterwards what they had in mind when they did their move they probably couldn't tell you because they reacted instinctively.
It's because they spend a lot of time on the mat. Sports school players train twice a day and at least one of those sessions involve randori. When you're doing randori everyday you can't help but develop good mat sense.
What do you do when you don't have many training partners? Of course that's not an ideal situation but you've gotta work with what you've got. Sure, it gets a bit stale after a while, always doing randori with the same partners but it's better than not doing it.
Also, as your training partner gets used to your moves, they get better at defending, which forces you to get better at attacking. So it's not a bad thing at all to have a regular training partner, even if it's one whose moves you know very well and vice versa.
It helps if the both of you have an exploratory mindset where you don't just stick to the same game plan every time. You try out new techniques, new maneuvers, new grips, new combinations. When you do that, it helps to mitigate the fact that you don't have many different training partners to do randori with.
Many things, you can do at your home club. Uchikomi, nagekomi, strength training, stamina training -- all these things you can do back home. You don't need to travel for that. But randori, you'll need to. There's really no way around this. You will need to travel to get some variety in your randori.
 |
| Mat sense -- or knowing instinctively what to do in any given situation -- comes from spending hours and hours on the mat. |
What is mat sense, exactly? It refers to instincts and abilities that allow you to react to situations during a randori or shiai. It's not something you can train up doing uchikomi or nagekomi. Those are usually done from a static situation and do not contribute to mat sense. Even when done in a moving situation, there is no resistance involved and it's usually done in a very controlled situation. So that doesn't really help either.
To develop mat sense, you need to do a lot of randori. You've gotta spend time on the mat, doing newaza randori and tachi-waza randori. And of course ideally, you do randori with a lot of different training partners (always a challenge in Malaysia where most clubs don't have many members).
When you look at judo players from sports schools, they have excellent mat sense. Whatever their opponents do, they know how to react instinctively, without hesitation, without having to think. In a flash, they react appropriately to win the match. If you were to ask them afterwards what they had in mind when they did their move they probably couldn't tell you because they reacted instinctively.
 |
| There's no way around it. You've got to do lots of randori. |
What do you do when you don't have many training partners? Of course that's not an ideal situation but you've gotta work with what you've got. Sure, it gets a bit stale after a while, always doing randori with the same partners but it's better than not doing it.
Also, as your training partner gets used to your moves, they get better at defending, which forces you to get better at attacking. So it's not a bad thing at all to have a regular training partner, even if it's one whose moves you know very well and vice versa.
It helps if the both of you have an exploratory mindset where you don't just stick to the same game plan every time. You try out new techniques, new maneuvers, new grips, new combinations. When you do that, it helps to mitigate the fact that you don't have many different training partners to do randori with.
Many things, you can do at your home club. Uchikomi, nagekomi, strength training, stamina training -- all these things you can do back home. You don't need to travel for that. But randori, you'll need to. There's really no way around this. You will need to travel to get some variety in your randori.
No comments:
Post a Comment