Instituting "Randori Night"

The importance of randori for competition skills development cannot be emphasized enough. Yes, technical training is important, drills are important, strategy is important, fitness and strength are important, so is flexibility etc. But at the end of the day, none of those things will help you in competition if you don't have enough randori.

To become good at a sport, you have to play it. That's true whether it's football, badminton or rugby. You can't just do drills and exercises. You have to play the game to become proficient at it. And so it is with judo as well.

That's why I find it astounding whenever I hear about judo clubs with training sessions that include very little randori (like 15 minutes of it) or none at all (yes, such clubs do exist). I guess that's okay if you took up judo to learn kata but not if you wish to become a competitor.

In Japan they have tons of randori. According to former US coach and World Champion Jimmy Pedro, who has spent considerable time training in Japan, sometimes they have up to 15 randoris in a single session. The South Koreans are really into randori too. World and Olympic Champion Jeon Ki-Young says they typically do up to 10 randoris in a single session.

It may be too ambitious to aim for 15 randoris per session but I do think it's realistic and pragmatic for players to aim for between eight to 10 randoris in a session, especially when there are lots of partners around.

Sometimes achieving those numbers may be difficult due to lack of training partners. When you have only one partner to train with, a realistic target is to aim for five or six randoris in a single session.

The ideal of course is to have a room full of training partners so you have more variety. I've always said, in order to get the best out of your randoris, you need three kinds of randori partners:
i) those who are higher level than you
ii) those who are on the same level as you
iii) those who lower level than you

Higher level
A higher level player will push you to your limits. This is necessary for improvement. Enough said.

Equal level
It's good to fight someone of equal level because they can give you the right amount of resistance to make it hard for you to throw; they can potentially counter you when you are careless; and of course, they can potentially throw you, which gives you a chance to develop defence and countering skills. Do not make the mistake of treating the randori as a shiai though. Fight hard but don't be afraid of "losing". It doesn't matter if you get thrown or countered. Randori is the time to try stuff. If you treat it as as shiai, you will be conservative and be afraid to try anything for fear of opening up and getting thrown or countered. Then you won't learn anything. So treat randori as randori.

Lower level
If the people you fight are all better than or equal level with you, you won't have many opportunities to feel what it's like to throw someone, especially with new techniques. The less experienced player is the one whom you should try new techniques on. This will give you the feeling for the throw. And then you can slowly learn to get it to work for you, even against stronger players.

Fight Night
In view of the fact that randori is so important, we will be having a randori night every Friday. What that means is the entire Friday session will be dedicated to just randori. We might do a bit of gripping drills at the start but essentially Friday night is fight night.

Our dojo is big enough that we can have four pairs on the mat at once and still safely allow them to transition from standing to ground (and ground to standing). This is important given the new IJF rules. This is what we will be practicing -- a holistic randori that flows seamlessly between tachi-waza and newaza and vice versa.

If you are in the KL/PJ area, considering joining us. If you are not in these neck of the woods but would to see what our sessions are like, we will be live-streaming our Friday session starting at 9pm. See you online!