Seoi-Nage family of techniques

Drop seoi-nage is one of the most popular techniques in the world.

Judo techniques should not be taught in isolation. At the very least players should be taught a technique, its counter(s) and its combinations. Players can also be taught things like gripping situations and effective blocks for the technique.

Tonight we will work on the drop ippon-seoi-nage family of techniques. This will consist of:

i) Basic drop seoi-nage (the fundamentals)
ii) Ole Bischof variation
iii) Arm Trap variation
iv) Sode variation
v) Kouchi-Makikomi (combination)
vi) Cheng Osoto (combination)
vii) Ways to block and avoid
viii) Counters
- Yoko-Guruma (tachi-waza)
- Koshi-Jime (newaza)

Running a judo club ain't easy

It's sad to see this club in Australia closing down.

I was shocked and saddened to learn that the Noblesoul Academy, a judo club in Australia run by a Japanese sensei named Ryosuke Miwa, is closing down after more than three years of existence.

I can't claim to know Ryosuke well. I've only met him once when I did some randori with him during his visit to Singapore. He's a very strong and technical judo player. And through his blog postings, which were written in English, I could tell he was very philosophical about judo as well.

At one time he had a club for senior players. That closed down some time back and he then focused on children. Now, that's closing down too. I don't know the reasons why he is closing down his club but I do know that in general, running a judo club isn't easy.

I should know. I've been running one for slightly more than three years as well. Fortunately, we are not in danger of closing our club anytime soon. That doesn't mean it hasn't been a bumpy ride. Our club has seen many ups and downs.

We've seen our membership dwindle down to just a couple of players. At one point, our -52kg female player had only a -90kg male player as a training partner. But if there's one thing that judo teaches us, it's perseverance. So we hung on and we kept plugging away on a wing and a prayer.

A big breakthrough happened when we decided to do online marketing in a big way. We've always had an online presence from the start: a website, a blog and a Facebook Page. But we didn't really invest a lot of time on these until about a year ago. That's when we decided to start blogging regularly and making videos for our Facebook Page. Later on we started live-streaming our sessions. All these things helped to raise awareness about our club.

Judo is not a popular sport in Malaysia. It's very hard to recruit beginners. And even if you do manage to recruit some, it's a challenge to retain them long enough for them to get good at judo and therefore want to stay on.

So the first challenge is recruiting people to your club. The second one is retaining them. Both take a lot of effort.

Different clubs have different ways of recruitment. I've heard of clubs in Singapore doing on-the-ground recruitment giving away brochures and balloons and holding demos and competitions in shopping malls.

Our approach has been to do our publicity online. Through trial and error we have found three things work really well:
i) Blogging: In the age of Instagram, you never would have thought blogging would work but our blog has quite a following which shows that people still do want to read about judo.
ii) Live-streaming: You never would have thought live-streaming would work either. But whenever we live-stream our training sessions we get quite a lot of views. I guess people want to see how our sessions are conducted.
iii) Video highlights: Something else we like to do are short highlights of drills that we do or best moments from randori or shiai. These are quite popular.

It's important to have a strong online presence because when people are searching online for judo clubs, they will naturally want to know more about your club. A few pictures here and there will never properly convey what training is like. But if they can read blog postings, watch live-streams of whole sessions and view highlights of the best moments, they would have a good idea of what to expect if they join.

More than a few new newcomers have told us that they had followed our blog or Facebook Page for some time before approaching us. There are probably several others out there right now reading our blog, watching our videos and contemplating whether to make that call to arrange for a trial session. It might take them weeks or months to decide but eventually they will come around to it. So, we know that content marketing is crucial. It's something we will continue to do.

As mentioned earlier, recruiting is only part of the challenge. The other part, which is just as challenging (if not more so) is retaining them. It's very important to have a critical mass of players on the mat. When players come for training and they see only one or two other players on the mat, they get disheartened. Or when a girl comes for training and she sees only one other girl (or none at all) on the mat, it's also very discouraging. In contrast, everybody loves it when they come for training and see 20 people -- a good mix of guys and girls -- on the mat ready to train.

It's not possible to have a full attendance. When Player A is free, Player B is not, etc. So, you can never have all of them on the mat at the same time. But what's important is that you have a decent number of players for training at each session. The ideal is to have about 20 people on the mat. That would be great. But that's rare. If you can get eight to 12, that's a really good number.

Key to that is having a big base and having a core group of dedicated players. If you have a big base and only half of them show up, you'd still have a decent number. Let's say you have 30 players (a number we have not reached yet), even if half show up that's 15 which is pretty good. Even if one-third show up, which is 10, that's still pretty good. So it's important to keep recruiting to grow your numbers so that you have a big base to work with.

The other thing is have a core group of dedicated players. These are the ones who are really keen and on training and will come two to three times per week. There will always be some who can only come for training irregularly. Maybe once a week, maybe once in two weeks, maybe once a month. But if you have that core group which is always there training, you can always have a good session.

Let's say you have a core group of about eight players and you have two to four irregulars who decided to attend that day's session, you'd then have 10 to 12 players on the mat, which is pretty good. Even on a bad day when you have no irregulars coming for training, you'll still have that core group of eight which is sufficient to have a good session. So having a core group is crucial.

At KL Judo we've doing something that's really different, which flies against the face of conventional wisdom. We've built a club for seniors and we train competitively.

If you ask most judo people for their views on what you should do to have a thriving judo club, they would say firstly, build a club for kids. Everybody knows kids are the "cash cow" for judo. Secondly, they would say make it a recreational club. Don't train them so hard. Don't emphasize competition. Make it light and easy. That's not our approach.

We aren't going against conventional wisdom just to be different. We are doing it because we believe in what we are doing. We think there are adults out there who want to train in judo and we want to provide an avenue for them to do that. (We do have a few students training with us but these are not kids. They are teens who are able to train with adults).

Judo is a safe sport. There are many rules in place to minimize the chances of injury. But it is undeniably a hard, full-contact sport. The only way to really experience the sport as it's meant to be is to train competitively. It's also by training competitively that our players benefit from the lessons in life that judo is supposed to impart. Things like perseverance, hard work, discipline, fighting spirit, creativity and so on. All these come into play only when you are training competitively. If you take it light and easy and don't mind getting thrown about, you will never learn any of these things. And frankly, you won't enjoy judo. That's why randori is such a big part of our training and so is shiai. These things give our players a chance to test their skills and to gauge their progress.

It's not easy building up and running a private, competitive judo club aimed at adults. But it's what we believe in and something we will continue to work hard on.

Preparing for yellow belt

Time for grading soon!

A bunch of our players have been training quite hard for a couple of months now. Some of them will soon be ready to do grading for their yellow belt.

We set quite a high standard at KL Judo and your yellow belt requirement is actually a lot tougher than in most clubs. We feel this is the right move. I want our players to be very technically sound so we won't just give out belts just for attendance. They need to know a decent number of throws, groundwork and Japanese terms to get their yellow belt.

Tomorrow, most of the players attending will be white belts so we will go through the entire syllabus and start getting them ready for their grading next month.

After they are done with that we'll proceed to randori. On Sundays, when are trainings are in the afternoon, we won't be doing randori during the fasting month. But on weekdays are trainings are in the evening after breaking of fast, so randori is fine. Our players are able to drink and rehydrate themselves.

Sunday Shiai (May 20, 2018)

It's always very fulfilling when you have a really good session where everyone enjoyed the training.

Sometimes, you just know it's a good session and so far we've had two good Sunday sessions in a row.

Last Sunday, we had our first Open Day where a bunch of visitors came and trained with us. One signed up and another one said she would do so after her semester ends next month. In judo, which is a super niche sport, every recruit counts so we are pretty happy with the outcome of the Open Day.

This Sunday was the first one we've had since fasting month began. About half of our members are Muslims so there's bound to be a reduction in attendees this month, especially since our training time on Sundays is 2pm to 5pm. Still, we had four players who were fasting who came for training anyway.

Normally, we do high intensity drills for the first two hours. But for this month, we have decided we will do lighter training, so instead we focused on technical work. We started with newaza doing leg-insertion koshi-jime. Then we worked on drop seoi-nage.

After that we did some shiai or mock competitions. There are not a lot of competitions in Malaysia so in order to give our players a taste of competitions, we decided to hold our own shiais. It went over really well and everybody enjoyed the experience.

By the time we were done with that, there was still about an hour left. So, for the first time we had a completely "free practice" period where the players could do whatever they liked. Some wanted to learn certain techniques so I asked Nigel to teach them some stuff. Some preferred to work on fine-tuning some new throws they learned. Some wanted to do some randori. There was room for everything and everyone was busy doing their own things.

This free practice session worked out remarkably well. Loose and light, this session was very different from the highly-structured, intense trainings we normally have. It's good to introduce some change and variety to the training, otherwise it gets stale and boring.

I'm already looking forward to the next session.

Technical training & drills

Technical training and drills for this lot.

On Friday, we had a tiny group training -- just four people. Maybe it was due to the fasting month just starting. Or maybe everyone was just too preoccupied with something else to come for training. But at least we had four people and that's enough to have a productive training.

Two of the players were white belts so I went through the yellow belt syllabus with them. The other two were blue belts and they did drills. We ended the session with some light randori. Three out of the four players had been fasting and although they had already broken fast (and eaten dinner) it was still quite tiring for them to train after a whole day of fasting.

This coming month will be a challenge because easily half of our members will be fasting. When the training is at night it's not so bad but on Sundays we train in the afternoon. So we have to come up with some way to make the training less strenuous.

Drills and shiai

Drills are crucial for developing competition skills.

How do you prepare your players for competition if they don't have a lot of training partners to randori with and when there are not a lot of competitions around? The answer is: Drills and Shiai.

If you have a situation where there are 50 players on the mat doing daily randori for two hours every day, you don't need to do drills. In the course of doing those many hours of randori with a wide range of partners, each player would have come up with all kinds of situations. If they do this for a prolonged period of time, they would become capable of dealing with different types of opponents and can deal with different kinds of scenarios.

In contrast, if you have only a handful of players who spar with the same partners over and over again, they become used to the fighting styles of their partners. Over time, they become very good at fighting against those type of styles -- but only those type. They won't be used to fighting other styles because their exposure is limited.

For example, let's say you only have four people training regularly and all four are right-handers. These players would be familiar with fighting right-handers but not left-handers. Or let's say all four don't particularly like to do groundwork. Just training with each other will not prepare them for a match against a groundwork specialist.

When you have 50 players on the mat, all of them black belts, it's a different story. You will be forced to fight all kinds of styles, right-handers, left-handers, people who like groundwork, people who don't, etc.

In Japan, they do tons of randori. It's not unusual for a randori session to go on for two hours and players get between 10 to 15 rounds of randori each session. That's not possible in most clubs around the world. There simply aren't enough players.

So what you can do if you only have a small group is to have them do situational drills. These are drills that simulate or mimic a particular scenario: a left-handed high gripper, for example. Let's say the players are all right-handed. The only way you can prepare for them to fight a leftie with a penchant for high grips is to get the players you have to simulate such a situation and get each of them to try fending off that grip and imposing their own grip. This would not naturally happen in a randori situation because none of them is left-handed in the first place.

There are not a lot of competitions in Malaysia or in our neighboring countries. The lack of competition opportunities can be offset by having your own little shiais in the dojo. These are more focused and intense than regular randori where players fight each other as if they were in competition. It's still not quite the same as taking part in actual competitions but it more closely resembles a competition situation than regular randori. Shiais take up a lot of time because you can only have two people doing it at a time. But they are worth doing because only doing drills and randori is simply not enough.

We are a small club. As such we will be doing more drills and shiais in the weeks and months to come as we prepare our players for competitions in the second half of the year.

Open Day Review

We had our first Open Day last Sunday. Some people who said they would come failed to show up but that was to be expected. But a few unexpected guests also showed up so I guess it more or less evened out.

As planned we worked on koshi-jime for groundwork and ippon-seoi-nage/ippon-osoto for standing. Then we did randori.

Not sure how many of the newbies will sign up but one already did and he's a welcome addition. Another one said she would start only after her semester ends cos she will have more time then. There were a few others who said, "Maybe...". So, we'll see.

These types of recruitment drives are necessary to inject new blood into the club. A natural amount of turnover is to be expected. Some people leave the club and some new ones come in. The important thing is to have a core group of people who make up the foundation of the club and we are lucky to have that. 

Sometimes, a small group isn't a bad thing

More often than not, our training sessions involve small groups.

In general, it's better to have a bigger crowd than a smaller one when it comes to training. Everybody likes it when there's a big bunch of people to train with. More training partners means more variety when it comes to randori.

But sometimes -- actually oftentimes -- it's hard to get a group of judokas to assemble together for a training. This is especially true if you are talking about adults. And players in both Sunway Judo and KL Judo are adults. Unlike most other clubs in Malaysia, our membership does not mainly comprise kids and young teens. Our players are mainly university students and working adults.

University students have exams, assignments and social activities that sometimes get in the way of training. Working adults, meanwhile, have overtime, business trips and family obligations.

As a result of our membership demographics, we often don't have big groups in our training. But I always maintain that even if you have just one other person to train with, you can have a good training.

When there are fewer people, it's possible to give more individual attention to players. So those that do attend actually benefit a lot despite not having many partners to randori with. But I'd also argue that even when there are fewer randori partners, you can still make the most of the situation by adjust the kind of randori you do.

When there are lots of people on the mat, you naturally want to do free-flow randori where you fight within your comfort zone. You do the techniques you are familiar with and try to overcome your opponent. It's a test of your fighting skills.

When there are fewer people, randori can become more of a "drills" session where you set out to try stuff you aren't that familiar with but want to master. Of course you could do that even when there's a big group but when there's a lot of people on the mat you just want to have fun sparring. Drills, in contrast, are not fun. And randori done as drills are not fun either. They are designed to familiarize you with something that is probably uncomfortable for you to do (just because it's new stuff). But drills are necessary and good for your development.

So whether there's a big group or a small group, it doesn't matter. You can still have a good training!

KL Judo Open Day (Sunday, May 13)

We are pretty excited about our first Open Day where we'll have a bunch of visitors coming to train with us. Most of them are white belts but a handful are colored belts. It should make for a really good training session and hopefully a few of them will decide to join our club.

We believe the best warm-ups are judo games, especially ones that involve cooperation and teamwork. In the past year we have experimented with a few fun games and there are some that are particularly good for big groups. Two that come to mind are the "The Dojo Ball Game" and the "Zombie Game".

It's always a challenge when you have a mixed group of people with different experience levels but we believe we have a way to make it work. Before we start on technical training (for newaza and tachi-waza), we'll split the group into two with the beginners in one group and the experienced ones in another. The beginners will work on some basic forward rolls, backward rolls etc. The experienced ones will work on some gripping drills.

As usual we will begin our session with newaza. This will be done as a group. I'll try to pair each beginner with an experienced player. We'll work on the koshi-jime family of techniques. We'll start with the standard koshi-jime where tori secures uke around the armpit area. This is an absolutely classical version of the technique that still works even at the top level. However, the more common version involves tori holding uke's trouser area and we will work on that too. If there is time, we will work on an even more advanced version that involves tori inserting his leg across uke's abdomen, similar to a juji-gatame entry situation. So, for newaza it's:

a) classical koshi-jime (armpit grip)
b) modified koshi-jime (trousers grip)
c) advanced koshi-jime (leg insertion)

We will start with (a), then proceed to (b). If there is enough time, we will move on to (c), otherwise we will simply move on to tachi-waza.

Tachi-waza will also be done as a group. We will work on a trio of inter-related techniques centred around ippon-seoi-nage. From the ippon-seoi grip, it's possible to also do osoto-gari and kouchi-makikomi. Whether we get to do all three will depend on time. If we progress fast, we'll do all three. If not, just the first two. So, for tachi-waza it's:

a) ippon-seoi-nage
b) ippon osoto
c) kouchi-makikomi

We always end our sessions with randori. With a big group, we'll need to allocate at least an hour for this. The dojo is big enough to have six pairs (12 players) on the mat at any one time. We'll do a moto-dachi approach whereby six of our more experienced players will stay on the mat for three consecutive rounds of randori. Then we have a new batch of six players take their place as moto-dachi. And so on.

We believe even beginners should do randori (yes, on their first day). It's what we did at Sunway Judo Club and it's worked out really well. What's important is that they partner up with an experienced player who knows how to take care of them. So, on our Open Day, everyone will get a chance to randori, even absolute beginners.

Progressing at a steady clip

Our Sunway class is progressing steadily. This is only the start of the second month of training for these players and they've already learned some basic hold-downs, several throws and for the first time, a strangle.

I taught them the traditional form of koshi-jime, which is a pretty basic (although very effective strangle). Most of them managed to learn it quite fast. We also revised kesa-gatame and yoko-shiho-gatame before we moved to standing.

For standing, we worked on koshi-guruma, which is similar to ogoshi in a way except the grip is around uke's neck. The players took to that quite well too. They were told to do uchikomi followed by a throw onto the crash pad.

Then we moved on to randori. I am a big proponent of randori and I've had these students do randori from Day 1. We are very careful and always have an experienced player on the mat to partner with the beginners. So far, so good. The players get to try their techniques and they managed to get some fun out of the training. The best part of training is, after all, the randori.

The club has a steady group of enthusiastic members and that's important. I look forward to the coming weeks and months as the players continue to develop into strong judokas and as the club continues to grow from strength to strength.