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.