First Sunday training after Raya

Nice group of judokas back to training after the Raya break.

For the whole month of ramadhan, our Muslim players had to train while fasting on Sundays because our Sunday sessions are in the afternoons. Today we had our first training since Hari Raya.

Since no one is fasting anymore, we had a lot more randori than usual. I had our more experienced players do motodachi, which is to basically stay out there for many consecutive randoris while new partners would come onto the mat to take them on. This is very tiring but exactly what they needed.

Today was also the start of our koshi-waza series. Over the next few weeks we will be focusing on hip techniques. Today, we covered Ogoshi, Koshi-Guruma and Tsuri-Goshi. All are very similar with only the gripping being a bit different.

I had the players do uchikomi followed by nagekomi on the crash pad. It's important that they do the full movement and throw with full impact to learn how to throw properly. For that, you need a crash pad.

For newaza, we worked on the Matsumoto Roll, a turnover synonymous with Olympic and double World Champion Kaori Matsumoto. It's actually quite a rare turnover. Not many people do it besides Matsumoto. And even she doesn't do it all that often. Even people who are aware of it find it hard to deconstruct the move. I recall when I first saw it on a highlight clip, I asked myself: "How the heck do you do that?"

I had to look for more clips of her doing that technique and there weren't many. But from the few that I was able to find, I was able to deconstruct and reverse engineer it.

Next week, we will work on harai-goshi and trap choke (a strangle done from a similar gripping situation as the Matsumoto Roll).