Elite training

In a world that's in permanent motion and which is rapidly evolving, judo clubs too must change with the times. One of the things we will be doing in the second half of this year is incorporating kids into our training program. This is really a long time coming. We've had a lot of requests for this over the years and it's about time we finally extend our groundbreaking judo training system to training kids as well.

The other thing that we will work on introducing is an elite training program. As mentioned in a previous blog posting, our club is primarily a recreational judo club for adults. Unlike the sports schools and other government-funded clubs in the country, we are not primarily a competition-oriented club. We only have a handful of really serious competitors and the rest would be best described as recreational competitors who do it just for fun. That said, over the years we've also had various inquiries about expanding our competition training program. As with the children's classes, perhaps it's high time we looked at offering dedicated elite training sessions.

I've long held the view that for a country like Malaysia where judo is very niche and where there are very few elite judo athletes (those who are serious about competition), we cannot follow the Japan model which is designed for a country where there is huge judo grassroots and where top training centres can easily have 30 to 40 black belts on the mat.

When you don't have mass, by definition your players won't have a wide variety of randori partners. To make up for that, you need to do a lot of work on situational drills, strategic gripping, seamless transitions and competition tactics. We have exceptionally strong modules for each of these things.

As for techniques itself, of course you work on enhancing and improving your players' existing tokui-waza but you also supplement these with modern moves used by international players. Competition judo is evolving at such a rapid clip and interesting new trends (in tachi-waza and newaza) can clearly be observed from the IJF World Tour.

If someone says "Mollaei's side takedown" or "Baker's reverse seoi" or "Funakubo Roll" or "Modified Gerbi Choke", you should be familiar with these. If not, don't worry because we are. In fact, we are fully up-to-date with all the notable competition techniques being practiced in top dojos around the world as we are constantly exchanging information with our wide network of contacts in all the top judo countries.

We also believe very strongly in visual aids in the form of latest competition video clips. We use these to illustrate latest moves and strategies but also to illustrate latest IJF rules, which all competitors must be aware of. We also shoot videos of our sessions so our players can revise what they learned. And we provide them with footage of their randoris so they can analyze their performance. At KL Judo, we believe strongly in video.

Lastly, randori, randori, randori! World Champion Neil Adams says that top competitors should aim for at least 70 quality randoris per week. That's an average of 10 per day. That sounds like a lot but the Japanese elite players do up to 15 a day. There's no way you can get anywhere close to that kind of volume with recreational classes only. That's why elite sessions are needed. And on top of that, you'll probably also need to have one session a week dedicated just to randori.

So, to recap, our elite training program would cover:
a) Modern, competition techniques
b) Situational drills
c) Gripping strategies
d) Transition practice
e) Competition tactics
f) Video analysis

Sounds interesting? This is just a teaser. We hope to launch this exciting program in the second half of this year. Stay tuned for the highlights (Yes, we will share some video clips. At KL Judo we always do!).

If you're interested in this program, contact us.