Grips, nagekomi, drills, randori, shiai

If a judo player happens to be a student of a sports school or a professional athlete, they would be training a few times a day. They have volume in their training. The sheer amount of training they do and the number of different training partners that they have would mean that over time, simply through trial and error, they would have discovered effective ways to grip, throw, outsmart and defeat an opponent.

But few people have that luxury. Most people aren't sports school students or professional athletes and can at most train three times a week, for perhaps two hours at a time. To make it worse, usually they'd only have one or two judokas their size and skill level. In such a situation, you can't learn through trial and error. There is not enough volume of training (and training partners) for you to pick up skill-sets this way.

Instead, you have to train in a smart and systematic way. At KL Judo Centre, we have a decent-sized crowd but it's nothing like in the sports schools. On a good day, we'd be lucky to have a dozen people on the mat. So, we have to have a systematic approach to training to get our athletes competition-ready.

I believe there are 5 key factors that are critical to success in competition.

i) Gripping strategy, tactics and technique
ii) Nagekomi on crash pads
iii) Situational drills
iv) Purposeful randori
v) Shiai

Gripping
A sound understanding of stance and gripping styles is important in order to devise a strategy to deal with every situation. You will also need some tactics and techniques to deal with a constantly changing scenario. No huge mass of training partners means you can't learn this through trial and error. It needs to be taught and drilled.

Nagekomi
These have to be done with full force and to do this repeatedly, you need to have a crash pad or uke will suffer greatly.

DrillsAgain, unless you have a room full of people to train with, you won't encounter many different body types, grips, fighting styles, etc. So, you have to simulate those situations through drills and practice your response to each scenario.

Randori
I am a strong believer in randori. If there are not many partners, just do randori multiple times with the same partners but do each one with a set objective in mind. In one randori, you can focus on trying a new technique, in the next one, perhaps focus on how to block and counter their favorite techniques, and for the third one, try out different grips to find out which one is most effective for a particular technique. And so on. Be purposeful in your randori. It doesn't matter if your randori partner is the same person over and over again.

Shiai
If there are not many competitions for you to go to, do shiai in the club where you compete in realistic situations (4 minute matches, with someone acting as a referee to call out shido penalties and so on). This simulation will give you more exposure to competition scenarios which you will need to become a good competitor.