Instruction vs Osmosis

When players have a lot of opportunities to do randori as well as shiai, it's possible for them to pick up a lot of good fighting skills even without much or proper instruction.

They achieve this through osmosis. By sparring with many good training partners, they naturally pick up winning techniques and habits.

Take for example, the skill of gripping. Even if a player has never been taught anything about gripping, if he spends enough time sparring with good players, he will develop good gripping skills. Either that or he'll drop out of judo. But if stays on, he will sooner or later pick up those skills. He has to, in order to survive.

Learning through osmosis only works if there is a lot of opportunities to do randori and lots of different players to train with. That's not usually the case at most places though.

If you don't have the luxury of learning through osmosis, you have to learn via instruction. If you are lucky, and have a good coach, you can learn a lot that way. I was lucky and had a really good competition coach who taught me the foundations of what I know about competition judo.

You can also learn from videos these days. There are a few online resources offering premium content for a fee. There's also lots of free content online via YouTube and social media. Some of it is very good. And, of course you can do your own analysis of international judo competitions and competitors and learn from that.

I did all those things, and more, when I was starting out. I bought tons of judo books, tried to collect as many instructional videos as possible and watched as many competition videos as I could get my hands on. You have to be like a sponge, soaking up all the knowledge that's out there.

In my club, I try to provide a very systematic approach to learning techniques but I also try to foster an environment where people can get to do a lot of randori and also some mock shiai. We do lots of these, even though we don't have anywhere near the number of players in top judo places like the university judo clubs in Japan.

When it comes to learning judo, it's not an either/or thing. It's not learning via osmosis vs learning via instruction. It can (and should) be both.