New program, new website, new online offerings to come...

It's often said that every crisis presents opportunities as well. During regular times, we're all so caught up with day-to-day matters, it's hard to find the time (or energy or mindset) to think strategically for the future. Now, during lock-down, we have that time.

We will be introducing some news things when the club reopens. While most of these ideas are still in development (and are very much a work-in-progress), I am able to talk about a few things that everyone can look forward to.

1. The first one is a wrestling-based class. I say "wrestling-based" because what we'll be doing is working on wrestling techniques that are applicable to judo. We won't be learning wrestling per se, just wrestling techniques. So, we won't bother with wrestling rules or how to score in wrestling. We'll just learn techniques that can be used in judo. This will go on for an hour, once a week. The other hour will be for randori.

2. The second thing is circuit training for judo. This will consist mainly of High-Intensity-Interval-Training modules, specially designed for judo. We've done some of these things as warm-up exercises but we think it might be a good idea to have a full hour devoted to just circuit training, once a week. The other hour will be randori.

3. We might have a dedicated session on judo applications for self-defense but that's not something that we'll be introducing straight away and we'd only do this if there's obvious demand for it. There is a strong interest in wrestling and circuit training so those two, It's a definite go.

4. Before the lock-down happened, we had successfully run two pilot programs of our internal shiai. This is basically our internal competition. We will make this a permanent program, run once a month (usually in the middle of the month) once we reopen so that our players can expect to be able to compete at least once a month. This will help prepare them for competitions at the end of the year, such as the Senior Nationals and the Malaysian Open, which we assume will carry on.

5. Over the past year or so we have regularly offered livestreams of our training sessions. This is to give people a chance to see what our training is like. Livestreams are not really not designed for remote learning because the cameras are too far away and the instruction can't be seen or heard properly. When we reopen, we'll start doing proper, close-up recordings of every session. This will be made available for free to our club members. Non-members living outside of the Klang Valley who wish to do remote learning might be allowed to have digital membership but I've yet to decide on a pricing for that.