Some changes afoot

This lock-down period of forced downtime for the has been a blessing in disguise. For one thing, the support we've gotten from most of our members affirms the fact that we do have a committed core group of members.

Shortly after the lock-down was announced, I (like many other judo coaches) worked out a worst case scenario projection and I concluded that for us, that would mean about 50% of our members would drop out. As it turns out it's looking like there will be a drop-out rate of only 20%. Which is pretty good by any standards.

I've been putting the forced downtime to good use. In order to continue to provide some lessons to my players, I decided to write down a lot of the conceptual stuff that I've always wanted to teach them but never got around to doing in a systematic way. Now, with the benefit of a lot of downtime, I am able to organize my thoughts about various judo concepts and write them down for posterity.

I've also used the time to chat with other judo coaches around the world and exchange ideas. I noticed that several of the coaches from the West have started to record down their knowledge of the sport in video format. This is something I've wanted to do for a long time too but everyday training got in the way.

Once the club re-opens, I'm going to put aside some time to codify my three decades worth of judo knowledge. Much of it will be done in video format but some of it in text format too. Certain things, especially technical matters, are best illustrated via video. But conceptual stuff sometimes is better described through words. This will be a big project that could last well over a years as I will work on it gradually.

Over the past four years or so, we've posted a lot of video clips. These were mostly highlight videos and some livestreams. None were designed to capture in detail the instruction I was giving to my players. In the future, I will be doing better recordings so that the lessons can be captured and posted up on our club's closed Facebook Group so that members can revised those lessons as often as they like. It will not be open to non-members though. There has to be some privileges to membership! If there is serious interest from non-members I might consider offering them access for a small fee for digital membership.

The other big thing I plan to do is to introduce some new programs to complement the judo training. One of them is wrestling. We will do some wrestling in order to facilitate learning for certain skill sets that will our players an edge. The types of wrestling I'm looking at are Greco-Roman Wrestling and some form of Belt Wrestling. I've asked a diverse sampling of our member and they all seem to like this idea.

Another idea is to dedicate at least one of the sessions to all kinds of judo circuit training. This is something our players seem to like also. One idea I'm not too sure about, although I'm always happy to experiment, is self-defence applications of judo. Surprisingly, most of the members I asked said they would find that interesting.

Prior to the lock-down we conducted two internal shiais. Those were sort of like pilot projects to see if we could pull it off successfully. Both shiais proceeded smoothly. As such, we will make this a regular thing, usually in the middle of the month.