AM judo

AM judo with Rob & Rick

• warmup with some light-movement randori with Rob
• footsweep to control drill with the idea of how do you make a reluctant or careful opponent attack so that it is easier for you to counter
• deashi as a response to stiffarming
• hizaguruma as a follow-up to deashi
• groundwork mobility drill with emphasis on positional asphyxia in kesa, mune, ushiro kesa, and tate

Working the envelope

AM judo with Rob

• warmup with the ground mobility cycle
• kosotogari→(kesa↔mune)→(wakigatame↔udegarame)
• near leg (bent) armbar, far leg (straight) armbar, and elbow crank from kesagatame
• top shoulder choke and step-over choke from kesagatame
• straitjacket holds from kamishiho, tateshiho, and munegatame

Shortcuts

Judo with Rob

• warmup with the groundwork cycle. We worked on shortcuts from munegatame to tateshiho and from the guard to tateshihogatame.
• randori - rob started out beating me a couple of rounds, once with a very uncomfortable face-down rear mount and the threat of a RNC. Towards the end I wore him down some and had better success. I then sprawled as Rob shot in and got him in a facedown position with a relatively wimpy collar choke but the addition of the sprawl submitted him.
• osotogari working on getting the timing and direction of the individual pulls right.

Aiki with Jill

• walking kata and releases
• chain #3: wakigatame and kotegaeshi
• nijusan wakigatame working on emphasizing the release feeling and brushing off.

Don't forget the Call for Submissions for Carnival #5.

High-resolution jiu-jitsu and low-resolution judo

Martial arts randori or shiai or sparring is to a large degree a pattern recognition problem. You have to find the right opportunity to apply the tactics and techniques that your strategies and principles suggest will help your situation. This is the Observe-Orient-Decide part of the OODA loop - finding the pattern in the chaos of combat.

.

Techniques are just named reference positions, labels that are placed on commonly-occurring motions just to have a shorthand way of talking about that type of motion or situation. Part of the pattern recognition problem involves the number of techniques in the system from which you have to choose, the number of categories you have to recognize.

.

This is similar to the problem of resolution in a computer monitor. The greater the resolution, the greater the scan time required to keep all those pixels refreshed and lit up. In the olden days (10 years ago or so) this problem was solved by moving the gun farther back from the inside of the screen so that shorter gun motions described a wider arc on the screen. The problem was this led to much larger (deeper, heavier) monitors. It took a while to develop the technology to make fast, hi-res, flat panels.

.

In the same way, you can increase the resolution of your martial art by labelling more and more of the motions that you find in randori/sparring/shiai. For example, the escape from the mount (tateshiho) in judo or BJJ. If you do some randori for a while you can probably come up with a dozen or more decent ways to get out of tateshiho. Keep doing randori and each of those dozen will recur at least once. So there you have it – recurring motion! Let’s name it and call it a technique and teach it as part of a high-resolution syllabus. Problem is, it takes time to learn a technique and it takes time to scan thru those techniques during a fight to choose the right one. Thus leading to a larger (deeper, heavier) jiujitsu.

.

What you need in your martial arts system is sufficiently high resolution with minimal scan time. Technical resolution has to be great enough to solve many of the likely problems you will encounter but it needs to be small enough to minimize scan time. Scan time has to be minimized and your system has to be relatively light so that it is not too hard to pick up (to teach and learn).

Old-Bear regains his honour

Another good class. Tonight in judo we worked the Meatgrinder entry into groundwork and focussed on entering into jujigatame from the rear mounted position. Cool and easy. Standing we worked on some nice, easy ukigoshi followed by some uchimata. Good work. Rob needs to work on getting the standing leg placed properly under himself as a fulcrum. That involves:

• toe-out and hipswitch
• standing foot slightly farther back underneath our collective center of mass.
• standing foot, knee, both hips, and all abdominal muscles pointing in the same direction
• butt cheek underneath uke, almost through uke's groin

On the ground the old bear recovered his honor. I got Rob in 4-5 good submissions, including a kesagatame (i think), a couple of tateshiho, and a jujigatame. Rob crushed me at least once with something or other - maybe a kesagatame? Good stuff. Neither of us got clean throws tonight in randori. I got a partially successful kouchigari and he attempted several single leg picks, which mostly got him sprawled-on and grounded. I think I may have gotten an arm-snapdown and I know I got a great cross-face turnover.

At aikido tonight, Kel and Patrick M. and I worked on hanasu into ukemi, a little light randori, some kata shomenate and several variants of aigamaeate, including some from goshinjitsu and kimenokata. Cool stuff.

Day of the bear

I got schooled tonight by a measley judo shodan! Rob tapped me 5-6 times to my 1-2. Mostly positional deals, but I do recall him getting one fine jujigatame and one good choke of some sort. I think I tapped him with a sodegurumajime (sleeve wheel choke) and with a head-crushing tateshiho (north-south hold). But I know for sure that my mat mobility was off tonight and Rob did very well. Standing I got a sode tsurikomigoshi (sleve lifting hip throw) and a morotegari (double leg pick). Rob, as I recall, mostly got these clinches and dragged me into the ground, from which position he crushed me. He must have had a good judo instructor at some point in his past.

.

And that was all before aikido class started! By the time Kel got there I had the shaky jelly triceps fasciculations. We worked releases into ukemi, tegatana, and the atemiwaza (striking throws) from Nijusan. Kel is getting very good at shomenate and his aigamaeate and gyakugamaeate were better than mine tonight. We'll keep working on his rank requirements and solidify his skill and knowledge and have a rank test in a few weeks. At the end we played with the offbalance for kubiguruma and the kata otoshi brushoff from Owaza Jupon. Fun, but not very sklled performances on my part by that late point in the night.

.

If I did not already have a great name for the dojo, I think I'd come up with a name involving a bear - as in my defacto motto, "Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you."

Aiki & judo weekend with John

This weekend at Mokuren Dojo we had John & Belique (hope I spelt that right) from Florida, Vincent, Andy the Hattiesburger, and a new guy, Trey. We had good workouts - the reason I know, we were all sore and tired and dragging today after yesterday's practice. Working backward through my memory of the weekend...

This afternoon, Andy and I worked on nijusan #6,7,11, and 12 (oshitaoshi, udegaeshi, kotehineri, kotegaeshi) emphasizing the slipping aside idea that I wrote about the other day. We worked slow and soft so we could really get into the coordination of these four techniques. They worked well. Andy is closing in on time in grade for nikkyu rank, and with a couple more months good work like this today, he'll be ready to feel good about ranking.

Earlier this morning, John, Andy, Belique, and I worked on aiki. We warmed up with tegatana and hanasu then focussed in on #1, 3, and 5. Andy had asked about the 'lost wrist releases' so we worked on jodan aigamae a while, trying to make it work just like hanasu #1 with uke grabbing wrong. When this happens, it places tori on the inside close to uke's free hand, so tori has to either strike uke or move away to stay safe. This led to practicing shomenate in nijusan mode as well as in aiki brushoff mode. John asked about what he missed from the recent ABG, so we worked brushoff, stab-twice randori, and multiple attacker randori for a while.

Yesterday, the class that wore everybody out and made us sore was judo. We worked on kosotogari into ukigatame into tateshihogatame, bridge&roll escape from tateshiho, and various escapes from the guard. I managed to pull one out of the hat that John hadn't seen (knee in the butt) so he'll have something to try on Bryce when he gets back to Florida

Judo meatgrinder

Tonight at judo class we had Gary the Hattiesburger, Rob, and myself. We warmed up with a few reps of deashi and kosotogari trying to throw into ukigatame. From here we moved into the meatgrinder series, working on getting from the back mount to tateshiho and working on getting hadakajime, okurierijime, and the cool backwards meatgrinder choke. We also got to work on the wakigatame/udegarame part of the envelope series.