Basically, when you’re doing fit-ins, or Uchikomi’s, the other person tends to stand there and let you do it.  With a makikomi this makes the move devastating.  If someone is standing straight up it’s almost impossible NOT to hit a good Osoto Makikomi.  So, I spend time working on the move, and smashing people down on a crash pad.

Then it’s time for Randori.  Guess what?  It doesn’t work that way anymore.  People keep their feet back much further in Randori than they tend to when you work on fit-ins.  Maybe I just need to have my partner stand more “realistic” during our Uchikomis?  I’m not sure.

What have you done to make your Uchikomis be more than just some perfect-world fairy tale move?

Another problem wit the Makikomi is that Randori should not be at full strength… you’re practicing… you don’t want to hurt people.  Well, the Maki gets thrown hard, or it don’t work.  I struggle on this a bit.

I will continue to practice and share my experiences.  Any insights appreciated!

Just as a note on the above video… it really doesn’t show what makes the Osoto Maki work… the real key to making this work is power.  You need to drive through you opponent… almost as if you are running past and grabbing them on the way by.  You also need to reall concentrative on driving down.  I had a real problem in competition with not committing enough.  For this move to work well you ned to think about your forhead driving toward the mat.

But even given that, I ahve had some problems.  You can see fromt ese pictures some of my mistakes with the Maki:

Now, let me just say in regards to these pictures:  All three of these are exampels of poorly thrown Osoto Makikomi’s… so hopefully we can all learn from my mistakes

The first Maki my momentum and direction is just all wrong.  Instead of plowing through the opponent I’m hitting him sidways.  But then to make maters worse, instead of spinning into a Soto Makikomi (without the O… we’ll cover this ina  minute), I just sort of fall onto my side as I try to pull him down.  Bad move.

The other two are bad as well… The palcement on my left foot is too far in the middle rather than outside.  This is really wrong position for the Osoto Makikomi.  It puts me reach and leaning back (which cost me the match in the last example here.)

But you can’t always plow through… if the person is big and strong, or leaning forward… sometimes you have to take them back (like I ineffectively tried to do in the first attempt here.)  That is when you turn the Osoto Makikomi into the Soto Makikomi, as shown here:

http://superjudo.tv/episode-22-makikomi/

I am still working on this move, and am not entirely sure yet how this will work in Randori… But I’ll keep ou posted

Through that, I have faced countless trials and challenges, many of which, at the time seemed nearly insurmountable.  The biggest thing I have learned through this is that each and every trial in business is an education that you could not possibly have found anyone you could pay enough to really teach you the way you know now.  You couldn’t buy the kind of education that trials and loss can give you.

The same is true in Judo.  So let’s have a look at our trials (HUGE Thanks to Robert from Lehi Judo class for these pictures!!)

First we’ll take a look at Ty up against Jake.  Jake is from our Judo class as well, and is really tough as nails.

This first picture shows Jake starting to throw Ty.

To Ty’s credit he really fought this one for a while… from this position they hopped several times each as Ty tried to get back to stability.

As a note here: Ty is actually a yellow belt.  They generally make one person wear a blue belt for scoring purposes. (Just as another side note there:  I was surprised to find that they seem a bit picky about people needing to wear a white Gi unless they are the blue fighter… I guess blue Gi’s to tournaments is a bit of a no-no.)

Here we see Ty start to go over.  But here is also where the learning process begins… After this throw Ty and I spoke, and he determined that he was more likely to be able to compete with Jake on his ground game than the throws… and that his main focus would be to not go down cleanly enough to suffer a loss, so that he could then attempt to fight from the ground.  He executed pretty well on that.

Next we head into another of Ty’s matches.

In Ty’s first next he stepped in and quickly executed a nice Osoto Gari to win the match.

Next Ty, who is currently 14 and weighs a whopping 115 pounds when clothed and wet,faced a much larger, much older opponent:

Just before this match Danny, from our Hidden Valley Judo class noticed some things about the buy’s previous match.  His pointers were really great, and gave Ty a lot of insight on how to better attach the legs of this much larger opponent.

Thanks Danny!

In this match Ty began to use a technique where he would attach the leg, then attempt to take the larger person down.  This worked really well for Ty, and he was able to not only take his down three times in this way, but also maanged to score a really brutal rear-naked choke that lamost ened the match.

Unfortunately, Ty’s would-be victim managed to make his way out of bounds, causing the two to be stood up again in the middle of the ring…and resulting in the following:

Okay, so this post is getting pretty long, and much of what I want to talk about wit my own matches is in regards to the Makikomi, a move that I will be doing a blog post all about tomorrow.  So for now, here’s a look at a few failed moves:

my first tournament win:

And my first tournament loss:

So for now that’s our review… tomorrow we explore things a bit more detailed, and discuss the Makikomi.

I have thought an awful lot about how to do a review o the Tourney, and have decided to really do it in three parts… The first is a review of a what a Tournament really is, from the perspective fo a first timer…  Then I’ll post a bit about the matches, and finally, a bit on a specific move: The Makikomi.

On to an overview of tournaments then

1: Standing over ground-fighting

The first thing that was really surprising about a tournament was how quick they are o stand people up.  there was really very little ground fighting.  If you look back over my historical blog posts you’ll see that I talk a fair amount about the level of my cardio.  Watching the action at the tournament it seemed that cardio was almost always of very little issue.  Very, very few of the matches went the full 3 or 5 minutes (depending on age group.)

Most matches seemed to take far less than a minute.  The was a bit of struggling, someone got thrown, and it was over.  If the throw was not clean enough, there was a little scramble on the ground, they stood up, and they tried again.

Although some of the matches did go the limit, and some ended in a pin, it was definitely the exception, not the rule.

2-Don’t psych yourself out

There are two people that I was afraid I might face at the tournament: Randy (a Jujitsu guy), and Jeff (another Jujitsu guy.)  I have sparred a bit with both of them, and was pretty worried about it going into the competition.

My first match was against a person that I didn’t even know.  I had no fears and no assumptions going into the fight.  He was really pretty darned good (you’ll see more about that in my post after this one, about our specific matches.)  I won that match.

My second match was against Randy.  Don’t get me wrong, Randy is hella-good, and may well have beat me anyway, but I really feel like I psyched myself out.  There were several things in the patch that I know for sure that I would have done differently against anyone else, but I did what I did because I wanted to be so careful against a Jujitsu guy like Randy.

I may well have lost to Randy anyway, but next time I have decided that I would rather lose soundly, and know that I did than lose and wonder if it was due to me or due to him.  That’s worse than getting beat.

Then we made our way to Randori.  I feel terrible to say (I am AWFUL with names), but I can’t recall the name of the guy I sparred with (even though I asked him three times!)  I was good though.  He was good sized, just a bit smaller than me, with a year into Judo, and some fairly good Wa Do Ki and Aikido experience.

So on to the main thing I learned last night: First, dragon ball Z does not work in Judo (inside joke for a few folks there :)  But more importantly, Randy really worked with me on conserving my energies and keeping my head.  On the ground I tend to count on my strength and explosiveness to pull me through.  While that tends to work for me sometimes, it keeps me from learning the skills I need for when I can’t power through something.  Randy really worked wit us on keeping our (my) cool.  Thinking through a situation… conserving energy.

So my Judo tip for the day:  Just because something works doesn’t mean it’s right.  Just because you can nail a double leg takedown doesn’t mean you should… counting on that too much is keeping you from the reason you came to class: to learn Judo.  Judo because you can overpower someone, doesn’t mean it’s right.  It is keeping you from learning the skills you will need when the other guy is stronger.  Learn finesse.  Then combine that with strength, and crush them really beautifully

In the meantime however, I have been looking through some videos with my son, Ty.  He is really trying to work on his Ipon Seonagi.  We took a look at this video of Koga from Youtube.  These are some spectacular Ipon throws.  As I watched them, looking for little subtleties of Koga’s style, little tricks that my son can incorporate to improve, it jumped out at me that what was one of the most important things seems to be so simple:  Commit yourself to the throw.  Really, really commit.  Watch Koga in the video… he is practically doing a headstand on some of them.  Once he grabs on he doesn’t just sort-of-lean-over, and hope that maybe he breaks his opponent’s Kazushi.  He waits for the moment, and them commits everything he has to taking it.

For me, the piece of this move that seems to make the the most critical (read that: the part I screw up the most) is when you shift your upper body to the side and bring the foot toward their head.  If I think about it as shifting my upper body, then I mess up.  If however, I think of it as using my leg to shove the person over to the side, it works better, and I end up shifting my upper body anyway, without really even thinking about it.

Okay, so now on to the “Whoopin”…

I was in class last night, and was please to see that there was a fairly large student there for me to Randori with.  He was a white belt, but seemed to have good balance and leverage.  I asked how long he had been doing Judo, and found the answer to be, “about 4 months.”  Cool… fresh meat!

Or not…

Aaron informed me that our new addition was in fact a Jujitsu black belt, and 3 time national champion.  He spent the remainder of Randori showing me how exactly the body’s pain receptors work.  One hell of a workout!  I hope he comes more, as it these types of challenges that really push you to new levels.  Thanks Jeff!

I wanted to share a revelation I had this week in regards to the arm bar from the guard position…. but as I have tried a few times to write this up, I find it just doesn’t work without pictures.  I’ll grab my son, a camera, and our insurance policy later tonight and see if I can get some shots up here

In the meantime, thanks so much to everyone who is teaching me so much.  If you really want to get in shape this is amazing!  I am going to be taking some more mats to the HVjudo class Thursday, so we can fit more people.  Stop thinking about it!  Step away from the computer and come join us.  It’s cheap, there’s no long term commitment (it’s month to month in both of the classes I do.)  You know you want to!  If you’re south of point of the mountain, check out Lehi Judo.  North of it, meet us over at HVjudo, and I’ll be happy to work with you myself.

Well, let’s start with fire-arms.  First off, skip the concealed carry… once the undead walk no one really cares about law anymore.  It might be handy to make sure you have the gun with you in case things degenerate really quickly, but otherwise you risk looking like an idiot walking around with a fanny pack.

I would however, recommend learning to shoot straight.  Even with that though, ammo will quickly become a problem.

So within a short amount of time you will be relying on your body and its abilities to keep you alive.  Let’s look at a few of the martial arts, and how exactly they stack up:

In my mind Jiujitsu is out of the running immediately.  The last thing in the world I wanna do is wrap up with a zombie and fall to the ground in the middle of a swarm of the flesh eating buggers.

Another popular and normally effective style: Mui Thai is also out in my mind.  Fist strikes are way too risky.  A cut on the knuckle lets infected blood in and before you know it you munching on your family members.  Kicks can be risky too.  It puts you off balance, and if even a single kick gets caught you’re done.  I would not want to rely much on my Mui Thai clinch either… grabbing the head of a biter, and driving their open mouth into my knee sounds like a bad idea.

Okay, so next we get to Judo.  I think Judo could do fairly well… You would ave to choose a few throws that would put you at the least risk.  Definitely avoid Koshi Garuma, or anything that puts you by the mouth.  Carefully executed Sasi throws could do okay though, a could several others.

Personally however, I would put Aikido ahead of Judo here.  As “The ancient art of getting the hell out of the way of stuff,” Aikido is less about engaging, and more about avoiding.  Sounds like a good plan.

On the top of my list however, would be Kendo.  Knows as “The art of the Sword,” or “The ancient art of beating the hell out of stuff with sticks, swords, or any crap handy,” this one is a solid bet.  The problem is that until the zombie attack happens you have little real-world self defense opportunities to test your skills unless you join the SCA and stage massive mock-medieval battles.  But tha might be fun too… plus you can all hang around and play D&D in your bunker to keep yourselves busy after the fall of humankind.

Saturday, October 25th

Granite High School (500E, 3300S)

I have heard that we have committed folks from several states to come in for this competition.  For full details, feel free to download the full Overview PDF and the Event Registration PDF.