Notes:
- A black belt in Judo (at least in Japan) means you have “learned the basics.”
- Here are the basics of Judo:
- Rei – bowing and being respectful
- Ukemi – breakfalls, rolling, and injury prevention
- Throwing:
- Kuzushi – weight shifting
- Tai-sabaki – moving into an advantageous position
- Kake – executing the throw
- Groundwork:
- Kuzushi – weight shifting (yes, newaza is also based on the same principles)
- After several years of Judo, I feel like I have barely even begun to learn these basics.
- Even if I were to get a black belt tomorrow, it would be deeply unfulfilling.
- My training methods has changed a little recently to reflect this realization.
We’ll talk about rei another day, because it’s more of a philosophical / spiritual subject.
Ukemi
The right ukemi not only feels painless, it feels almost joyful. Like play.
I practice ukemi every time I show up to training, so I’m slowly getting better at it. I still can’t do it smoothly, but I’m trying to be more mindful of the details and hold myself to a higher standard.
I’ve noticed that tiny changes, such as the angle between the arms and the torso, the tension in the arms, the timing at which you slap the ground, and the positioning / angles of the feet make a HUGE difference to the result.
Mastering ukemi alone is a wonderful, long-term pursuit. I’m also trying to slowly push out of my comfort zone bit by bit, so that I could withstand more and more dangerous / unexpected falls in the future.
Throwing
This is the sexy part of Judo that everyone wants to get better at, myself included.
The last part of a throw, the kake, gets all the attention. But it is also the most deceptive. The real mastery of Judo lies in kuzushi and tai sabaki. I guess it’s like a chess manoeuver. The reason you lose is not in the immediate move but in the mistake you made 5 moves earlier.
But I’m very guilty of completely forgetting this during randori and also during uchikomi (although recently I’ve been getting better — with an ego as obstinate as mine, it will be a journey). It takes enormous self-mastery and humility to not get caught up on the final result, which is whether the person has fallen or not, and only focus on the process that led you to it.
Newaza
Same as the above. Focus on mastering kuzushi, not on the end result.
This is a good time to revisit the question, why am I doing Judo? What do I hope to really learn from all this Judo practice (that I couldn’t get from another sport or activity)?
I believe that at least for now (until getting to my black belt), the answer is simply in mastering kuzushi and tai-sabaki.
If the only thing I ever got out of Judo was this, I’d be a happy camper. And I also realize that if I never master these two concepts, then I’d look back on Judo as a waste of time that could have been spent better on another sport.
One frustration I had in Judo for a while was that every day the curriculum is different and random (i.e. you might go two weeks before you practice the uchi-mata in class again), which makes focusing on individual moves / skills very difficult. Training was very inconsistent.
With such a haphazard training focus, you can’t get the benefit of compounding, which in my view is the end-all-be-all.
But with a focus on basics, training suddenly becomes very consistent — no matter which move we are drilling that day, I can treat every second of training as an opportnity to polish the same skill, and in fact, multiple ways of exposure to the same skill.
As I learned from my challenge to become fluent in Japanese, it’s very helpful to fall back on a process that acts as the main vehicle for your learning journey:
For example: one way to become a better programmer, is to start and prototype as many projects as possible (or start ONE major project and see it end to end).
To become fluent in a language, one way is to focus simply on comprehensible input (consuming as much native content in that language as possible, understanding one word, one phrase, one line at a time).
For getting better at Judo, my process is to focus on kuzushi and tai sabaki in every rep, every set, every minute of Judo practice.
