Judo adventures - Class 25

[yuuago]

Class today was me, J, K, Se, L. T-sensei instructing. A new guy showed up; R-kun, one of the parents that has a kid in one of the other classes.

Since we had even numbers, I was with J all class.

Today was 100% groundwork.

We started off with a review of various holds in sequence - kesa-gatame, kata-gatame, and a few others that I can't remember the name of. Every few weeks or so, we review these, but I can never remember them, arrrrgh. Fortunately, it's not just me - there were a few where J had difficulty recalling the correct technique, too - but still.

After that, T-sensei introduced a new technique, and... I'm not even sure what they were, actually. Kind of a combination of joint lock and twist. Definitely an immobilization technique, at any rate. "I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually use these, but they're part of the curriculum" - Okay, T-sensei, if you say so. Anyway, it involves pinning your opponent with your knee, locking the joint on one of their arms, and twisting - we learned a few variations of it. They're very effective, and for that reason I wouldn't want to actually apply them outside of practice/review - too easy to hurt somebody.

Variations of arm locks after that. T-sensei didn't mention the names of these, and a quick glance doesn't bring up the specific ones. Anyway, getting the technique down is tricky. Sometimes this's just because getting things right is hard in general, but also, J is pretty flexible, so that provides an additional challenge... Sometimes I need to make adjustments, or draw everything further in than he would have to do if he were performing it on me, and so on.

15 minutes of randori after that. Fun, but challenging. I think I'm getting better at finding opportunities to evade and/or get out of J's attempts to get me in holds/strangles (though he did get me pretty good, and I had to actually tap out a couple times). Today I also seemed to have some success with finding openings to make an attempt at actual hold/strangle techniques myself - even if I didn't succeed, I tried. J even said that he noticed I was improving. :D

I was hardly tired after all that; could have gone a while longer. (Man, I keep wishing we had more class time... Alas, no.)