Thursday, July 10, 2008

Julia and AnnMaria's World: Learn Counters

It occurred to me that today it is Thursday, all day and all night and that I had promised that every Thursday we would do an edition of AnnMaria and Julia's videoblog, Sneakerdoodle Zebra Judo. On the off chance that anyone silly enough to actually pay attention to what I say and remember it would have nonetheless have mastered the concept of Thursday well enough to apply it, a new edition of the video blog is below.

This is the feature of this blog which caused my oldest daughters, Maria and Jennifer, to conclude with absolute certainty,

"The rest of the people in this family are complete dorks."


Of course, if you are getting this blog through an RSS feed that does not include the video, you have no idea what I am talking about. Your two options are to actually go to the blog at

http://drannmaria.blogspot.com



or read on....


  1. It bugs me when people do lousy throws off balance and do not get countered.

  2. Countering people who attack off-balance is sort of a Darwinism of judo. They will either learn to adapt and do their throws correctly or quit and take up badminton.

  3. A tani otoshi counter is in that minority of techniques that you can do effectively if you have an outside grip and your opponent has an inside grip.

  4. If the other person has an inside grip and you have an outside grip, you are at a disadvantage. If they are stupid enough to use that disadvantage to attack on a not very good seoi nage then you must counter them. Otherwise, you are voting in favor of stupidity and we should all be against that.




For those of you who have written me to tell me that these videos are shot in my living room (I knew that) or that these are not of the professional quality of some other videos that you have purchased let me point out a few facts, Captain Obvious. Professional videos most likely:

A. Do not co-star a ten-year-old wearing a bike helmet, and
B. Do not have a studio audience made up of 8 stuffed animals being walked over back and forth by a cat.

Furthermore,
C. Tani otoshi is still a good counter for seoi nage

3 comments:

Ice said...

I like your Darwinism comment and also fighting for the inside grip. I seem to be always trying to fight for the inside grip and am always uncomfortable when held in an inside grip.

Funny thing I tried that same technique that was easily countered.

And yes, thankfully my randori partners take little mercy on me, so it's a good thing.

Anonymous said...

I'm mainly a recreational no-gi grappler who occasionally gets to train with some of the judoka at my Uni, and I still find your posts on learning / coaching styles in judo to be pretty interesting and relevant to my own training.

On one occasion you mentioned juji gatame being the answer to everything, would you mind posting some of the drills or techniques you found useful in preparation for competition?

Any cool or sneaky variations I can use in the next open mat at my club would be greatly appreciated…

Stephen said...

These are great, exactly what my eight year old needs, can't beat the production values for her needs.