The Business/Judo of Life

I didn't want to go to judo class today ...

2012-01-29T21:32:00.000-08:00

On Friday, I was thinking,

"I really wish I didn't have to go to judo class today."

Of course, when you're the teacher, you can't skip class, so I had to show up. As I was driving in rush hour traffic to get to the middle school where I teach judo once a week, I was thinking about all of the work I had to get done. I was hoping the sponsoring teacher would call me at the last minute, as had happened several times before, and cancel class.

It was over 80 degrees, and paradoxically, I thought it would be a good day for an extra hard work out. Those are the kind of things you remember and talk to your friends about later,

"Remember that time when it was so hot outside and she had us run sprints in the gym and then we did all those leg lifts and exercises? I thought I was going to die of heat stroke during practice! My stomach hurt for three days afterward!"

Anyone who lives in Los Angeles knows we measure distance not in miles but in minutes. It takes me about an hour to get to the middle school from my house, which is plenty of time, after over 30 years of coaching, for me to have a good lesson planned out for an hour and a half.

When I got there, the sponsoring teacher was late meeting me at the gym (you can't have a class on a public school campus without a teacher supervising it). While we were waiting for him, several of the kids who had come for the class had left. We had to track down someone with a key. Someone kindly drove over to the gym and opened the doors. The teacher, I and the one student who had waited around went up to start putting down the mats. While we were doing it, the kids who had left came back and helped set up.

We did sit-ups throwing medicine balls back and forth. Then we laid on our backs and did straight leg raises and spelled out the alphabet with our toes. (MUCH harder than it sounds - try it!) We did more leg raises. Then, an uchikomi drill where you have two people, one at each end of the mat, and the person in the middle sprints back and forth and does as many uchikomis as they can in a minute. We did this for forward throws and backward throws.

We took a water break but the bathrooms were locked and there was no working water fountain anywhere close. Fortunately, the teacher had two bottles of water. We just passed them around with everyone holding it over their head and pouring it in their mouths like catching raindrops.

We took a mental break and did a game that I learned from Maurice Allen, where the students run around the mat and the instructors throw a giant rubber ball at them. Like dodge ball while running if the ball was almost as big as you.

Then we did matwork uchikomi as many as we could in a minute, reviewing a rolling choke that I had taught last week. Next, we did a wrestler's roll turnover drill, again, as many as possible in a minute.

We finished off with everyone doing a couple of rounds of randori.

At the end of ninety minutes, , the students put the mats away, finished off the last few drops of water and sat around in exhaustion, but it was a good kind of exhaustion.

"Today was a good day,"

One of the students commented. The others all smiled and nodded, agreeing it was, indeed, a good day.

After the students had all left, the teacher apologized for the delay getting started, but said it had been a bad week. The day before, one student had pulled out a knife in response to bullying, and another student had pulled out a gun. Yes, one of the middle school students had a semi-automatic weapon in his backpack, with an extra clip. The school had been locked down, all of the students kept in the classrooms until the police had come and taken the two students involved away.

This isn't the first time incidents have happened on campus - which is why several times in the past class has been canceled. Of course, there are other reasons. There is a real shortage of teachers willing to stay after school - at no extra pay - so if the supervising teacher is sick, on jury duty or not there for another reason, we have to cancel class. There was another teacher but he left, frustrated with all the budget cuts that he could never get a permanent position at the school.

This program is the longest running extracurricular program at the school and we are only on our third year.

The gym is filthy. Janitorial staff is another thing that was cut in the latest round of budget cuts. The mats are borrowed. The judo gis are donated. I teach for free and the sponsoring teacher volunteers his time after school. People just get discouraged by the lack of support, lack of resources, and they don't feel secure on a campus where a student brings an automatic weapon to school.

But ... for those kids in my class, today was a good day.

I'm really glad I went to judo class today.

Look what I found

2012-01-28T12:36:00.000-08:00

Dennis made this for me when Ronda was 13 and he was playing around with some new photo editing software.

I liked it so much, I printed it out and had it in a frame on my desk for years. Don't know what ever happened to the original.

Free rice! Ronda's weight cut and world hunger

2012-01-24T02:36:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you heard about Ronda's free rice group. If not, here's the description:

Because it sucks to be hungry! I'm Ronda Rousey, I'm cutting weight for the fight for the 135 lb world title and I'm hungry. How much more would it suck to be hungry every day? So I'm asking all of my friends and fans to be part of my freerice.com group to donate to the World Food Programme. When we hit 1,000,000 I'll send a t-shirt to the 3 highest donors. I have special prizes for the 3 highest donors as of when I weigh in on March 2nd. With 20,000 twitter followers plus my friends in judo and MMA, I'll bet we could donate 1,000,000 grains a day. That's enough to feed almost 300 people every day. Come on, play free rice, do good, get smarter and I'll send you swag.
Here is the link to join the group and play. It's free! Money is donated by sponsors.
http://freerice.com/content-group/rondamma

I was really surprised when I saw that no other person in judo, mixed martial arts or other weight-cutting sport had thought of this. Maybe it's just because Ronda is always playing computer games when she's not working out it just seemed a natural for her.

Anyway .... we were talking about this and thinking that it would be possible to donate up to a million grains of rice a day. Someone said, well that's only enough to feed less than 300 people a day, that won't matter. Ronda's answer was that if you were one of those 300 people and you were starving it would matter to you. Apparently a lot of people agreed because in less than 3 days her group had donated over 2,000,000 grains of rice and was #92 in the world - up from 164 for the day before and non-existent the day before that.

How it works is if you click on the link to join the group, you answer questions and for every correct answer 10 grains of rice are donated by the ad sponsor. (The ads vary.) Make sure when you are playing that it shows rondamma as your group at the top right if you want the group to get credit.

She has free swag to give out. T-shirts for the top 3 the first day, at 1,000,000 and something special (I don't know what) for three highest by her weigh-in date.

Here were the three highest the first day

Ryan Ghidina

Python_in_PJs

JUSTSK8NCREATE

Here were the three highest at 1M

Ryan Ghidina

hooperc

Modiaken

nelson888

There were four because I didn't catch it right at one million and I don't know who was highest.

If your name is listed and I haven't heard from you, please tweet me or Ronda on twitter so we can follow you, DM you and get your address.

I was actually at an American Statistical Association chapter meeting this evening and then had to write a program when I get home so I haven't seen the t-shirts and I don't even know who donated them or if there will be more swag to give away before the weigh-ins on March 2nd. I'll let you know what I find out.

The Juji Gatame Encyclopedia

2012-01-22T13:21:00.000-08:00

This is the foreword, I wrote for Steve Scott's upcoming book, The Juji Gatame Encyclopedia

When I was young, two-time Olympian Pat Burris gave me this advice,

“Always go for the arm bar, because even if the referee doesn’t give you the win and makes you stand up again, for the rest of the match, you’re fighting an opponent with one working arm. And, Annie, if you can’t beat a one-armed opponent, you really suck.”

(Just so you know, you have to be in two Olympics and older than me to call me “Annie”. Don’t even think about it.)

I took Pat’s advice to heart, as anyone knows who saw me on TV winning the Panamerican Games. The referees did not stop the match and made us get back to standing. Just as Pat predicted, my opponent was hampered by an injured arm and I won the match.

Enough about me (and Pat), what about Steve’s book? It is pure and simple everything you need to know about arm bars. The section on exercises specifically designed to build muscles used in arm locks is just brilliant. Not only is it a good, safe way to teach beginners some skills, it’s also good for any athlete who was ever injured - and all top athletes are injured at some point - to have something they can do to build strength when they are not cleared for grappling.

My favorite part of the book, though, is the drills. To get good at arm locks you need to do tens of thousands of repetitions. Think about it for a moment, when you are trying a move that has the potential to dislocate an opponent’s arm, you are fighting a motivated individual. Often, there is just one second to catch that arm and to be able to capitalize on that one second you need to have drilled and drilled so it is almost an instinctive reflex. Let’s be honest, though, repetitions can get boring and no amount of a coach yelling, “No pain, no gain” at you can change that fact. Having a huge variety of drills and exercises allows athletes to train from different angles, at different speeds and for different situations.

Anyone reading this book will benefit from the photos showing the techniques from every angle. If you don’t learn how to do a better arm bar from this, you’re beyond hope.

A mat work counter: How NOT to lose by a triangle choke (sankaku)

2012-01-19T23:31:00.000-08:00

Getting pinned or choked with a triangle (sankaku time) has got to be one of the stupidest things that happens to people in judo. You hide like a turtle in a shell and let someone sit on your head. In what alternate reality is this a good strategy in a fight? Yet, people do it all the time and lose this way all the time.

Many matches are won by a technique called a sankaku jime in judo and reverse triangle in mixed martial arts and jiu-jitsu. The top player uses a figure four to trap one arm and choke the opponent with his or her legs, leaving both hands free to either hold the trap the opposite arm for a better pin or attempt an arm lock. It is a bad position for the player on the bottom. However ... if you are ready when the technique begins, you can launch a surprise attack counter, as shown ....

You don't want THIS, do you?

Step 1: The opponent puts a knee into your shoulder and hooks your arm with the other leg.

Really, really important for this technique to work --- as your opponent steps in, you are going to put the back of your hand against the knee. Your other hand is cupping the heel. You are not grabbing either leg. You want your opponent to be lulled into a sense of security. Your opponent almost has the figure four sunk in. “Almost” is a really, really important word in that sentence. With the figure four almost sunk in and you not having a grip anywhere, the opponent feels confident, she rolls to her side expecting to lock in the pin and choke as she rolls over.

Step 2: Put one hand against the opponent’s knee and the other cupping the heel.

Step 3: As your opponent rolls, spread your hands apart as far as they can go. This ends up with your opponent lying on his or her back with legs spread wide apart. Not a very defensible position. (Note: When you are resisting, the person who is applying sankaku is going to pull harder to roll you. The harder they pull, the easier it is going to be for you to roll fast right up into the opponent.)

Step 4: Continue the direction of the roll so that you are laying on your stomach, with one hand under your opponent’s neck grabbing the collar and the one that was on the knee slide underneath grabbing the leg.

There! Now that’s a much nicer position for you, isn’t it?

Everybody has their own dream: The Sequel

2012-01-13T23:38:00.000-08:00

"I have it all - great career, nice wife, huge house, lots of money. It's like I'm living the American dream - but it's somebody else's dream."

One of Ronda's teammates on the 2004 Olympic judo team, Dr. Rhadi Ferguson made the point that no one who has earned a spot on the Olympic team decides not to go, what people do is decide not to train for the Olympics. Karo Parisyan qualified for the 2004 Olympic Trials at 81 kg but went into the UFC instead. He said he never regretted it. Rick Hawn, who won the 2004 Olympic Trials at 81 kg, placed ninth in Athens and is now a fighter for Bellator. He also says he never regretted his decision.

Here is the continuation of the discussion Ronda and I had (with guest commentary from Henry Akins of Dynamix MMA) about whether people really choose the UFC (or anything) over the Olympics - and what do you do after the Olympics is over.

Everybody has their own dream

2012-01-12T17:45:00.000-08:00

Since I am really busy with work and behind on The Book (which now has a new title our editor at Black Belt liked --- Winning on the Ground ) I decided to rope Ronda and Henry into doing a video blog with me. (Thanks, guys!)

The topic was whether we agreed with Dr. Rhadi Ferguson, who believes that anyone who had an opportunity to go to the Olympics would take it or whether we believed Karo Parisyan who said he had never regretted not going to the Olympics.

(Disclaimer: We've known both Rhadi and Karo for years so nothing here should be taken as unbiased - but, of course, if you've ever read or listened to anything on my blog, you know that nothing here is ever unbiased!)

Why Anyone Who Thinks Ronda Doesn't Deserve a Title Fight is a Complete Moron

2012-01-10T00:49:00.000-08:00

This might just fall under the heading of 'my mom thinks I'm cool' but in this case, mom is a world champion and not amused.

I've read a few of these blogs and comments written by people who have never met Ronda, never done judo at an international level and never seen Ronda train. It's too bad that they don't have a Stupid Olympics or a Whiny White Girl Olympics because I think we could have some real contenders.

In the points below, I am just going to use Whiny Girl because it is shorter than Whiny Girl 3, Whiny Girl 2, Random Guy Using the Internet from His Mother's Basement and Ex-Boyfriend Ronda Dumped. Don't feel left out. It's like when we use 'mankind' to mean humanity. You are all included.

Here are my opinions on YOUR opinions on Ronda's world title fight coming up.

Stupid idea #1: Ronda has only had four fights and Whiny Girl has had 9 or 12 or 17 and trained for four years. Guess what? Ronda has had hundreds of fights. She's had fights where people tried to throw her to the ground, choke her unconscious and break her arm. These were with women who had a decade or more of experience at trying to throw people down, choke them and break their arms.

Stupid idea #2: Whiny Girl says Ronda shouldn't fight because, "We don't know how good she is. She has won her fights so fast." That's so stupid it's really hard for me to respond other than wondering if you even listen to the words that come out of your mouth. Are you saying that you don't know how good she is because she has been so much better than the people she fought? I will tell you then. Very fucking good. There, now you know.

Stupid idea #3: Whiny Girl says we don't know if Ronda can do anything but an arm bar because she has won every match with an arm bar. I'll tell you how to find out - stop her from arm barring you and see what happens. If you can't stop her, I guess you'll never know.

Stupid idea # 4: Everyone has a game plan until they get hit in the face. This is actually very true and accurate. The stupid part is the presumption that Ronda has never been hit in the face. In fact, Ronda has been hit a time or two in her other MMA fights. She's been hit hard in a few other situations (not by me, I don't believe in parents hitting their children).

Stupid idea #5: We don't know how tough she is. I will tell you then. Ronda has fought (and won) matches in a major international tournament with her elbow dislocated. She popped it back in and kept fighting. When she was in high school, she broke a few bones in her foot, taped it up, entered a competition anyway and won six out of seven matches and the tournament.

One thing people who promulgate these stupid ideas fail to realize is that there is a world of difference between the level of the average judo player and someone who is winning medals in world competition, not just once on a fluke but over and over. Ronda won a bronze medal in the Olympics, four gold medals in world cups, a silver medal in the world championships and gold at the Panamerican Games. To have someone who has fought a dozen or two dozen matches, all within a cross-country flight from home question whether Ronda "deserves" to fight them - well, as I said, it's too bad they don't have a Whiny White Girl Olympics.

Me & Jim Discuss Variations of The British Strangle

2012-01-07T01:07:00.000-08:00

"I looked at that choking technique you showed on your blog and I think you're doing it wrong."
"What the hell do you mean I'm doing it wrong? I made that technique up. How can I be doing a technique wrong that I made up? That doesn't even make sense. That is like me saying that my favorite color is red and you saying no, it isn't."
"You didn't make that technique up. It's been around since the 1980s, maybe before."
"Oh, yeah, well I've been around since before the 1980s. Besides, if it's not the same technique, maybe I did make it up. Maybe whoever did it copied it from me."
"Well, I'm telling you that I looked at your blog on my iPad and I think what you are doing is a variation of the British strangle. Look it up British strangle on youtube and you will see what I mean."

First of all Jim Pedro, Sr. used to be the least technologically involved person I know, so when he said that last statement I almost asked him, who are you and what are you doing in Jim's body. It seems there are advantages and disadvantages to having my co-author become a lot more Internet savvy. The chief advantage is that we can get work done a lot more easily. This is a huge advantage because we signed a contract with Black Belt and our book is expected to be in their fall catalog.

The disadvantage is that now he is aware of it when I talk smack about him on my blog (not that it will stop me).

So, I did look up the British strangle and found a bunch of videos on youtube including this one with Nicholas Gill.

Jim says we need to call the section in the book where I discuss the two chokes in the last couple of blogs "variations on the British strangle". Fine!

Actually, although I give Jim a hard time for a hobby, I have no problem believing that someone came up with that choke before me. It wouldn't be the first time. When I was a teenager, I was very, very excited about this choke that I had made up. I showed it to my coach and he said,

"Yeah, that's the one Klaus Glahn, the 1972 Olympic silver medalist beats everyone with."

In fact, you can find the choke in the Tap Out Textbook under Glahn's name.

As far as the British strangle, yes, I had seen it before. No, that is not what I was trying to do and doing it wrong. I actually prefer my way of doing it. I'm not saying that Nicholas Gill and Jimmy Pedro, Jr. and anyone else who does it that way is doing it wrong either. It's just a different technique, like seoi toshi isn't a wrong way of doing tai otoshi.

Jim would argue that no, it's a variation and that makes him right.

Hmph. Whose ideas was it to buy him an iPad for Christmas?

Choking Plan B

2012-01-05T23:02:00.000-08:00

Remember our transition drill from standing to matwork that I rambled on about in the last two posts? Here is Plan B.

The purpose of a situation drill is to have a FEW techniques that you have practiced so often from a given situation that when it happens in competition you react automatically. In this drill, the situation is a fairly common transition from standing to matwork. The blue player attacked and missed a throw.

Step 1: The very first thing you do is make it very clear to the referee that you stopped the throw. I have seen many times in tournaments where the white player in the photo above (not me!) would go around behind the blue player to apply the choke. Blue continues the throw, the white player gets thrown and has only himself/ herself to blame. In the picture below, the standing player jerks the opponent down and the blue player puts her hand out to stop herself from going face first into the mat. Notice that, just as in the previous technique, the standing player has her right hand on the opponent's lapel. THIS HAND DOES NOT MOVE.

These next few steps should happen in one or two seconds, but we have slowed them down here to show you.

Step 2: Move to the side of the player on the ground.

Step 3: Pull up with your right hand, to make it difficult for the player to flatten out, and slide your left hand under the opponent's left arm. At the same time, throw your left leg across the opponent's stomach.

Step 4: Roll hard to your left side. As mentioned in the previous technique, this is a move where your momentum carries you through the roll and your opponent with you.

As you roll, you drive your leg across the opponent's stomach and your arm up behind the head. You do NOT wait until you have rolled over and then try to slide your arm behind the opponent's head.

Below is the end of the roll. If the opponent turns in, she is going to allow me to slide my left arm further behind her head and choke her even better. If she turns out, that is going to pull the lapel in my right hand tighter and choke her even better.

Personally, this choke is not my preferred style because, unlike the previous choke, there is no natural transition from here into another technique.

When Ronda was little I tried to teach her the diving roll over choke I did and no matter how many times I tried to teach her, she just couldn't get it right. So, I came up with this move, Plan B. This illustrates an important lesson, by the way. The point of judo isn't to slavishly imitate your instructor or your favorite world champion. The point is to win. If in doing a drill like this standing transition drill you find there are certain techniques that don't work for you, discard those and try something that feels more natural.

Don't try this at home

2012-01-03T13:00:00.000-08:00

Thank you to Al B Here for his comment on my blog, asking about yesterday's post.

He wanted to know why I roll over the opponent when she is in this position.

I think I did not make it clear enough. What I am doing is DIVING over the opponent.

There was a game we used to do when I was a child which illustrated this perfectly. It is also strongly discouraged by all of the judo organizations for the very logical reason that it is dangerous. It looks dangerous, although I have never known anyone to get injured doing it. The same can be said of climbing trees, diving off a pier, swimming at Johnson's Shut-Ins, and swinging on a rope swing and letting go to land in the middle of a river with a strong current, barely making it back to shore and starting all over again. All of these are things I had fun doing as a child but other people died doing them.

Here is a video from Fox Valley Judo showing adults diving over a crash pad. This is kind of the motion you are going for. It's somewhat safer than the drill we used to do because the person is landing on a crash pad. Here is another video that has players diving over a standing person and then over some mats. In this one, too, they land on the crash pad. Both of these have the player diving up more than over.

The drill we used to do is not shown anywhere that I can find because it is stupid and dangerous, no doubt. What we did was have a person bent down like Ana is in the picture above, and then we would do a forward roll over them. After the whole line of kids did that, we'd have a second person kneel next to them and do a rolling fall over both people. If you chickened out, or if you missed and ended up falling on the second person, you were out. We kept adding people until only one person was left.

I still did this drill with my own children. They can't sue me because if the do, I'll put arsenic in their toast and that will be the end of that.

ANYWAY .... the point is that you do a DIVING break fall , stretching your body out and then rolling back like a regular fall. Your MOMENTUM carries you over

and brings your opponent with you as you can see here.

A second important point is that even with the momentum, if your opponent is MUCH heavier, this will not work. Say I am 123 pounds (56kg) and my opponent is 220 pounds (100kg). I'll probably get him somewhat off balance but I doubt I will pull him all the way over.

This technique works fine for competition because it is by weight division, and against a person of equal weight, with the momentum added by the diving motion, I can always pull them over and up.

As you can see from this helpful wikipedia entry (give them money, I did),

Kinetic energy = 1/2 mass times velocity squared

This is why the diving part is so important. The more I can increase my velocity by diving out, since this value is SQUARED, the greater impact on total force applied to pull my opponent over.

Don't think, just choke

2011-12-31T23:02:00.000-08:00

"I know all 67 throws in the go kyu no waza."

is a brag I have heard rather often from a certain type. I have a confession to make:

I don't know if it is actually spelled go kyu no waza.
I don't know if there are actually 67 throws in it.
I certainly don't know all of them.

Gasp! And I have a sixth-degree black belt! Yeah, I have a bunch of of good medals, too. How can that be. What a travesty!

I don't believe being a good judo player, or a good coach, is a matter of knowing every possible technique. In fact, think of the number of times you have seen a player hesitate in a match. For example, one player attempts a throw and misses because the opponent stepped out of the way or pushed the opponent down.

Both players hesitate and in the end nothing happens.

In a position like this, most people would probably try a sankaku time (also known as a triangle choke). I have no idea who the person is doing it in the video in that link but her sankaku looks pretty typical in that it takes a while to sink in.

I don't try sankaku from here for three reasons. First, I just don't do sankaku because for most of my judo career my right knee did not bend (I injured it seriously as a teenager). Second, even if I could do sankaku it probably would not be my technique of choice because so many people do it that your competitor is generally expecting it. The third reason is that it is just not the style of mat work that I do.

Here is what I do. First, as in the picture above, I get the hell out of the way so that she can't throw me. Notice I have stepped around her so that I am at her head and I am pushing down on her shoulder, putting my weight on her to stop her from trying to pop up and throw me.

Next, I am going to DIVE over her towards her hips at a 45-degree angle (and you thought there was no use for geometry in real life). If you aren't so good at geometry, look at the picture below.

Do NOT dive straight over or you will end up under your opponent, get pinned and look stupid. And I will say, "I told you so."

You are going to do a rolling break fall and as you do it you keep your right hand on the lapel, in the exact same grip it was from the time you started standing with a right lapel grip. This hand never moves. Just hold on to that grip for dear life.

Notice the movement in the picture below. You are sliding your hand under her arm and behind her head as you are rolling over her body NOT after you have completed the roll.

The picture below shows the position as the attacking player is in the middle of the roll. You can see that her right hand has hold of the lapel that is now pulled tight under the blue player’s neck. Her left hand is under the arm and moving behind the head.

Instead of continuing to a standing position as you would in a regular rolling break fall, you are going to slide back on to your stomach as shown below.

At this point, you are both choking your opponent and have her in a pin.

When I do drills starting from a particular position, like this one, I do the same couple of moves over and over. I don't have 67 different moves. I probably have a Plan A and a Plan B that I practice 1,000 times a year - EACH. Then I have a Plan C and a Plan D I practice about 500 times a year - EACH.

Because I do these so often, when I am in a particular position on the mat I am going to hit that move, say, the choke shown above, automatically, without thinking. If for some reason I cannot get it, say, the player turtles up too quickly and I cannot get the roll in fast enough, then I am going to go to my Plan B - automatically.

Tomorrow .... Plan B.

In the meantime ... Happy New Year !

Matwork drills for when you don't have a badger

2011-12-29T23:05:00.000-08:00

I locked her in a closet with a badger.

That is the lie I have decided I am going to start telling people when they ask me what I did to teach Ronda when she was starting judo.

Badger

If you've ever watched Ronda compete, whether it is in judo or mixed martial arts, you'll notice one thing about her - she's sudden. Often at clinics, like at the California Judo, Inc. winter camp this week, I'll show drills I had her do when she was young and I get one of two reactions.

People think it is a good idea, looks like fun and try it. (This is usually kids and more experienced instructors.)
People shake their heads and don't believe me. It's not complicated or impressive enough. (This is usually people who are legends in their own minds because they won the middleweight green belt division not once - but, TWICE- so they are just awesome.) They conclude that Ronda just won by luck and I just won because only dinosaurs did judo back then, and there probably weren't very many small dinosaurs so I had the division to myself.

A small dinosaur

I thought about making up some incredibly complicated move where I fake right, then left, then do a little two-step dance backwards and forwards, slip behind the opponent and tie their arms behind their back with their own belt. The badger story sounds better, though. Plus it requires less work from me.

If you don't buy the badger or dinosaur story, read on ...

Pin escape drill - inside turn

Did you ever see a situation where one player is on his back, maybe he just got thrown, or the other player managed to turn him over, and just at the last second, the player on the bottom turns out and escapes? Did you ever think that maybe the other player practiced for just that situation? Here is a drill I like for all levels from young kids to black belts.

Step 1: Start with the player on the top as close as possible to the bottom player, without yet touching. Notice that the blue player, Ana, a former successful international competitor, when given a choice, chose to start in position for an upper four corner hold. This position puts her at an advantage. Less experienced players will probably start from the side.

Step 2: When the coach calls “Go!” the players have ten seconds to either get the pin or escape. In the position above, the best choice for the bottom player is an inside turn. That is, to turn in toward the opponent. Notice that the player in blue (Ana) has grabbed under the uniform of the arm pulling away from her. She has to switch her momentum from going straight forward and down to the mat to pulling her opponent back . It’s already too late. The bottom player continues her roll to the stomach and escapes.

Variation 1: Same drill from the side
We do variations on this drill, sometimes with the player at the top as shown above, and other times with the player at the side, as shown below. This is a more common position, where the bottom player has just been thrown, or the top player has passed the guard. Again, the drill begins with the top player very close but not yet touching the bottom player.

Players will soon learn that the inside turn, pulling the shoulder closest to the opponent in and turning into the opponent is the most likely chance to escape.

Notice that with the blue player at the side, if the white player on the bottom (that's me!) had turned away, she would be more likely to be pinned, as the blue player could pull back with her left hand, where she has grabbed under the left arm and pull the opponent to her back. Also, if the white player had turned away, she would be more at risk of an arm bar on her right arm, as blue could easily trap that arm, throw a leg over and sit back for the arm bar.

The drill is only ten seconds, then the players switch positions. The reason for only giving ten seconds is to force both players to react quickly to take advantage of an opportunity to win or to escape. In a large group, do this drill once, with each player taking a turn on the back, and then switch partners. With a smaller group, when there are only a few partners of the same size, you may want to do this drill several times with the same person before switching.

A very bright young 11-year-old asked me if I remembered that I had taught this same drill at the 2009 CJI Winter Camp. No. I'm amazed HE remembers what I taught two years ago. Good for him.

I do use this drill a lot because you can practice this situation several times in just a few minutes. It's also good for learning to get out of a dangerous position.

What I like most about it though is that it is good for developing a feel for mat work, which is THE key to being successful on the mat. After turning away from the opponent and getting pinned several times, gradually the player will get into the habit of turning toward the inside. At the same time, the top player should get the habit of catching the arm and arm barring any player that turns away, or find it easy to pull the player into a pin.

It's a drill that teaches players to react in a situation, without stopping to think. To be sudden.

Drills and series: Matwork ideas of the day

2011-12-27T17:56:00.000-08:00

Wow, did we ever make some progress on The Book today! Jim is back from China, Japan and Tibet or wherever the heck he was and we got another 15 pages done in one day. How amazing is that? I also have a list of photos I need to take down at the CJI (California Judo, Inc.) camp in San Diego tomorrow.

The more we get done, the more I am struck by how completely different Jim and I teach mat work. He wrote a whole chapter, which I think is great, on mat work series. Not only is each series complex, but they all flow into one another. For example, for several pages there is a whole sit out series (buy the book) that ends with this

When doing this move, if you don't feel you can get the arm lock, do everything the same, (that is, lock above the elbow, use your inside hand to post), then spin around behind your opponent as shown and continue your mat work from there.

Grab their wrist, pull it into their body, and then go into the wrist control series from here...

The next page begins a whole new series, for several more pages.It's brilliant, and anyone who has ever seen Jimmy Pedro,Jr. or Kayla Harrison or anyone else Jim coached knows that it works.I find it fascinating because it's also not the way I do mat work at all.This is chapter four.

So what did we talk about in the first three chapters?
Chapter two is entitled "Ten quick ways to a submission"
Chapter three is "Two techniques everyone should know"

But I don't want to talk about that, I want to talk about Chapter Seven, that I am working on now, which is situation drills. This is almost the opposite of what Jim did in chapter four. He says that you must always anticipate where your opponent is going to go.

My strategy is the flip side of that - having a reaction to whatever your opponent decides to do. The first drill is what I call "Help 'em up." If your opponent gets knocked to one knee and is so silly as to not let go of the grip immediately, you should do one of two things - either run straight into him, throw with o soto gari and bury him, or, if he is so silly as to try to stand up, step into an uchi mata and bury him.

I do this drill for two reasons. One is to teach the person who gets knocked to the knee that this is a very, very bad position and to not ever get here. The second is that, although you will not get a good player in this position very often, if you do, the person will only be there for an instant before they realize it is a huge mistake, drop the grip and either turtle up, get in the guard or some other more defensible position. Even really good players will make a mistake from time to time, but they won't make many of them, which is why you need to be able to capitalize on every possibility.

I like the first drill because it allows you to catch even exceptional players because the bottom person is in such a bad position.

The next two drills are for positions that are much more likely to occur. Check back tomorrow night when I will (hopefully) have pictures of those, since that is part of what I'm teaching in the clinic in San Diego.

Oh, The Book, right, when exactly will it be done and for sale? Well, our editor very inconsiderately decided to get married without consulting us in advance as to whether it would be convenient. While we thought editing our book was a perfect way to spend one's honeymoon, she apparently decided something else might be more interesting. (Yeah, hard to believe, I know.) Right now most of the photos in the book are "placeholders" so we know we want a photo of a counter to sankaku, for example, that shows the beginning, the exact placement of the hands, the roll, and the end but, of course, the quality needed for print is quite different than for on the web. We need to schedule a photo shoot in studio with the photographer. We're having Ronda do most of the demonstrations because she is much cuter and less wrinkly than me. We'll have to work around her fight schedule, so the photo shoot will probably happen some time in January.

I saw a blog I wrote in January that said we hoped to have The Book done by the end of this year. I don't think we'll be too far off. How long after we get done all the publisher's end takes, I don't know. Guess I will find out.

My Dream is to Become a Zebra: Thoughts on the Olympics

2011-12-21T19:44:00.000-08:00

Three times in the last week I have received an email or a link to an article asking me to give money to a player whose "dream" was to "win an Olympic gold medal". There is only one problem here. Each one of those people has exactly zero chance of winning an Olympic gold medal. If this post causes you to call me a mean, hard-hearted old lady, save your breath. Gary Butts calls me that every time he talks to me and I've known him for 11 years and it hasn't had a bit of an impact.Let me refer you to a wikipedia article on Olympic qualification for judo. While you're there, give them some money.

Qualification for Judo at the 2012 Summer Olympics will be based on the world ranking list prepared by the IJF on 1 May 2012. The top 22 men or 12 women from the world rankings in each division qualify, subject to a limit of 1 judoka per NOC per division. Further continental quotas (Europe 25, Africa 24, Pan-America 21, Asia 20 and Oceania 10 across both sexes and all divisions) also qualify subject to an overall limit of 1 per NOC.

(Interestingly, this other article by Burton and Fallon, who presumably know better than wikipedia, say it is 22 men and 14 women.)Let me clarify this. Each division will have the top 22 men in the world qualify, but only one per country. Let's say you are #99. You don't qualify. If two of the top 22 in your weight are from France and two are from Japan then the selection moves down and picks #23 and #24. You still don't qualify. The article by Burton and Fallon goes on further to state:

This list is used to add 25 more entrants from Europe, 24 from Africa, 21 from Pan-America, 20 from Asia and 10 from Oceania.However, in this phase, only one athlete per country can qualify across all weight categories and both genders.To take Europe as an example, where 50 countries could feasibly qualify an athlete, 25 different countries will end up filling those 25 continental places. This ensures a large number of countries get the chance to take part in the Games.In addition to this, there is a maximum of two athletes per continent, per category at this stage. (For example, Africa can only send a maximum of two athletes to the women's -48kg event using this method, regardless of which countries they come from.)There are 20 further invitational places on offer, which will be confirmed between May and July 2012.

In other words, if you are an American/ Canadian/ Mexican or any other Panamerican NOT in the top 22 men you have exactly ONE spot for your country that can be given to you or any of the other 13 weight divisions. You better be the number one non-qualified person out there. If you are ranked number 99, you are not that person. Even after that, you could conceivably get one of those 20 "invitational" places based on God knows what. While the means of determining those invitations is undefined, as far as I know, you had better believe the competition is going to be fierce to get them and I don't even want to think of the political trading, in-fighting and back-biting that will ensue. If it was me, I would NOT want one of those invitational spots.

It's like the old joke about the two guys who went hunting in a forest known to have grizzly bears. One hunter asked the other wasn't he afraid that he wouldn't be able to outrun a bear. The other replied,

I don't need to be able to outrun a bear. I just need to be able to outrun you.

If you are not in the top 22 in the world and not the top-rated in your country across all weights and both genders, then your chance of going to the Olympics is limited to one of the 20 invitational spots. I think it extraordinarily unlikely that more than one of those is going to a single country, although stranger things have happened.To this point, I'm questioning the probability of these people even GETTING to the Olympics. Now, let's say you manage to somehow obtain one of those invitational spots. Let's overlook the fact that your odds of doing that are only slightly better than me winning the 2010 Olympics in luge, which, need I point out, are already over and I did not win.

If you have not managed to crack the top 22 (really more likely the top 24 or 25 since some countries inevitably have more than one in the ranking) over a four-year qualification period, by what miracle are you suddenly going to become best on the planet on a day when ALL of the best players are expected to show up and bring their A-game?What would I suggest that you do, other than quit trying to raise money?Take an honest look at your life. When I retired from competition, I was very, very fortunate that I had the man of my dreams waiting to marry me and a good-paying job from which I was on leave. I also had a very definite idea of what I had been giving up the past decade and what I wanted to move on to - having more children, raising a family, moving up in my career.Think about what else do you want to do? WHY are you number 99 or 47 in the world anyway? Did you not train enough, did you not train in the right places, were you injured? WHY do you want to go to the Olympics anyway? I won the world championships then I went back to work, got married and had more children. When the first opportunity for women to compete in the Olympics came up, I took a pass on it and have never one day in my life regretted that decision. A few weeks ago, my niece asked me if I thought a person with a masters degree from a state university would make as much money as a person with a bachelors degree from an Ivy league school. I told her, other things being equal ,no. A lot more people have masters from state schools than bachelors degrees from the Ivies. She said,

Thank you for crushing my dream.

I told her,

I didn't crush your dream. Reality did. Find a different dream.

Running in Circles & the Spinning Back Fist of Death

2011-12-16T00:53:00.001-08:00

On the judo forum, someone commented that there are three types of judo instructors, the kind that believe in giving a man a fish, the kind who believe in teaching a man to fish and the third kind that tells you "a story about this one time in 1968 when I caught a fish". My children say I tell the same stories over and over. This is true, largely because I can never remember if I told that story before. Also, because I don't care what they think. Someone trying to show me the equivalent of the spinning back fist of death, reminded me of that one time in a judo match ....

Matwork on Purpose

2011-12-11T22:11:00.001-08:00

Everyone I have ever seen teach throwing techniques in judo acted as if the only purpose of throwing was to do as textbook perfect a throw as possible. The one and only point of throwing is to throw for a full point - an ippon. Do you agree?

If you do, then it follows logically that mat work only happens by accident. All mat work is secondary to throwing. It is Plan B. You throw to win and if you fail, then you do mat work. By this logic, no one ever goes to the ground on purpose. On the rare occasions that you see anyone practicing transition from standing to ground techniques it is taught as,

"If you do this throw and for some unknown reason it does not work, then you can follow up into a mat technique like so ..."

Can this be really true, that no one ever goes into groundwork on purpose? I know I did. My reason for adopting this style was simple, I had no choice. As I mentioned before, I hurt my knee badly when I was a teenager and after that I couldn't do throws that required bending my knees more than a few inches. Often, my competitive style was referred to derogatorily as "koka judo", meaning I only won by a slight advantage rather than dominating my opponent with a big throw. In fact, though, although I threw almost no one for an ippon ever, I won almost all of my matches by ippon year after year, including every match in the Panamerican Games, Austrian Open and world trials. I just happened to win them by pins and arm bars.

When I look at pictures of myself throwing, they never look like the textbooks. This never bothered me until I started writing a book and had to debate whether I should include pictures like I was SUPPOSED to be doing the throw or how I actually do it.

The truth is, I don't do matwork by accident. I do it on purpose. When I take a grip and go into a drop shoulder throw my end goal is not to throw for the win but to knock the person down and do a pin. When I do a standing shoulder throw, my first goal is to go for an arm bar and if I can't get the arm bar, to win by a pin. If I actually ever threw anyone for ippon and won by the throw alone, THAT would be by accident.

While I adopted this style because I had no choice, it was very successful for me. I know I'm not the only one who competed this way. I was talking to Hayward Nishioka about this today and he recalled someone he knew in Japan who was not that great at throwing, " ... but, man could he beat everybody on the mat!"

Hayward said that what I called my method of competing, "Matwork on purpose" and the general view, "Matwork by accident" didn't sound important and academic enough. So, just for him, let me reiterate.

Almost everyone uses the "secondary theory of mat work", where the primary attempt and goal is to win by throwing. Matwork is secondary. My "primary theory of mat work" allows for the possibility that winning on the mat is the goal and the throw is secondary, just a means of getting to the mat to win.

This next point is very, very important so pay attention ...

Often, the way you do a throw to set up mat work is different from the way you would do it to win by ippon. For example, at practice today, Richard (Blinky) Elizalde was teaching a drop shoulder throw. He had students throw and keep driving with their legs so that the opponent was driven to flat on his or her back. If successful, this will give the player a higher score, a waza ari (half point) or ippon (full point). HOWEVER, it puts the thrower in a less advantageous situation for mat work, with his back on the opponent's upper body and neck exposed.

Since Blinky and I were team-teaching today, I taught the same throw next, except I had the students throw their opponent and immediately follow up to the pin.

When I do ko uchi makikomi, I drive straight into the opponent. My goal is to end up with my opponent on the mat and me largely at her right side (assuming I did the throw right-handed), in a good position to turn quickly on my stomach and pull myself up into a pin or roll (the backstroke ) into a pin. Other people (Ronda, for example) often do the same throw rotating much as Blinky teaches in a shoulder throw. Again, you're more likely to score a full point than the way I do the throw, but if you don't win by ippon you are in a weaker position for mat work.

Time after time, when I won matches, the competitors and their coaches would comment on how I had just "gotten lucky" to stumble in the perfect position for an arm bar, turnover, choke or pin.

So, next time you see someone perform a throw "incorrectly" and end up winning on the mat seconds later, consider this - maybe they meant to do that.

My Stuff is Ugly but it Works

2011-12-08T21:38:00.001-08:00

Within the span of two weeks, I have seen two separate people, both good coaches, former outstanding competitors, demonstrate a technique that I have never seen work in competition. They looked really good doing it, though. Both of these coaches, I saw compete on many occasions "back in the day" and never once did I see them even attempt the technique being demonstrated.

One of the coaches trained at many of the same practices with me when we were young. I might have seen him do the technique he demonstrated once or twice on someone half his size or a new white belt.

Often, whether at a clinic or when visiting a practice, when coaches are asked to demonstrate several techniques an odd thing happens. First, they show the techniques they do best, the ones they have won matches with. Most of those techniques are pretty basic - throws like o soto gari . Everyone has seen o soto gari. It's not fancy and shiny new but it wins one hell of a lot of matches.

After that, the instructor seems to feel that he or she should do something "impressive", so then they move on to "let me show you this trick".

I feel a little funny watching these demonstrations because, quite the opposite of the perfect posture and exotic techniques that many people show, I don't look like a textbook at all. For example, in the transition from a shoulder throw to a pin I showed on this blog the other day, I have terrible technique. My knees are not bent and my back is, the exact opposite of the way seoi nage is taught. Of course, as I explained, I do it that way because my knees don't bend.

So, what should I do, show the technique the way it appears in the textbooks? Or the way I actually do it?

In the end, I decided to go with the way I actually threw people in competition and then went into the arm bar, not the way the books SAY you are supposed to have done it. I am sure some people will look at the book and say, "That's not the way you're supposed to do it."

Maybe I don't look pretty doing my techniques. Maybe I don't have the best-looking, most impressive clinics. I've heard people comment sometimes after clinics,

"That guy looked a lot more impressive and taught a lot more techniques. His looked a lot better than hers. I thought she was supposed to be good. I wonder how she ever won that much."

One reason, I guess, is that I was only worried about winning, in any way the rules allowed, and not at all about looking good.

The question that still puzzles me, though, is WHY people who really do know judo, who were legitimate competitors, who should know better, still demonstrate techniques that I've never seen be effective in competition, whether done by them or anyone else.

These are the kinds of questions I'd usually discuss with Jim as we are working on The Book but since he is in Japan for the next couple of weeks coaching, if anyone else has any opinions, please feel free to jump in.

The Most Important Things I Learned from Judo

2011-12-06T22:44:00.001-08:00

and how destroying my knee made me a world champion

I'm not very good at throwing, as you can see by my less than perfect technique here. At a very young age, I had what in a less stubborn person would have been a career-ending injury. My knee was so damaged that it became physically impossible to balance on my right leg and throw someone - eliminating a whole range of throws. Eventually, my other knee started to give out, from years of bearing 80% of my weight, and it became increasingly difficult for me to lift anyone even when standing on both legs. The only reasonable decision was to quit competing.

No one has ever accused me of being a reasonable person. Instead, I pursued international competition, rather successfully, if I do say so myself.

What I learned was to turn strengths into weaknesses. As you can see here, my throwing technique is not the best. I start in a standard grip.

I turn into a throw, just like anyone else.

Because my knees are very bad - better now, since I had one replaced, but prior to that I had one ligament and no cartilage in the right knee - none, not even the stuff that is supposed to cover the end of your bones - and was missing one ligament and some of my cartilage in the other knee - I can only bend a very little, as you can see.

The opponent just sort of ungracefully rolls off of me and lands on her side. Not very hard and not completely on her back.

However, I am in a perfect position for an arm bar. I have her arm at the elbow, her arm is straight up in the air. My right foot is close to her body to keep her from turning to the right. My left foot is near her head, also keeping her from turning to the right.

It takes less than a second for me to fall backwards, taking her arm with me. As I fall, my right leg goes over her body and both hands slide up to her wrist so that I have her arm locked against me with two hands. Then, I just arch to finish the arm bar.

What I learned was this -- to turn my weakness, that is, my inability to lift someone up so that I could throw them hard and flat on the back - into a strength, by practicing the transition from that rolling off my back position into a really tight arm bar.

When I got injured, I thought it was the end of the world, that I would never be able to do judo again. Oddly, it was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. I learned to focus on what I could do and not what I couldn't do. When I was injured things like ligament replacements and total knee replacements didn't exist. That meant I had to find a different way to win that didn't require being able to stand up very well. I learned to look at what other people were not very good at as an opportunity - that was mat work in general and particularly the transition from standing to mat work and the transition between mat techniques.

If I hadn't blown my knee out when I was a teenager, I'd probably have gone along like everyone else, trying to do a better shoulder throw and never have really won very much outside of the U.S.

Three other really important lessons I learned at the same time were:

that success often comes from doing what no one else is doing,
hard work has an almost infinite capacity to make up for what you're missing in other areas, even missing body parts,
it's perfectly fine to pursue goals that are completely unreasonable.

For example, I decided to write a game in javascript, just because. The fact that I didn't know javascript when I decided this did not deter me in the slightest. Today I got it to work. Tomorrow, I'll get it to work better.

While I'm getting too old to pull off the arm bars 100% of the time, those lessons help me in business every single day.

I didn't show up here to look good losing

2011-12-03T20:29:00.001-08:00

If you looked at me and Jim Pedro, Sr. as competitors, you might guess the big body-builder - looking guy with all the muscles (him) was the one who would really focus on using strength to win and the little midget-sized one (me) would be all about technique.

You'd be wrong. One of the people I really learned a lot from was Miguel Tudela, a teammate of mine at Los Angeles Tenri Dojo, a member of the 1980 Olympic team and national sambo champion. Miguel was ungodly strong. He was also a very, very intelligent person, with a degree in international business and fluent in Spanish and English. He won national championships in multiple sports and in multiple weight divisions from 189 and under to the open weight category.

Two really valuable lessons I learned from Miguel were:
1. Use your head. Literally. When attacking someone with a double-leg take down he would grab both legs but he would also smack into the opponent's chest with his head. He figured for a guy his weight the head was at least 15 pounds and having the force of a thrown bowling ball smacking into your chest could only help off-balance you and send you in the direction of the throw. Miguel would come off the mat with mat burn all over his face because he used his head as an extra appendage to hold you down and to block in matwork. Pretty soon, I, too, came of the mat looking like I had wiped out on my bike and hit the pavement with my face. The other thing I had in common with Miguel is that I won.

2. If you're stronger than your opponent, use that advantage. Jim disagrees because he says that at some point you're going to run into someone stronger than you. (I'm not sure he really disagrees, because he later said that, sometimes even if you have better technique than someone, if they are a lot stronger than you, they'll beat you any way. I suspect he just argues with me for a hobby.) Here's what I learned from watching Miguel - both he and I were stronger than at least 95% of the people we fought. Technique may beat strength but people with technique AND strength have a better odds of winning than people with just technique. To win, I only needed to have technique as good as the people who were not as strong as me. I only needed to have BETTER technique than that 5% or so of the population who were stronger than me.

I saw this video of the finals of the Panamerican Games where I was fighting Natasha Hernandez. At the end, I locked her arm, rolled to the mat and when we were on the ground, I grabbed her legs and hauled her over into a pin.

Two things amused me by this. One is that the video had edited out the two times when I armbarred Natasha. (It was a double- elimination tournament, so she had tapped earlier in the day.) The second match, she did not tap and the match kept going. They did show her being taped. Almost 30 years ago, people being arm locked seemed a bit extreme for network television.

The second thing that amused me was a comment on the video, "Some of the worst judo I have ever seen". Natasha wasa gifted judo player. She moved up in weight and won the world championships the following year, at 61 kg. I had already beaten her once by ippon that day and I beat her by ippon again in the finals to win the gold medal.

I'm not sure how many international gold medals that commenter had won. I don't feel at all bad about winning because I am stronger than the other person, we're talking about a sporting event here, not the SATs. To some people the main point of a judo match is to look good, to throw with a nice, pretty uchi mata. To me, if I am representing my country in an athletic event, the goal is to win the event any way the rules allow.

As my friend, Steve Scott, often says to his athletes at major events,

"Guys, we didn't come all this way to look good losing."

For those of you who want an equation (all two of you), it would look like this:

y = a + b1X1 + b2X2

where Y = the log of the odds ratio of winning versus not winning
X1 = strength
X2 = technique

You're welcome.

Jiu-jitsu habits I just can't stand

2011-11-28T23:06:00.001-08:00

I'm not hating on jiu-jitsu in general, but having spent over 30 years in judo and misspent too much of my youth in actual fights, there are two things in jiu-jitsu that just have the effect on me of fingernails scraping across the chalk board. I realize that these habits are just as legal in jiu-jitsu as those pants the curling team from Norway wore in the Olympics and I am against both for the same reason - I'm pretty sure they will get your ass kicked if you try them out in the street.

(And yes, those are their actual uniforms and they won a silver medal and you didn't. The team, not the pants.)

One thing that irritates the hell out of me is what they call jumping guard. When I saw this in a grappling tournament, I turned to my friend and said,

"What the hell is that? Why doesn't the other guy just drive his head into the mat?"

and he told me there was a rule against it. This is NOT a "judo is cool, BJJ sucks" post, because believe me I know that judo has its own share of stupid rules, starting with the fact that if you grab a guy's legs, pick him three feet off the ground and slam him hard on his back you lose because you touched his pants with your hands. All that aside, doing a move where the only reason you don't get your ass kicked is that there is a rule against it is irritating. Notice that in mixed martial arts you don't see people do this move because there isn't any rule against driving your stupid head into the mat. You don't see people do it in judo because there is a rule against jumping guard, too. Judo keeps adding rules against everything. One day, we'll only be allowed to indicate with our eyes the directions we would move to throw the person if we were allowed to touch him. I won't even be surprised when this happens.

The second thing that irritates me is that lately when I watch jiu-jitsu people do matwork 100% of them start the same way, on their back. People in JJ tell me this is because it is the easiest position to defend.

Again, I understand this is true according to jiu-jitsu rules. (The alternate explanation, that 100% of the people I have watched lately are stupid, seems rather implausible.)

However, if you have ever been in an actual fight, or even watched one, you realize it doesn't go like this:

Guy X insults Guy Y's girlfriend, mother and/or masculinity.
Guy Y calls Guy X outside to the parking lot to see whose girlfriend/ mother / masculinity is the real #%^&&(!
Out in the parking lot, Guy X falls on his back and yells, "Come on, sucker!"

In fact, laying on your back is a VERY piss-poor position to defend from getting kicked in the face, hit with a two-by-four, jumped on or even being urinated on by your opponent (speaking of piss).

Rant off. For today. Tomorrow, in the interest of fairness, I think I'll ramble on about stupid judo things that irritate me.

Arm bars and Legos

2011-11-27T22:30:00.001-08:00

Today, a boy at the West Coast Judo Training Center told me he did not want to learn turnovers or pins, he wanted to learn arm bars. When I asked him why, he said,

Do you know who Ronda Rousey is? Did you know that she won four matches, all of them by arm bar? I want to be like that.

I told him, that why, yes, I did know who Ronda Rousey was, that, in fact, I'm her mother and I taught her arm bars. He was too polite to openly call me a liar, but he looked very skeptical.

If my judo teaching was a lego, it would be that base piece. You know, the blue or green piece that you stick all of the other legos on to. That piece isn't cool. No one asks for the base piece. They ask for a pirate kit or the safari legos or the Star Wars ones.

Funny thing, though, look at just about any cool lego thing and if you don't have that boring base piece, it falls over. You lay out the beginning of your cool thingy on the base and build from there.

I explained to the skeptical young man that often right before you see Ronda do an arm bar, the opponent is on her back and Ronda is on top of her.

I pointed out that judo matches (and mixed martial arts matches) do not start that way. .

Everybody who just wants to practice "the cool stuff" is missing two important points:

If you don't practice the boring basics (which I personally don't think are boring at all) you don't get a chance to get to the cool endings. I further pointed out to the boy who wanted to do nothing but arm bars that politely asking your opponent to lay down on the mat and let you get on top does not really work very well as a means of getting into this position. We spent the rest of the time doing the collect the arm turnover to get in position for an arm bar. We didn't do any arm bars at all today.
As Jim said the other day, "The idea is to win." The final point I told the skeptical arm-bar- assassin - wannabe is that you will find that the better you get at arm bars, the more people you pin. The reason is simple - they are too focused on tucking those arms in tight to be able to defend against pins successfully. After I'd dislocated a half-dozen arms, I pinned a LOT of people.

I'd have more to say about this but I have to go find A Christmas Carol because I am the mother of an eighth-grader who needs to finish her homework. (I'm also Ronda Rousey's mother, whether that boy believes it or not.)

Save your breath on the trash talk

2011-11-19T21:26:00.001-08:00

Just got back from Las Vegas and have a week of vacation. Also just getting caught up on twitter, Facebook, the Judo Forum and random sites. There seems to have been quite a bit of trash-talking from some woman trying to pick a fight with Ronda. I could tell her she might as well save her breath.

When Ronda was barely 17 years old, she was number one in the U.S., would go to judo tournaments and her competitors, all much older and with many more years of competition experience would walk by, try to catch her eye and glare at her. Since Ronda was a huge Pokemon fan, she spent all of her time in between matches playing on her Nintendo and never even noticed these people giving her the evil eye.

One woman skipped several tournaments setting up a head to head match against Ronda that would occur at either the Olympic trials or the senior nationals. We were sitting at a tournament and my friend commented,

"You notice that (*** ) didn't show up again? She's trying to psyche Ronda out. She wants Ronda to get all nervous about fighting her, and then have a let down when she's not here. She's hoping your daughter will convince herself they won't have to fight, and then, when Ronda is unprepared, she'll show up. You better tell your daughter to be mentally ready at any time."

I looked down at Ronda, sitting on the floor, playing Pokemon and said,

"I'm not telling her anything. Ronda never thinks about those women walking by her trying to stare her down, and she certainly doesn't think about whether so-and-so is going to show up at this tournament. If anything, she is thinking of some excuse she can use to convince Jim Pedro that she's close enough making weight that it's okay for her to have a chocolate doughnut."

Ronda paused in Pokemon for a minute, looked up and complained,

"Big Jim will never let me have a doughnut."

Later, she put her Pokemon game down, went out and won the senior national championships.

She calls it MMA now

2011-11-16T21:26:00.001-08:00

Earlier this week, a judo coach I had not spoken to in a couple of years caught up with me on Twitter and said,

"I just heard that Ronda is a professional fighter in MMA. So, is she not doing judo at all any more?"

I responded,

"She's still doing judo. She just calls it mixed martial arts now and gets paid for it."

Now is the time in every fight when I call up Jim and say how worried I am that my little baby is going to get in a ring with people who are going to try to punch and kick her. Jim always says the same thing, that she'll be fine, that once they clench up, Ronda will throw the woman and arm bar her because it is what Ronda has been doing since she learned arm bars in the eighth grade. I pointed out that is what the other person would expect and that in the pre-fight interviews her opponent said they had been training for that. His answer,

Yeah, well what did you expect her to say to reporters? 'I think I'm going to get killed?'

Even though I think I will never get over worrying about all of my kids, I have to admit that Jim does have a point. Ronda won the high school nationals by arm bar when she was a freshman, before she was even old enough to be allowed to do them in the USJF Junior Nationals. She won the women's division of the California state championships with an arm bar the same year. When she was 16, she was winning matches in the Ontario Open with arm bars, beating the then-Panamerican champion. At 17, she was winning matches in the Junior World Championships with an armbar, on her way to taking home a gold medal. She was the first American woman in a decade to win a World Cup, including a win with an armbar that made it into 101 Ippons.

So, yeah, however much practice that other woman has in avoiding arm bars, I'd be willing to bet that Ronda has a lot more experience getting them on people who don't want to be gotten, and who have practiced their defense a lot, specifically defense against her. Just like in the 2004 Olympic Trials, my money is on the little pumpkin.

Why I do what I do (useless pain is stupid)

2011-11-11T22:49:00.001-08:00

I've been working on The Book (working title "Building Martial Arts Champions - from the Ground Up") a lot the past few weeks and come to the conclusion that Jim and I have a little different ideas on teaching beginners. I teach the turnover to a pin shown here with me starting on my knees facing the other player and them facing me.

ONE

In step two, I turn, get my hips in front, get a grip on the head and pull the opponent's arm tight across my chest.

TWO

into a pin.

THREE

Jim doesn't do this. In fact, he punishes his students by making them do bunny hops if they get in this position because he says (rightly so) it is a stupid position to get into and you should always be on the other person's back.

So why do I do it? Three reasons.

First, novices (not stupid people, but people with very little judo experience) DO get in this position quite often. Over the years, I have taught a lot of people who were a long way from becoming international players. These included six-year-olds, white belt kids taking judo once a week and adults who just want to get some exercise after work. My goal for them is to feel successful immediately and have fun. This is above where you can learn to do a turnover, pin, escape and a second pin, learn the concept of matwork connections and look and feel pretty cool doing it.

Second, it teaches you to move your hips in front of the other person, which is something people always seem to have a hard time learning. Compare Tony's position in the picture above with my position in the previous picture. It is the exact same move as o soto makikomi or harai makikomi which is a really, really hard fall to take from standing. People who are not very used to getting thrown are likely to stick their arm out to keep from landing hard and hurt themselves. At the very least, if someone throws you from standing with that move and then lands on you, you'll probably get the wind knocked out of you.

So what? Usually the person saying so what is the coach standing on the sideline who hasn't taken a hard fall in 30 years. Yes, I remember taking falls on the tatami at Tenri Dojo, over and over. I remember how much it sucked. It didn't make me any better but I had to take falls because I wanted my turn at throwing my partner. When we got crash pads at other clubs like the Naval Training Center down in San Diego, I thought it was the greatest thing ever. After that lots of people would let me throw them, even if they weren't personally training for anything, because the fall didn't hurt.

So, the second reason is that I can get the students to learn how to get a grip for a throw around the opponent's head and on the sleeve, a grip used for all kinds of effective throws.

When I am teaching this move, beginning on your knees, face to face, I teach it as a sequence. So, novice players get in this position and they can surprise an opponent by doing a matwork counter. When the opponent grabs the head and arm, you can get a grip around the waist

FOUR

.... turn your hips in front of her ....

FIVE

and throw her into a pin. So, now, the student has gotten the basic idea of a matwork counter. Also, her opponent is pinned ...

SIX

with a pin that can be escaped by doing an inside turn ....

SEVEN

Which allows the second player to work on her escapes, and allows the first player to hook the arm coming through

EIGHT

and do a kami shiho gatame, which is a really good pin.

NINE

The third reason is that the sequence from six on works at all levels. I can guarantee this because either Steve Scott or Hayward Nishioka (in a Rick Perry moment, I can't remember which) has a picture of me in one of their books pinning someone in the world trials with this exact move. You know those last two parts, where the person is in kuzure kesa gate, turns in, I catch the arm and pin with kami shiho gatame?

You know the other time you get in that exact position? When you do a wrestler's roll.

In short (well, I guess it is too late for that now) - I teach the way I do because it will give the players early success, teach some basic movements they need to learn and part of it will be techniques in their repertoire that will work the exact same way for as long as they compete.

Jim's argument, on the other hand, is that I am letting them get away with bad habits and no one should be on their knees face to face, ever. Maybe he is right, but I would say more likely it depends on what it is you are trying to accomplish.

Jiu-jitsu for judo is a bad idea

2011-11-05T11:42:00.000-07:00

Jiu-jitsu and judo are two different sports.

- Captain Obvious

I'm surprised I have to explain this to people but I often do. I cannot tell you the number of judo players I meet who are convinced that jiu-jitsu will help their matwork. If that is true (and it often is) it's because their matwork really sucks.

The haters who only read the first paragraph are now writing long diatribes on how a purple belt in jiu-jitsu could kick my ass (maybe, by the time you are an old grandma - or grandpa -, a lot of people can kick your ass, and the judo and jiu-jitsu coaches that pretend different are delusional).

The reason jiu-jitsu does help some people is their matwork totally sucks. They spend all of their time at judo practice working on perfecting their throws. Not surprisingly, then end up with great throws and terrible matwork. So, they go to jiu-jitsu where 90% of the time they work on matwork and, no surprise again, their matwork gets better.

This proves - what? That you get better at the things you work on.

HOWEVER, I have seen over and over those people who are doing all of their matwork at jiu-jitsu never win a single match in a judo tournament using matwork.

Here is why - the rules are different. In jiu-jitsu you get to roll around for quite a long time trying to get a score. That's fine, that's the rules of the sport. In judo, you do not. You get a few seconds and then the referee makes you get up. This isn't a discussion of who would win if a judo player and BJJ player got in a fight. See my earlier post on unicorns for my opinion on that. This is a discussion of whether BJJ is the best way to improve your judo matwork. I would suggest it is not.

What if you don't have any people in your judo club who are near your size and the BJJ club has more people who are your size/ age to train with? Even in that case, I think I would stay at my judo club and do drills of judo matwork.

I would do drills like the Collect the Arm and then connect it to the pin combination shown here.

I once had a disagreement with a judo coach who was in favor of having excellent BJJ players teach our players armbars. He said to me,

"Just ask the players. We went to this guy's club and he did moves they had never seen before."

Why do you think they had never seen them? The players weren't stupid and neither were the moves he taught. The armbar combinations he did were great - for jiu-jitsu - but in judo, they often took longer to set up than the rules allowed.

What I see as one of the biggest problems with matwork for most judo players is that they are too slow to pull it off in the few seconds the referees allow for you to "show progress". Training in jiu-jitsu, with different rules and more of an acceptance of matwork makes that weakness worse, not better.

In other words, if you want to do well at a sport, train in that sport.

Captain Obvious is all over the place this morning, no?

How Do You Know When Your Child is Really Injured?

2011-11-01T18:39:00.000-07:00

Ronda suggested to me that the book Jim & I are writing should include more on what we know that is rather unique, that is, about coaching your own children. While she was over today we were discussing one of the most troubling questions to parents, I think, which is when you know that your child is injured as opposed to just tired, sore, bored,scared or wanting to get out of practice for some other reason. As a parent, it always helps to have an experienced coach to ask. But what if you ARE the coach?

Here are the list of steps I go through to determine if my child is really injured. Take these with a grain of salt. As my grandmother used to say, I am not the kind of doctor that does you any good. I'm a statistician with a Ph.D. Your mileage my vary.

Tell them to get up & quit whining & go back and work out. If they do, they're fine.
If they keep crying, invoke the 5 minute crying rule. Sometimes kids just want to know you care or want attention. Let them sit out for five minutes, get iced, get fussed over by mom or dad, whatever. Then ask, "Are you ready to go back?" If they do, they're fine.
Check them out when they don't know you're looking. I can't tell you the number of times that I have seen a kid get knocked down and they're fine. Ten seconds later, they see Mom or Dad looking at them and they let out a howl like they've broken every bone in their body. If they are limping around when they go back on the mat, keep an eye on them. When the coaches and parent are not paying attention to the child, watch out of the corner of your eye and see if he or she is still favoring the injury. Often kids will forget they are supposed to be injured.
Play a game at the end of practice, a really fun game. If the kid magically recovers and can run or pull during the game, they're fine.
At night, when your child is asleep, go into the room and gently touch or move the injured part. See if they react. If they react, this is a really bad sign. Go to the doctor. (Ronda wanted to know if I really did this when she was little. Yes, to her and all of her sisters.)
Don't mention the injury the next morning and see if your child still complains.
Take a day, a few days or a week off of practice. Maybe your child just needs a break. Ask your child each day to rate the pain on a scale of 1= doesn't bother me to 10 = I think I'm gonna die. If the number doesn't go down, A LOT from day one to day five, call the doctor.
Anything that doesn't get better after a week or two, call the doctor. Kids heal fast. If something is still bothering your child two weeks after it happened, something is wrong.

Also, even if you are the coach, don't hesitate to call a more experienced coach and ask for advice. I'm lucky that one of my good friends who knows my children well is both a judo coach and physician.

In the end, you know your own child best. It's popular (and a way to prevent lawsuits) to say that you should call the doctor or take your child to the ER any time you are in doubt, but that's not always practical unless you have infinite time and unlimited money.

One of my daughters hated sports and had a new injury every day. A second likes sports a lot but is a bit of a hypochondriac. If I took her every time she said she needed to go, we'd have been in the doctor's office every two weeks. The other two, if they say they're injured, I drive them to the emergency room.

When I hurt my knee as a teenager, before orthoscopes, no one could see anything on an x-ray and the first doctor told my mother

"It's psychological, she's just afraid to compete."

My mother said,

"I know this kid and she's never been afraid to compete in her life."

She took me to a new doctor who pulled a sample of fluid from my knee and said to my mom,

"It's not in her head, it's in her knee. I can see pieces of cartilage floating around in here, it's that bad."

Your kid is, well, a kid! How does he or she know if this is just a minor injury that will just heal up on its own or something more serious? By the time your child has been competing for a few years, you can usually call it right away, like my mother did, but in the first few years, the steps above may help ease your mind a little and help you and your child make the right calls.

Do a half-nelson, damn it!

2011-10-31T21:01:00.000-07:00

It has never made the slightest bit of sense to me that so many judo players who wrestle in high school and college forget wrestling once they put on a judo gi. Some of them are really good wrestlers. One technique I cannot believe that every judo player does not know and use is a half-nelson. Here is former Marine Corps wrestler and West Coast Judo Training Center coach, Gary Butts, demonstrating on his fellow WCJTC coach and head instructor at Ontario Judo, Victor Ortiz.

The first thing to notice is that Gary has his weight on Victor. He is reaching around Victor's waist to pull him closer and put even more weight on him. At the same time, he has his left arm under Victor's arm

Notice how Gary shoots his left hand through and is grabbing his opponent's neck.

As he turns Victor, Gary pulls his right arm back and shoots it through underneath to grab Victor's bicep.

You can see below that Gary continues to crank on Victor's neck with his left hand as he pulls the opponent's arm in toward him with his right. Notice how his weight is STILL all pushing against Victor. There is no space between the two of them. Also, you can see in both photos that Gary is driving against Victor with all his weight. Notice how he is pushing off of his left leg.

The half-nelson finishes with the opponent on his back, pinned with yoko shiho gatame (what jiu-jitsu players call a side mount).

Now I know that anyone who ever wrestled learned a half-nelson and I see lots of judo players who are successful wrestlers get in the same position that Gary was above and they never try this move. It is just ridiculous. Cut it out! Do a half-nelson, damn it!

Book cover - what I did when I should have been working

2011-10-28T22:34:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I spent so much time playing with the cover. In the end, I'm sure the publisher has far more artistically talented people than me who can put something together, but, I hope, this gives an idea what the book is about - physical conditioning, matwork and coaching, for judo and for other sports, like mixed martial arts.

So, what do you think?

Spent hours today working on the book when I should have been writing a statistical paper (good thing I'm president of the company). Still, I have commitments to meet to clients, so, I'm off to that now.

Matwork Connections: Tie-up series

2011-10-27T22:29:00.000-07:00

Many judo players do a move called a tie-up or key-lock, where they slip one arm through the opponent's bent arm, pull over the gi and "tie-up" the opponent's arm. If you want to see the whole series (and there's a LOT of it), you'll need to buy our book. Since I am working on the outline, synopsis and all that stuff publishers want, here is a guest post from Jim Pedro, Sr. today. Thanks to him and thanks to Kayla Harrison for the demonstrations (congrats on the Panam Games medal) and to Riley McIlwain for taking the photos.

Another matwork connection sequence is when you are attempting to do the tie up, as your opponent starts to get up on her hands and knees. You step around and get your knee in front of her chest as the other knee is controlling her head. Then, you take your free arm and shoot it through the arm that you were trying to tie up.

You cross-face (put your bicep into her face) and drive her to the mat

into the pin shown below.

Smart Coaching: Caring that you know

2011-10-20T22:55:00.000-07:00

Before I was interrupted by the Sneakerdoodle Zebra Judo video of Ronda's two buns, I gave the beginning of the first chapter of the section on coaching, "Coaching matters" . This is the beginning of the second chapter in that section, "Smart enough to do it". We're just getting started on this chapter so feel free to jump in with comments. (Photo courtesy of Riley McIlwain - thanks, Riley .)

Love is not enough.

By itself, caring about your players won't build champions. The first two sections of this book gave specific techniques, exercises and drills, both for physical conditioning and matwork. This chapter gives specifics on how to be, and become, a smarter, better coach. Of course, that is a whole lot of books all by itself, so we’re following the same tactic of the first section of focusing on the areas we think are too often overlooked.

The first of these areas *I* call developmentally appropriate coaching, being a professor and all, and Jim calls recognizing the difference between children and adults. Whatever you call it, there's a need to adjust your coaching based on the physical and mental differences between junior and senior competitors. A second area is individualized coaching, fitting your program to the strengths and weaknesses of the athlete. The third area is building mental strength. That strength includes motivation to train harder and longer in practice, and to face down fears and anxieties in competition. Anyone who claims never to be anxious before a competition is either stupid or a liar. The skill to learn is to overcome those fears and come out on top despite them. The fourth area is matside coaching. This is where the coach is most visible and where too many people let their ego get in the way. If you admit that you don't know always what you're looking for when a player is on the mat, or what is the best thing to say, well then, you're an honest person because this is true for all coaches at least some of the time. Hopefully, after having read this chapter, you'll find yourself in that position less often. We'll give you a preview right now by telling you that we believe "Less is more". During or just before a match is not the time to be teaching your player techniques. That's what you should have been doing the months before the tournament and if you didn't do it then, it's too late now.

-- Well, there is more, but I have to brush Julia's hair. I told her that I needed to come up with the last sentence for this post first. She suggested, how about this

Goodbye.

Fight-y Smurf's Hairstyling Tips from Ronda

2011-10-18T14:16:00.000-07:00

Sneakerdoodle Zebra Judo Guest Video Blog from Ronda Rousey

How to do your hair.

THE IMPORTANCE OF COACHING

2011-10-18T01:20:00.000-07:00

The chapter I'm working on now for The Book is on coaching. We tag-teamed and it's Jim's turn to do some matwork techniques and edit my draft of the matwork section, while I edit his first draft of the coaching section. Thanks to Riley McIlwain for taking photos and Kayla Harrison for posing in them. Also, thanks in advance to Gary Butts and Victor Ortiz from the West Coast Judo Training Center who are going to be helping fill in the gaps this weekend by posing for some of the turnovers. (And, yes, Ronda, I DO deliberately have a white person in a white gi and a black person in a blue gi in all of the pictures we take at West Coast because it makes it easier for people to see immediately who is doing what to you.) So .... here is what I am working on today .....

To excel at coaching, you need to be smart enough to do itand dumb enough to believe it’s important. We thought about that saying a lotbefore deciding it’s true - which is why we have divided this section intothree chapters, believing it’s important, being smart enough to do it and thereisn’t a manual for this.

Over the years, we could have made a lot more money managinghedge funds, writing software or selling real estate than we’ve made teachingmartial arts. It isn’t that a person can’t earn money in the martial artsindustry - both of us have children who make a living coaching, teaching,competing and marketing to martial artists. The truth is, though, that anyonewho succeeds as a professional martial artist probably has the drive, mentaland physical ability to succeed in a lot of areas of life.

In this chapter, we’ll do our best to convince you thatcoaching is important in building champions, both on the mat and in life.

It’s been said that athletes don’t care how much you knowbut they know how much you care. That’s not completely true. We believe youneed to care about your athletes. They need to trust you, to believe when youtell them to change weight divisions, switch their training plan, work out atone gym versus another - that you have their best interests at heart. No matterhow technically skilled you may be, no matter how much you are up on the latesttheories of coaching, no matter the number of degrees you get, if your athletesdon’t trust you and you don’t have their best interests at heart you will neverreach your potential as a coach. If your athletes reach their goals it willoften be despite you instead of because of you.

Caring is necessary but it’s not enough. You can love yourplayers like your own children but if you don’t know enough to tell them tolock the arm against the body and pinch their knees together when they go foran armbar they aren’t going to win as much as if you knew a little moretechnique.

If you’re a completely selfish person, no book is going tochange you. If you’ve read this far, though, we assume you’re a coach whosincerely wants to help your athletes improve or an athlete motivated tosucceed in your sport as far as humanly possible.

Coaching matters.It certainly matters when it comes to winning. The next chapter is all about how, the details of what to do. Right now, we want to run by three reasons why coaches help you win, why coaching matters.

First of all,a good coach pushes you harder than you can push yourself. We’ve said itthroughout this book - intensity is key to winning. It will pull you throughwhen the opponent has better technique, more experience, better tactics. Partof that intensity comes from physical conditioning and part of it comes frommental toughness. The exercises in the first section develop physicalcondition, but they also build mental toughness as a coach pushes, encouragesand demands more from an athlete than he or she believes possible. Many of thedrills in the second section are about developing matwork techniques, but some,like the escape drills from pins and armbars, are also about buildingintensity. How much do you hate losing? How badly do you want to get out ofthat pin?

[Yeah, I know there are two more but it is past 1 a.m. and I have to write a lecture tomorrow, read four chapters on multivariate methods and write a paper on categorical models. Plus, I have clients who actually want me to write programs and answer their email. So I'll have to get those other two tomorrow. ]

Matwork Mistakes Not to Make

2011-10-10T23:24:00.000-07:00

One mistake players can make when they hear us talk about connections in matwork is to think that everything has to be connected to everything else. That is not exactly true. I'll write about that some other time, or you can read our book, which is coming along nicely, thank you.

A bigger mistake to make than thinking everything needs to be connected is to get so focused on one move that you forget to make connections. An error we have seen too many times in competition is when a player is attempting an armbar against an opponent who is resisting very strongly, as in STEP 1 below.

Often what happens in this position is - nothing. There is no Step 2. The player on the top exerts a lot of effort trying to get the armbar but the player on the bottom has both arms locked together resisting. The referee stops the match and both players get up.

When I get some more time, I will write about what SHOULD happen in Step 2. I only have a step 2, but Ronda has steps 2 through 9. (I counted. And took pictures.)

Completely Random Ronda Story

2011-10-09T23:41:00.000-07:00

Ronda dropped by to visit today and we had a difference of opinion on something, which reminded me of something that happened a long time ago ...

We were visiting (*cough *cough) Judo Club and one of those things happens that happens to everybody if they are in judo, or really, any martial art, for long enough. You run into a jerk.

So I am a kind of little, kind of old lady and this guy quite a bit bigger asks me to do matwork. I was still young enough to work out somewhat, and so, I say okay, even though he is bigger than the partner I would usually choose. Thirty seconds into it, it's pretty obvious he is a jerk and a bully and trying to muscle me and show off, "I beat the world champion".

Really, what a moron. It's not like some guy beating up a 115 pound woman in her forties is a big deal. But by now, I am a very annoyed 115-pound woman in her forties and I do this turn over here to the pin which, since he hadn't seen it before, works and since I am NOT stupid, I don't let him up to have another chance at me before they call matte.

When the person running practice calls time, Mr. Jerk "doesn't hear it", keeps going and "accidentally" pushes me into the wall.

Ronda, who was just a skinny little brown belt, comes over and asks me what is wrong with my wrist that I'm rubbing. I told her it was nothing, that jerk just pushed me into the wall is all.

The next round, Ronda has some young brown belt guy a bit older and a lot bigger than her. She throws him off the mat, throws him on the mat and lands on him and just generally beats the crap out of him. People even stop to watch. This is extremely out of character for Ronda, who was generally a very nice kid.

When they call matte, I pull her aside and hiss at her,

"We are visiting here! What the hell was THAT all about? Don't you have any manners at all?"

Unrepentant, she shoots back,

"He deserved it! He hurt my Mommy!"

Shaking my head, I told her,

"It wasn't him! It was the guy standing next to him."

Two weeks later ....
I run into a friend of mine who is a judo coach. He asks me whether I had taken Ronda to visit (*cough *cough) Judo Club a couple of weeks ago. Surprised, I tell him yes, why, and he says ...

"There was a tournament a couple of weeks ago. The practice after a tournament, I discuss each person's individual performance - Joe got second place, his throws looks good but he needs to work more on his defense on the mat. Stuff like that. I tell them that if they have any questions they can stay and talk to me after class. So, one of my guys comes to talk to me and says, 'I don't have any questions about the tournament, but I do have a question. I was visiting this judo club after the tournament and this girl just beat the crap out of me.' I asked him was the girl bigger than him, and he said, no that was the weirdest thing about it, she was this skinny little girl with a blonde ponytail."

Matwork Connections: Latest in an occasional series

2011-10-06T21:21:00.000-07:00

Jim told me that I could not use The Lego Theory of matwork because we were not writing a book for ten-year-olds (boo!). As much of it pains me to agree with him, I have to say I do like his new title for this chapter, "Matwork Connections".

He said some really good stuff about everything connecting to everything else which I wrote down and lost somewhere in the house. Hopefully, I find it while cleaning tomorrow.

Here is yet another example of a matwork connection. First, you collect the arm. You roll on top into what judo players call tate shiho gatame and what people in jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts call a mount.

If you were Ronda in a match, at this point you would punch the person in the face.

Let's say you're not Ronda, though and you're not in mixed martial arts. Suppose you are me and you are in judo. Then, at this point you would go straight into the pin.

You may wish to connect something to this pin, say, another pin and a choke. So, I push her arm across her face. I clasp my hands together so that I am now pinning and choking her.

Just because I think this pin and choke combination is not quite painful enough, I am going to move my legs so that I can use my body weight to put more pressure on the choke.

Notice two things in the photo above. First, I have my hands clasped tight together to put pressure on her neck. Second, I am up on my toes putting all of my weight on to her head. Even really tough people will become distracted when you almost (or actually) dislocate their jaw, and not focus so much on escaping from the pin.

Today was AWESOME!!! (Despite the lack of a jiu-jitsu song)

2011-10-01T23:22:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest things about living in southern California if you are in martial arts is that people who are legends can just wander in off the street and work out with you.

Today was the Grand Opening of the West Coast Judo Training Center at our new location, which is about twice the size of the old place. It's a good thing, too, because a whole lot of people showed up for practice today from Barstow, San Diego, Santa Monica, El Centro, San Gabriel and a bunch of cities out in San Bernardino county.

Dr. Jake Flores, head coach for many years at San Shi Dojo in San Diego and father and coach to world team members Justin Flores and Jacob Flores, Jr. just happened to find the time to stop by between seeing patients to teach gripping.

Hayward Nishioka drove out from San Pedro to teach gripping and foot techniques. We all clapped when he came in and he looked at us like he honestly couldn't figure out what all of the fuss was about. Seriously, this is a man who has been a competitor at the world championships, U.S. Grand Champion, Panamerican Champion, coached at the world championships, refereed at the world championships, produced several judo videos, written several judo books, and just walks in and says, "I'm here to do whatever you want me to do."

Then there were other people who are too young to be legendary but are just really, really good teachers. Victor Ortiz did a phenomenal job teaching shoulder throws and foot techniques to our younger players. Blinky Elizalde, who has been in several Olympic Trials, a member of the U.S. team back in the day and taught judo for well over thirty years helped everyone with their ko uchi gari (and some of you really needed it - I've seen you try to throw). Gary Butts taught no-gi techniques, assisted by demonstrations from the inimitable Crystal Butts. (As Gary would say - "inimitable, those of you who went to public schools, look it up!") Tom Reusling taught jiu-jitsu.

I was particularly proud of Ronda, and not just because I am her mom. I see a lot of younger athletes and athletes newly-retired from judo competition who have a complete "What's in it for me?" attitude. You will never see them do a camp or clinic unless there is a fat paycheck involved. Now, Ronda does mixed martial arts professionally and she does charge a fair bit for teaching and private lessons. She has a fight coming up in six weeks. However, she also has known a lot of the people who teach or train at the training center for over half of her life. After working out for several hours this morning, she drove well over an hour to get to the training center and then taught for twice as long as she had been scheduled because there were some people who wanted her to show specific techniques.

She even taught a choke and sang a song. I would like to take this opportunity to point out that Tom Reusling had an entire twenty minutes advance notice to come up with a jiu-jitsu song and he failed. We trust that he will be working on correcting this lapse. I once suggested to Gary Butts that he come up with a no-gi grappling song. His response is not printable in a family blog but if you have met him you can imagine it.

I'm not sure how much those kids really wanted to see Ronda demonstrate o soto gari again and how much they were just amused by her continually missing the crash pad. It wasn't on purpose. Honest!

Regardless of the number of songs or lack thereof, it was an awesome day. Thanks to everybody who made it that way. I did not get picture of all of the instructors teaching so I am hoping someone else did and will post them on the West Coast Judo blog or Facebook page. Yeah, I'm talking about YOU, you know who you are ...

Middle School Judo: Day 2

2011-10-01T00:36:00.000-07:00


Learning a turnover, pin and escape

Here we are in the second day of teaching at Gompers Middle School and it is great! We don't have enough gis and half the gis are missing belts, but whatever. There are 14 kids who work hard from the minute class starts until it is over an hour and a half later.

To be a member of the class, students are required to have good grades, no behavior problems at school and commit to attend the entire school year. Every Friday, after school they come upstairs and put down the mats. When I get there at 3:30 we start practice with a warm up and then go right into judo matwork drills, exercises and throws.

There isn't a water fountain in the room and it isn't always the best idea for the students to be outside the area where judo is, so the teacher, Mr. Gonzales and I decided we'd have to remember to get water for the kids for next week. He said he would just go out and buy a couple of cases of water because it's not very expensive. Note, this is a teacher who has two small children, one of them a newborn, who works all day and then helps organize and teach this class after school for free, since there is no budget. Next time you hear someone talk about how bad LAUSD teachers are, think of him.

A terrific, and I think very accurate, description of what it is like teaching at Gompers is given in this post by a teacher called "A View from our Watts Middle School."

Yeah, there are a lot of things they lack, but as you can see from the picture below, talent isn't one of them.

One other thing I appreciate about this class is there is NO WHINING. The students were selected to be here. They want to be here and they work hard with very little goofing off, especially considering they are all sixth, seventh and eighth grade students who have come here straight from school with no break.

Some people tell me that I am crazy that I teach for free, I'm a world champion, I have a Ph.D., I'm de-valuing myself, blah blah blah. I disagree. Everything doesn't have to be about me getting every dime I possibly can from people. There is no money for programs like this in the district budget so either I teach for free or there is no class. I'm not hypocrite enough to complain about the state of American education (which I do frequently) and the lack of physical fitness in youth and yet never get off my ass and help.

Besides, it's fun.

And frankly, I hate that "what's in it for me?" attitude so many people have that you should never do anything for free. Most of the best things that paid off the most for me in terms of having a great life - sex, parenting, getting an education, traveling around the world - I did for free.

The Lego Theory of Matwork

2011-09-29T01:21:00.000-07:00

Did you ever see a kid play with Legos?

You know why Legos are so awesome? Because you have a few basic blocks and you can build a million different things with them. Matwork is like that. Really. The Lego theory of matwork can be summed up as, “Everything connects to something else.”

One of the differences in the way I teach matwork is the degree to which I emphasize matwork combinations. You are going to be a lot better at matwork combinations, at teaching them, learning them and doing them, if you have mat techniques that fit together.

When adding a new mat technique to your arsenal, try to think about how it fits with what you already have. One example of mat techniques that fit together was in a post I wrote a while ago with the demonstration of a move that began with an attempted throw by the opponent. From this position, you go to one armbar, if that doesn’t work, move to a second armbar and, failing that, move to a third armbar. That is one type of connection, where the techniques are all in a sequence, where you do step one, two, three and four.

A second type of connection starts from a base and branches out. One of the bases I use is the “collect the arm” technique I wrote about last month and connections to it are shown below.

From the first technique, a turnover, I can move into one of two different pins. One of the pins has two variations I can choose from the standard pin. One of those has two possible combinations, one to a choke and another to an armbar. Or, I could just stay in the pin and win that way. In coming up with these combinations, it’s not as if I sat down one day and laid it all out, quite the opposite. I learned the combination pin to choke when I was twelve years old - kata gatame. Probably about that same year, my first year in judo, I learned the next part of that combination, the tate shiho (mount), and quickly figured out I could put that together with my other pin and choke. It wasn’t until a few years later that I learned the armbar, and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me to switch from the pin to the armbar. I don’t know why, but it wasn’t.

When I learned the “collect the arm” turnover, I put that together with the pin, choke and armbar combination I was already doing. I learned the other pin variation last.

When I was in my twenties (better late than never) it occurred to me that the most effective way to improve my matwork quickly was to take anything new I learned and add it into an existing framework like the one above.

By that time, I had lots of opportunities to learn from camps, clinics and just visiting other clubs. When I would see a new technique, I would immediately try to find a way it connected to one of the existing sequences I had. Just like Legos, it could connect on at any point. The beginning of the scheme above, the "collect the arm" turnover, I learned second-to-last. The last thing I learned in there was the "Variation 1" on a pin I had learned when I was thirteen years old.

Notice something else. Remember, that first post I talked about, the one with the sequence of armbars? It just so happens that if you try to push on towards me so that I can't get the armbar, you're set up for this "collect the arm" turnover. If you pull away from the "collect the arm" turnover, it is easy for me to throw my leg over and do the armbar sequence. It's all connected. (I really am smarter than I look. I keep telling people that but they don't believe me.)

Two points:
1. When you have a choice of new techniques to learn, always select the one that makes a connection with something you already do.
2. You can be almost completely unpredictable and damn near unstoppable if you have so many possible combinations and permutations that you have a matwork move no matter what your opponent does.

This weekend, at the Grand Opening of the new location for the West Coast Judo Training Center, I'll try to get some photos so I can illustrate these steps better. For now, though, having followed Andy Lee's advice on blogging , first matwork , then statwork , I need to get to bed so I can get up in the morning and finish my lecture on the Central Limit Theorem.

Judo role model? Try Dave Winer instead of Homer Simpson

2011-09-24T13:30:00.000-07:00

For years, I have been hearing that judo needs to be taught in the schools. Starting sentences with, "The problem with judo is ..." happens so much when black belts get together you almost wonder if it is part of the promotion exam.

Two very, very common statements I hear are that judo needs to be in the schools and judo needs to be run more like a business. I never hear anyone say that judo coaches need to be more like Homer Simpson.

The first argument goes that everyone (or, at least, a lot more people) would love judo if they knew about it. Japan has very good judo because it is taught in their schools and millions of kids take it. The hundred thousand or so that get to black belt are the pool from which their Olympic teams can be drawn.

After this point, most judo coaches seem to adopt the Homer Simpson model. (A disadvantage of being married to someone obsessed with The Simpsons is that he has an analogy for every issue in life with a Simpsons' episode. In this particular one, Home is elected to public office based on the slogan, "Let someone else do it.")

Dave Winer is a pretty successful businessman. He's founded two software companies, made some interesting contributions to technology we all use - like the original outlining program - and has the opposite attitude of Homer. On his blog yesterday, he suggested that rather than complaining about all of the problems in America, some of us voluntarily roll up our sleeves and start fixing things.

Which gets me to my point - this is the third year that we have had a program at Gompers Middle School. For the first two years, the mats were loaned by a very kind karate coach. Now we have some different loaner mats surrounded by a safety area of very old gymnastics mats. We have a dozen used judo gis that kind friends and former students of mine donated (thank you!). That is not enough since we had 14 kids signed up for judo and not all of the gis fit all of the students. One young man much bigger than me was wearing a size 2 because that is all that was left. Still, we are in the third year of the program.

Here is how it started - the teacher asked Jennifer, my second daughter, who was a student teacher back then, if she knew anyone who might teach judo. Jenn got Ronda, her younger sister, who had just come back from the Olympics, to volunteer. We borrowed mats from Sean Davila, a karate instructor who also writes Christian books. Sean is one of those people who give Christianity a good name, a follower after Father Loyola Ignatius who believed that God's charge is that we do good in the world - NOT that we go around judging other people, like some right-wing nut jobs seem to think. But, I digress. Anyway, I knew Sean was the type of person who would let us use his mats for free if he wasn't using them - and at the moment, he wasn't.

Ronda taught there for a year, and I would substitute when she couldn't make it. After she started MMA, it got to be more me teaching there and her substituting when I couldn't make it. After another six months, Blinky Elizalde began teaching as a substitute as well. Ronda now drops in once or twice after a fight during the period she is taking a break from training, or if we really get in a bind and neither Blinky nor I can make it.

My point is that if you really want to have a judo program in a school - just do it. If you really think the Los Angeles public schools (or your school district) needs more help - just do it. Find a teacher to sponsor the activity, borrow some mats, get some judo gis from your friends and show up.

I really think the success of the Gompers program is in part because we have multiple instructors. We never cancel practice. Sometimes the school cancels practice because they have an event, like a school dance, but WE never flake on them. Yes, it is a volunteer activity, but there are three of us and between the three of us, we can make it there one day a week for thirty-six weeks out of the school year.

Speaking of showing up, I better get in the car and head out to the new West Coast Judo Training Center location.
859 W Foothill Blvd
Claremont CA 91711

(Sekai Black Belt Academy)
See you there.

Underhook!

2011-09-20T22:14:00.000-07:00

Son, I do think you'd be more likely to turn her if you under-hooked that left arm of hers with your right and got up on your knees so you'd be in a stronger position to turn her.

Agree? Disagree? Discuss.

Out of Shape or Over-training?

2011-09-19T23:45:00.000-07:00

I was going to write about something else today but the comments on the last post on over-training were so interesting that I decided to write about periodization instead.

Just like within my family and friends, the larger population view on over-training seems to be split along three lines, those who believe it never happens (Maria), those who think it seldom happens (me) and those who think it happens all the time (Jim).

Michael Hulstrom said,

To talk about an absolute level of overtraining that isn't tied to how well trained you are to start with is the wrong way to think about it.

I kind of agree and kind of disagree. Certainly what is "over-training" for, say, Ronda, who is a professional athlete and Blinky, who is a grandfather many times over, are two completely different things. I will bet he was a lot more fatigued after this workout than she was.

Jorge says

Empirically I would say that every time that you start training and you feel as tired as you have been at the end of the previous training, you have not rested enough to recover.

I have never felt that way but I would certainly agree that if I did it would be a very bad sign.

Where I disagree is with those athletes who take their fatigue as indication that they are training "too hard". Rather, I think their problem is usually that they have not been training hard enough and are out of shape.

The FIRST thing those athletes need to do is train less today than they did yesterday because they aren't in good enough shape to do a workout at the level they should be doing it to win. However, the mistake they often make is to stay at that lower level of workout for fear of "over-training".

The SECOND thing they need to do, which most of them don't, is increase their training gradually over time so it is at a much higher level.

This goes back to the concept of periodization. (See, you should really read our book. However, since it is not done yet, you can read this post on periodization instead.)

How Much of a Problem is Over-training?

2011-09-14T00:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I was talking to sports writer Maria Burns Ortiz about the issue of over-training. She said,

"I have covered all kinds of professional sports and I have NEVER heard a coach say that an athlete was over-training. "

Personally, across all sports, I have seen a very few players who I think over-trained, but I have definitely seen some. These were mostly players who had an eating disorder, who were training so much they were burning muscle, or players who did not take enough time off after an injury. I've heard a lot of people say their problem was over-training when I thought their problem was they did not train enough.

Today, I was talking to Jim Pedro, Sr. who said that he saw players who over-trained all the time, that he thought it was very common. I don't have any problem saying that Jim knows a lot more about coaching than I do - because it's true - so I was very surprised to hear him say that he had over-trained when he was a competitor because he didn't know any better. He said that he would train right up until the day of the tournament and he sees a lot of other players that make the same mistake now.

Which led me to the two questions of "How common is over-training?" and why do three people who have a lot of sports knowledge and experience have such different views?

One answer, I think is that there are two definitions of over-training.

Not enough recovery time is allowed between workouts . The intensity of workouts is so hard and workouts are so close together that, physically and mentally, the athlete gets torn down and gets progressively weaker instead of stronger.
The failure to apply periodization, which is breaking your training cycle into periods which vary in intensity.

I think these are two different ideas. One is that you are training too hard. I see very, very few people who ever do that compared to the large number who delude themselves into thinking they do. The second is that you are training hard at the wrong time. This occurs far more commonly than the first problem.

I think Maria and I are only considering the first definition as over-training while Jim calls both of those over-training. If that is the definition you use, then I'd say he is right, it's very common.

Many people who THINK they are over-training just are not in good enough shape. Yes, perhaps you do need to rest more but the reason is not because you are training too hard and the solution is NOT to not train so hard in general. What most of these people need to do is gradually increase their training because they come in to practice and train very, very hard but because they don't do this often they end up exhausted the next day. So, what do they do? They take three or four days off. Instead, what they ought to be doing is training at 70-80% capacity and increasing what they do each day.

As for periodization - well, there is a lot about that in our book, but since I have to be in Malibu by 8:30 a.m. I guess I better turn in.

So..... what's YOUR opinion? How common do you think over-training is?

WHY COMPETE? Guest post by Ken Brink

2011-09-10T22:08:00.000-07:00

Thank you to Ken Brink of Welcome Mat Judo for giving permission to reprint his article here. It was in Steve Scott's Welcome Mat newsletter and I thought it was well worth repeating.

     A recent conversation I heard someone say, "It’s better for young players to focus on the fundamentals of the game instead of winning and losing. There can be a lot of anguish associated with competitive sports for young players".

     It got me to think about how the kids in the class were talking about some of the other entry level sports that they competed in and how they don’t keep score, there are no winners , everyone gets to bat or shoot the ball there are no team trophies. Everyone gets the same generic award and the same generic end of the season party.

     Life isn’t generic; competition varies in everyday functions. I believe that many youth sports are missing the coaches and parents who know how to set the essential ground rules for healthy competition for their athletes.

     Since our club was formed, I’ve witnessed an underlying fear or reluctance by many of our kids to compete in a tournament. Some of the kids that do compete are so overcome with anxiety that they struggle to perform during the match. After speaking to many of the kids after the match about how they thought it went, many just answer "I don’t like to compete" or a parent will inform me that they are "afraid it will ruin my child’s confidence." Judo is a tough and challenging, physically and mentally. No one has ever gained confidence without having overcome a significant personal challenge. A parent who shelters their child from challenging situations will keep their child from developing the vary skill they want their child to learn.

     My personal belief on this matter is that competition is an important valuable and critical element of our society. Every child, during the course of his or her lifetime must compete in some form. It may be for grades in school, on the playground with friends or even in the work place for advancement. At some point a child must be empowered with philosophies and values about competition. Reflecting on my own childhood I began to realize that not everyone has had the advantage of experiencing a unique coach or leader who was able to instill a positive philosophy about competition that I had. There are many parents that don’t understand the attitude towards healthy competition. Another reason is that society is in love with the winner, only caring about who took first. Can you remember who took 2nd place on American Idol last year?

     Through my years of coaching I’ve watched children quit because of a bad experience they had during a tournament. Regardless of the sport or child, it can usually be traced back to parents, coaches or a family member who is solely focused on winning that the child learns to associate losing with failure. Many times losing for these kids’ results in a verbal or physical punishment. Does it make sense why kids don’t like to compete?

     During a tournament we ask that a child does their very best, gives 100% effort during the match and utilizes the skills that they have been taught. Winning is not based on the end result of the match but what happened during the match. Did the child gain ground on an opponent that they had lost too previously, did they work in the new technique they just learned, how did they handle themselves after the match was over, regardless if they won or lost. If the end result is a victory…Great, but should they lose then it is my responsibility to figure out why and help them improve.

     As the child matures this becomes a team effort. This approach empowers the child to focus on something within their control, personal performance. It teaches them to ignore things outside their control, like the draw of the bracket, referees, or what color the opponent’s belt is. It’s a simplified approach to focus on one thing which allows the child to be more successful.

     In our program, we teach self-confidence, self-discipline, self-control and self-respect. These are all life skills that are acquired as a result of an extended participation within our program; these are not skills that can be taught within one or two sessions. One of my fundamental beliefs is that empowering the child’s belief about competition will help them become more self reliant, mentally tough and self confident. By avoiding competition kids may be missing these valuable life lessons.

Matwork secret #8: Don't give the opponent time to escape

2011-09-09T08:51:00.000-07:00

Aperson does a throw and lands on his side, at the side of the other person. Fora side four corner hold down (called yoko shiho gatame in judo, a side mount injiu jitsu), all you really need to do is turn on to your stomach, as shown inthis photo. This is a photo of Ronda landing in a pin.

Her opponent hasn’t completely hit the mat yet, his legs are still inthe air and not only is she already in the pin, but you can see that she isalready moving her right arm to make the pin tighter. To make the hold tighter,move your top arm under the person's head and hold tightly, so he can't bridge.If the person is wearing a gi, you can feed the lapel of the gi into the handunder their head to hold tighter. Since Manny is not wearing a gi, Ronda isgoing to slide her right hand under his shoulder.

Dopeople throw into a pin? Generally, no. They throw, then let go, and try to get on top of the opponent, of course giving theperson time to escape. Whether you go to a club that does grappling, jiu-jitsu,judo or MMA, you’ll often see the same thing.
Thereare two reasons people do such an illogical thing. One is that they aren't usedto thinking of a match as one connected whole, because they don’t practice thatway. We already discussed that on this blog before and the solution is simple. Practice goingstraight into matwork from your throws. The other reason I bring up here a lot is that must people have a very limited arsenal of matwork techniques.

(Oh, and speaking of Ronda, please vote for her for female fighter of the year . )

Ronda Rousey Female Fighter of the Year

2011-09-02T22:50:00.000-07:00

Ronda is one of the finalists for female fighter of the year. People are always telling me judo is the second most popular sport on the planet. I am skeptical of this but would love to be proven wrong in this case.

You can vote for Ronda for female fighter of the year at this link
http://www.onlineawards.co.uk/fightersonly/News2.asp

Reasons you should vote for her
1. She's good at armbars

2. She teaches at the West Coast Judo Training Center, supporting judo

3. She helps out at an urban school, giving back to the community

4. She is undefeated in MMA with a 6-0 record

5. She likes camels.

First, you collect the arm (NOT an armbar post)

2011-08-31T01:38:00.000-07:00

I saw Gokor Chivichyan do this many years ago. He hadn't been in this country nearly as long as he has now, and his English was not perfect. Still, he had some good judo moves and someone had asked him to show a matwork move.

He started out with,

"First, you collect the arm .... "

I think he meant that you trap the arm, but I thought the expression was hilarious, and I've called it that ever since. I've used this turnover to a pin for years and taught it to hundreds of people. For those of you who didn't quite get it, here are a sequence of photos we took for THE BOOK a while back.

1. First you collect the arm. Notice how Ronda has his arm trapped here. She hooked ABOVE HIS ELBOW and she has a grip on the opposite lapel of his gi. She is going to keep this grip through the whole move and never let it go.

2. You sweep with the leg on the same side as the arm you have collected. You hook inside his other leg with your other leg and lift. You go directly to your side. The photo below is shown at a bit different angle so that you can see the lift with the leg, because a lot of people miss that.

Also, notice that her arm is coming up around his head. Personally, I'd swing my arm and try to clock him in the head with my bicep to get more momentum going over.

3. Notice that she STILL has that same arm and the grip on the opposite lapel. Once she has him on his back she gets her legs over to the side and sinks her hips low to have a lower center of gravity which makes her harder to lift and roll over. She spreads her legs to give herself a stronger base.

Even Better Armbars & the Necessity of Coaches

2011-08-30T00:52:00.000-07:00

A month ago, I sent Jim Pedro, Sr. the final draft of one THE BOOK chapters on matwork. He called me up and said,

"The picture of that armbar is all wrong."

I said, "What are you talking about? That is exactly what he is supposed to be doing. First, he locks the arm tight against his body, which is exactly what he should do. Next, he rotates toward the head, forcing his opponent to resist at an angle, rather than being able to just do a curl to get his arm back.

Now, he's got both hands on his one arm. He has the arm flat against his chest. He has it perfect.
Jimmy objected,

"Yes, but look at his legs in both of those pictures!"

He was right. I (and Karo and Rob in the photos above) was focused on showing how you need to lock the arm against your body and you need to rotate toward the head and you need to lift with your hips to finish. Once it is pointed out, if you look up above to the first photo, it is obvious that his legs are really wide apart and so he does not have his opponent nearly as tight as he could.

In the photo below, Roman shows a better armbar on Manny. Notice how much closer together his legs are. Remember all of those leg curls you did in the gym? (You didn't? What?! Well, you should have!) With Roman pulling Manny in with his legs like this he has that much extra strength to hold the armbar, strength that has gone to waste if you do the armbar like in the first two photos.

Here's another variation Roman does which I kind of like where he does a figure 4 on the arm. I never really did it that way when I was competing because my knees didn't really work. This armbar looks cooler and it looks like it would hold the person from getting away, but, personally, I like the one just above, I feel like I'm using my leg strength to pull my opponent in tighter for the armbar.

I thought this discussion brought up an interesting point. Rob, Karo and I are all black belts. We all know armbars fairly well. Yet, when we did those first two photos we were talking about and thinking about locking the arm against your upper body, breaking the arm away from the opponent's body and finishing the armbar. It isn't that Karo (or I) didn't know that your legs should be tighter together, we just weren't thinking about it at the moment.

When I explained to Roman and Manny that I needed to re-take the photos they knew exactly what I was talking about and we took those shots right away.

I got to thinking about the importance of a coach, of someone who is NOT thinking of exactly what you are thinking about at the moment and who can spot those mistakes that really are obvious once they are pointed out to you. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that to be successful at an international level, you really need a coach. You cannot do it yourself. Certainly you can win local and regional tournaments coaching yourself, and plenty of people do. Possibly you can even win the nationals in the U.S. without a coach. As you get to an international level, though, the differences between the top players in conditioning, in natural physical ability, get smaller and smaller. At that point, I think having a good coach who can spot all of those little nuances can really make a difference for you.

My criteria for a good coach differs from a lot of other people in this country. That's a topic for another post but I will tell you this, the main defining factor for me in whether someone is a good coach for me is whether I'm getting better and whether I'm getting the results I want. I see people who train in the same place for years, telling me their goal is to make an Olympic team and they've never come any closer than making the top three or five in the U.S. If that is you then there are three possibilities,

You don't have the necessary talent.
You aren't working as hard as you could.
This coaching situation is not working for you.

I suppose there are others - God hates you, you were cursed by a gypsy for breaking her favorite crystal ball, but personally, I'm going with those three.

As I said though, that's a post for another day.

What's a good training partner?

2011-08-27T21:52:00.000-07:00

A good training partner is the same as a good business partner. He or she needs to be able to draw the line between being a friend and getting the work done.

Too often, I see friends who train together and they don't want to go too hard. There is that unspoken agreement that,

"You won't make me feel uncomfortable. You won't ask me to do things I really don't want to do."

My 14th wedding anniversary is next week, so I think it's safe to say that my husband and I are pretty good friends. Dennis is a home-body type. I almost never ask him to go to meetings or conferences with me. He's an adult. If he doesn't want to hop on a plane every few weeks, it's not my place to tell him he should fly to San Francisco or Denver or North Dakota. You don't try to change your friends. You take them as they are.

A friend with that attitude is great.

A training partner with that attitude sucks.

Ronda and Manny have known each other since Ronda was 13 years old and, as a condition of getting her first car, the oldest sister, Maria, would leave St. Monica's Catholic High School cheerleading practice and drive the little sister in said car to Hayastan for judo practice. Manny threw Ronda, pinned her, armbarred her. The reports I got from Maria were that Ronda cried - a lot. Neither Maria nor I were particularly worried about this because Ronda cries easily. I'm pretty sure she cried during Finding Nemo (you think I'm kidding, but I'm not).

I remember Karo Parisyan telling me that it drove him crazy to work out with Ronda because she cried. Manny shrugged and said,

"It doesn't bother me. I just throw her harder. Go ahead and cry."

That makes him sound terrible but I think Manny is one of the best friends Ronda has ever had. I'll always remember the time many years ago, when she had knee surgery and was in a lot of pain and depressed about not being able to compete. Manny came over to cheer her up, brought the usual flowers you bring to sick people and on the way stopped at Zankou Chicken where I used to grab dinner for her when she practiced at Hayastan. She would actually eat between rounds of randori.

She couldn't help laughing,

"Dude, you brought me flowers and hummus?!"

Who knows, maybe it's an Armenian tradition. When she came back, he threw her harder than ever. Of course, Ronda eventually grew and managed to slam Manny her share of times. She didn't quite manage to choke him unconscious the other day when I dropped by practice, but it wasn't for lack of trying, I can tell you that.

My point, and you may have despaired by now of me having one, is that the best training partners are the ones that DO make you uncomfortable, that DO challenge you, that DO hurt you and yes, who do sometimes make you cry. They also make you better. It doesn't mean that they don't like you. More likely, it means that they do.

All Your Arms Are Belong To Us

2011-08-22T20:54:00.000-07:00

Victor Ortiz armbars Sam Garcia in one of several transition to armbar drills we did last Saturday. This is a variation of the armbar Ronda did on Sarah D'Alelio. Of course the day was full of people jumping up and yelling,

"What? I didn't tap, I just yelled ow-ow-ow!"

but it was all in good fun.

Daniel Valdez from Barstow practicing transition, a little earlier in the sequence in the same arm bar Victor is finishing above. I cannot recognize the other person just from the top of his head. Sorry.

It did get a little bit crowded at times when we were all doing matwork at once. I think Nathan is resting there, right after he kicked me in the face while I was doing matwork at the other end of the mat with Crystal. How does he even manage that? It's a gift. So, I had to give a talk on statistics for two classes of middle school students today and I looked liked I'd been in a fight in a bar the night before. Of course, they were very well-behaved.

Toward the end, because we had some younger children in attendance, we thought they might like to work on some throws. Ronda demonstrated a head fake to a switch (tani otoshi). Some of the younger kids wanted to know why she started doing the switch, which led to a story about how, when she was a kid, she threw everyone with uchimata and we were trying to get her to do a different throw. Since Steven Schwarz from Valley Judo Institute was there and we hadn't seen him for a long time, of course that led to she had to throw him with it for old time's sake. I'm sure he just didn't want to admit how much he missed her throwing him at those Nanka workouts.

Ronda and AnnMaria Do Armbars (& You Thought We Just Made this S--- Up)

2011-08-19T19:12:00.000-07:00

Contrary to appearances that we just make this s*** up as we go along, Ronda and I were actually planning out what we were going to do at the clinic tomorrow. We will definitely do more matwork than just armbars, and a little bit of standing technique as well because we are both big believers in matwork combinations and transition. It's not as if you bow in and then magically float into an armbar. You have to get into it some how.

Look, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's judo, it's mma -- it's an armbar !
(Okay, if you never watched Superman, you totally missed that reference. Forget it.)

The beginning of the clinic is going to be several judo moves to an armbar and demonstrating how each of those transfer to mixed martial arts.

1. I'm going to do a turnover where you over-hook the opponent's arm, use your legs to lift, roll on top into tate shiho gatame . (A pin that looks similar to a jiu-jitsu mount.) When the opponent tries to escape by pushing his/ her arm against my head, I switch into an armbar (juji gatame).

2. Ronda is going to demonstrate the almost identical move. When she throws someone and comes on top in the mount, unlike judo, she actually is allowed to punch them in the face. As the opponent puts her hands up to avoid being punched, Ronda catches the arm and switches into an armbar (the same juji gatame).

3. I do an armbar where I start standing, push against the opponent's leg above the knee and go into a position like tomoe nage (a sacrifice throw in judo). As his leg is pushed back, he ends up going forward with his arm straight. (Imagine yourself pushing against a door and the door suddenly opens. You find yourself falling forward. Now, if I had your arm, as you fell you would be in the position shown below. And let me just say here, Ronda stole my armbar.)

4. Ronda is going to show a very similar move that she does in mixed martial arts where she throws the person with uchi mata (an inner thigh throw) and when her opponent stumbles forward she switches to sumi gaeshi (another sacrifice throw) and switches from that to the armbar. If you saw her last fight in Las Vegas or on Showtime, you saw this move.

Well, you get the idea ... it will be fun.
The clinic is from 2-6 pm on Saturday, August 20 (Yes, that's tomorrow)
West Coast Judo Training Center
537 Vine
West Covina, CA
$10 USJA / USJF / USA Judo members
$20 everyone else

If you are from out of town , please note that this is nowhere near the Vine St made famous by Hollywood and Vine. That's in Hollywood. We're a long way from there.

Take the 10 freeway. Go south on Vincent. Yes, I think the road changes names but just ignore that, it's being difficult. Just keep going south until you hit Vine. The training center is in the strip mall on your left. Hongkong Plaza is on your right. Don't go right unless you prefer Chinese food to armbars.

Why is it only $10 / $20 ? I have received advice that Ronda is "cheapening her brand" by doing clinics for such a low price, not to mention teaching free from time to time at Gompers Middle School. Ronda disagreed. The people who come to the training center are her friends, people she's known since she was 13 or 14 years old, who took tons of falls for her when she was training for her first U.S. Open, first Rendezvous, who gave her money to help pay her expenses when she was traveling the world before her first Olympics. So, even though Ronda normally charges A LOT more these days, she's "taking one for the team".

I think that's nice.

And me, I just like to do armbars.

Armbars and One Answer to Dr. Rhadi Ferguson

2011-08-13T23:34:00.000-07:00

First of all, since things get twisted around on the Internet, let me start by stating up front that I personally like and respect Dr. Ferguson, and I know my daughter, Ronda, does, too. Rhadi was a 2004 Olympic team member for judo, has since earned a Ph.D., started a business, is a devoted father and is married to a successful woman, Dr. Traci Ferguson. What's not to like?

That said, sometimes Rhadi and I respectfully discuss and disagree with one another.

Now, for my points. Rhadi has asked me a couple of things and since I have been so busy with work I haven't had a chance to blog, I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone. (And no, contrary to rumor, it is not true that I only needed one stone because I armbarred one of them to death. For one thing, birds don't have arms. They have wings. You should get your facts straight before you start spreading rumors.)

What do I think of Ronda not breaking Sarah D'Alelio's arm? My answer may surprise some people. I'm okay with roughness. When necessary, I'm okay with violence. I think you don't need unnecessary roughness and gratuitous violence.

Yes, I armbarred a lot of people when I was competing. There is even a picture of some major tournament where I am standing on the podium in first place and both the women on the second and third place steps have their arms in a sling. There are a lot of pictures of me standing on a podium where at least one of the other medalists has an arm in a sling. Jerry Hays, the USJF historian, could probably make a collage of them. One true confession I never let out when I was competing is that I never deliberately hurt anybody I knew I could beat any way I wanted. So, if you're from the German team and we're fighting for a medal, if I need to do a backbend on your arm to get it, I will and I won't feel the least remorse about it. I'm sure you'd do the same to me. On the other hand, if you're a sixteen-year-old brown belt and I have you in an armbar, what do I prove by breaking your arm? I'm going to wait for you to tap and wait for the referee to call it. Yes, anything can happen in a match, but seriously, if I can't beat some kid two times out of three, I deserve to lose.

I am not comparing Ronda's opponent with a brown belt. I don't know anything about her except that the odds in Las Vegas were 6 to 1 against her and 3 to 1 against her even making it past the first round (I am a statistician, after all). I am saying that if Ronda felt she didn't have to hurt the woman to win, then there as no point to her doing so.

What would I have done? I was in almost the exact same position as Ronda more than once, where I armbarred a young woman, the referee called it and then the woman said she didn't tap. In one case, I offered to get back down in the armbar position and the referees put us back into the position we were in when they had called the match, and I popped out her elbow. I disagree with people who say my opponent that day was just being competitive and wanted to fight to the last second. If you are caught, you're caught. The referees were doing her a favor. The other time I remember was in the finals of the World Team Trials. I armbarred Eve Aranoff and the referee called the match. They said she screamed. She said later that she hadn't screamed or tapped, that it was me that kiai'ed as I went for her arm. I told her it was because I was so happy to have it. Yes, I would have broken Eve's arm given half a chance and the referees no doubt knew it and so did she.

So, what did I tell Ronda? I told her that I was surprised she didn't offer to get back in the same position and start again. Or to go again, right now. In fact, I think she DID offer. As someone on twitter said (sorry I didn't catch your name), if someone can throw you and get you in an armbar in the first 25 seconds, they can probably do it again some time within the next 15 minutes. My suspicion (and since I have three kids under 15 with me here in Las Vegas, I have only seen Ronda at dinner after the fight and at breakfast late this morning - no clubbing for young children on my watch) is that Ronda felt confident she could beat Sarah without hurting her, and so she tried to do that.

You learn as a parent that you and your child are two different people. As anyone who knew me in the day can attest, I was an angry little person and would hurt you if you got in my way.

Ronda is a happy person and she will hurt you if you get in her way (you should have seen the look she gave the guy who checked out her little sister and her friends in Caesar's Palace - I thought we were going to get co-ed MMA right there in the Forum Shops). She didn't have anything against Sarah and didn't feel in a position where she had to hurt her. People who don't compete don't understand (and I know Rhadi knows this) that most competitors are going to empathize with their competition more than anyone else. These are the people that train like you, want the same thing as you. I was a lot less Miss Congeniality as a competitor, but that's the kind of empathetic person Ronda is.

But yes, we are going to have a little chat when Ronda gets home. I am dead certain if she is in a position where she has to take that arm off, she will. (As Jim Pedro, Sr. told her when she called him this morning, "You're Gaw-dam right you will!)

As for the people saying it was a mistake because it causes controversy about women's mixed martial arts, I rather doubt it. People watch TV because of drama. Somebody getting knocked down and armbarred in 25 seconds isn't very dramatic. Now people will tune in to the next match to see if the referee will stop it and if Ronda will dislocate the next woman's arm. So, I think by protesting about it Sarah did Ronda a favor. Her next opponent, not so much.

I do have some motherly advice for that next opponent, whoever she might be.

Tap.

Trust me on this one.

The Blessing of Losing

2011-08-05T00:15:00.000-07:00

I HATE LOSING.

You really have no idea how much I hate losing. I have NEVER, and I do mean this most literally, never, met anyone who hated losing more than I did as a competitor. I would cry all the way home on the plane, lock myself in the bathroom and cry, break things, you name it.

Before the finals at the world championships, a coach, trying to make me less nervous, I think, said,

"Look at it this way. Even if you lose, you'll have tied with the best any American has ever done."

I turned to him and said,

"No, if I lose, I'll have fucking lost!"

He laughed and agreed,

"Well, yeah, I guess that's another way to look at it."

If someone had come up to me at 19 or 26 and said that losing could be a blessing, I probably would not have punched them in the face. On the other hand, depending on their timing and who it was, maybe I would have.

And yet .... in hindsight, which is far more often 20/20, I realized that losing was a blessing.

When I fought in the finals of the U.S. Open at 17 against Diane Pierce, one of the best women competitors ever, she armbarred me in nothing flat and I was PISSED. It's a really good thing I didn't get lucky that day and win on some fluke. Diane was a lot better than me and it showed me how much more judo there was I needed to know. When I asked her for advice then, and later, she was extremely generous with her time. She taught me that armbar. It won me a ton of matches. She also gave me great advice on competing, like

"Never change divisions because there is someone tough in it. Get better and make people run out of the division to get away from YOU."

By the third time I won the U.S. Open, I came back to work, told my co-workers I'd won a gold medal over the weekend and everyone was like, "Yeah, yeah, you did that before."

When you win all of the time it's sort of a no-win situation. If you win again no one is impressed and if you lose everyone is shocked.

Most people put more pressure on themselves the longer a winning streak goes on, and this is especially true if they are young. Mathematically, the guy who has a 17-0 record and loses should be far less upset than the guy who had a 7- 10 record. I mean, the first guy won 17 out of 18 fights. It's not that way at all, though. For many, many people, the stress to stay on top builds with every win. I remember feeling as if it would just be the end of the world if I lost. I'd go a year or two at a time without losing a match, and then I'd get third in Paris or London or something and I would be PISSED. But, guess what, the sun still rose in the morning and I wasn't dead.

Yeah, some people I thought were my friends would disappear. There were always the people who thought this loss showed I was over the hill. As my coach, Jimmy (Man Mountain) Martin, used to say, "You're only as good as your last match."

Overall, though, losing was not the end of life on planet earth as we know it, and after crying for a few days or a week, I'd be back at practice, training harder than ever, with all of that pressure from feeling as if I could NOT lose gone because, I had lost and so there, it was over with.

The most important thing I learned from losing is that the things we fear are never as bad in reality as in our imagination and that no matter how bad they are, we can still overcome them.

After competing for years, when things were not going right, I still had the confidence and strength to keep on training and believing in myself that I could pull through this slump, because I had done it before.

The blessing of losing is realizing that you have the strength to come back from a loss and win again.

But I still HATE losing.

Develop your spidey sense for matwork

2011-07-23T12:05:00.000-07:00

I cannot believe I had never written about a "spidey sense" for matwork, because it's something I've thought of so often.

My favorite part about the Spiderman comics is when he would say his "spidey" sense is tingling. Supposedly spiders have an extra sense that allows them to detect danger. I guess this is to make them aware when you are about to step on them and squish them.

It seems to me that judo players who do A LOT of matwork develop a "spidey sense" of what is about to happen.

The best example I can think of this is many years ago when I had first met Jimmy Pedro, Jr. I had seen a lot of our U.S. players get beaten with sankaku jime (what some people call a triangle choke), had spent a very long time thinking about it and had come up with a counter. It worked on every person I tried it on. I taught it to Ronda and she used it effectively on a great many people, including in the Olympics. When drilling this, you let the person almost sink in the triangle but you slip your hands in between so that they can't figure-four their legs. You don't push, you don't do anything, you just gently cup one hand on their heel and have your other hand open with the backs of both hands touching. The attacker doesn't feel threatened at all, he/she almost has it and just goes with the technique thinking to lock the legs on the way over.

When that happens, I spread my arms as wide apart as I can and roll. The opponent ends up on her back with her legs apart like I'm making a wish with a wishbone on a Thanksgiving turkey. I wish that I am pinning her. This wish comes true.

At the time, I had come up with it not that long ago, and I wanted to see if it would work on someone who was very, very good at sankaku and Jimmy happened to be doing a clinic, so I asked him to do sankaku on me. He came into the technique like in the photo above. Unlike everyone else, he didn't go ahead. He came out and tried again. He did it a third time. Then he said, "I don't know why, but I can't do it on you" and he walked away.

He may have thought I was one of those jerks at clinics that try to show off by stopping the clinician from doing a technique. Seriously, if someone tells you the move they are going to do, it's not that hard to stop them. So, if he thought that, I'm sorry but since it was over a decade ago, I'm pretty sure he's gotten over it.

The fascinating part about this story to me is that he didn't fall for it. I have a theory about that and it's the same theory about why Ronda and I both have been very, very seldom armbarred, not even in practice. If you do something enough, if you are in that position often enough, even if you can't put your finger on it, can't put words to it, your spidey sense starts tingling. You sense something is wrong and you walk away rather than go through with the move you started and ending up pinned or armbarred.

There is no other way to develop this sense than gobs and gobs of matwork. Hours and endless repetitions in those very positions. This is why Jim Pedro, Sr. always says that the best thing for your sport is to do that sport. Weight-training is important. Building your endurance is important. Analysis of videos, yours and your opponents' is important. But if you ever have a choice between any of that and spending another 15 minutes on the mat, get your ass out on that mat.

Or you may end up squished.

Circuits: Conditioning for Juniors (Another Jim Pedro, Sr. Guest Post)

2011-07-22T01:14:00.000-07:00

(This worked out well today that I had a guest post from Jim on circuits for conditioning for juniors because that was the chapter in the book I am writing today. If you haven't been reading this blog lately, the posts from Jim are to free up my time so I can finish up a couple more chapters of the book this week. )

I like dealing with young athletes, because this is a good time to build a base for their conditioning and good habits. This base will help after they reach puberty and are able to use weights. They'll already have both the physical and emotional foundation.

Except for out of season training where older kids are lifiting heavier weights for power and strength, I believe more in doing circuits especially for younger kids. Circuits are a good example of a routine for young children. I used to do these myself when I was younger, even before I was doing martial arts.

What is a circuit? It is simply doing one exercise after another without stopping for 25- 30 minutes

When your young players first starting out doing these circuits, you should have them do one circuit and then rest 1 ½ times as long as it takes for them to do the first circuit then gradually cut the rest time down until they’re doing 25-30 minutes continuously.

If you really want them to get in a lot better shape, after they’re able to do a continuous 25-30 minutes, you can have them try to beat their time. For example, if they’ve done 4 or 5 circuits in 25 minutes, the next time they try to beat the 25 minutes and so on. When they’re unable to beat their time, which will eventually happen, you can either add another circuit or add reps to each exercise and start over.

Example of a circuit
Jumprope
Push ups
Chin-ups
Deep knee bends
Situps
Squat thrusts
Step ups

If you’re in judo, mixed martial arts or other throwing events, you can do uchikomis with a tube (fitting in on throws) and add that to a circuit.

On opposite days, we recommend doing plyometrics. Doing plyometrics, you can either do isolated one exercise and rest or do in a circuit form. Before doing plyometrics, I recommend that you test their vertical jump, which is standing still and jumping as high as you can and mark that spot. After 2-3 months, re-test your athletes and you will be surprised at their improvement.

Example of plyometrics – box jumps, hurdles, ladder drills, twists (while standing), one-legged hops, in and outs (down the ladder), ball toss. You can see some animations of plyometric exercises on this site.

Guest post from Jim Pedro, Sr. : Out-condition them

2011-07-20T20:17:00.000-07:00

Note: This week, to free up my time to get another chapter done on the book, I have several guest posts from co-author, Jim Pedro, Sr.

Remember the best conditioning for a sport is doing that sport. Unless you’re a professional or doing college sports, you don’t get enough mat time. For instance in Japan, they do five or six hours a day of judo, very little wight lifting they build their strength and endurance by doing their sport. They do some lifting and some conditioning but not very much. When you’re working out at home, you’re probably only working out mat time five or six hours a week compared to their five or six hours a day. Not only are they training on the mat far more hours than you, they have more quality athletes to train with.

(Photo courtesy of Jerry Hays, USJF Archivist)

Looking at it logically, you would say that you don’t have a chance to catch these athletes. But if you supplement your training with lifting, running, circuit training and try to out condition everyone that you fight, you have a chance. Those things you control. I recommend you get a tape by Dan Gable that I listened to years ago where he said everyone has a breaking point and he would stay on him until he broke them and beat them.

It’s difficult to do, but not impossible, look at the results that we’ve had with some of our players.

As a coach, most of the happiest moments of coaching have been after one of my athletes beat an athlete and they’re fresh and the other athlete is totally exhausted. This all comes down to how bad do you want to win.

(I could not actually find a picture of Jim looking happy so I included a photo of Ronda doing her happy dance at practice at the West Coast Judo Training Center instead. This is the dance she does when people do whatever she's teaching just right. By the way, Ronda and Sensei Blinky are running practice on Sunday, if you want to show up. Maybe you'll get to see her do her happy dance.)

Guest post from Jim Pedro, Sr.: You can always find an excuse

2011-07-19T21:55:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to get another chapter on the book done before I leave town on Sunday, so these next few posts are going to be guest posts from Jim Pedro, Sr. that he gave me last month (hey, I've been busy!)

(Thanks to Sevak from Hayastan Martial Arts for

being kind enough to pose for the picture below.

Despite appearances, he is indeed wearing pants)

Most of our athletes are part-time athletes. That’s one of the biggest problems with coaching these athletes. They have school, work, marriage, kids and other commitments. It’s hard for them to achieve their goals but it's not impossible. First of all, they have to want to structure their workouts. For instance, before one of their commitments, they have to get up early and do their running in the morning, if possible. If they can’t run in the morning, they can always run in the afternoon on their lunch break. Or they can do their weightlifting and conditioning on their lunch hour.

There is always a way to train if you want it. Where they are usually part-time athletes most of their sports are done at night. It’s a lot easier to construct your workouts to do your running and lifting in the morning so you can do your specific sport at night and put your energy into that.

If you miss your run in the morning, you can always run before you go to bed, or you can ride a bike or run to and from work. There’s always an excuse why you can’t work out or why you can’t do things. If you’re committed and disciplined and want to win, you will find a way.

If not, you’ll always have an excuse.

Secret of matwork #14

2011-07-17T01:28:00.001-07:00

If you ever watched even one tournament you've seen this happen ... One person is thrown, knocked or falls to the mat. The other player stands there for a few seconds and either doesn't follow through at all or moves to a different position before going into matwork. Nothing of interest happens and the referee makes them both stand up and start again.

What the hell happened?

Yes, this really is labeled "Secret of matwork #14" in our book.

One reason people will let an opponent have a chance to escape is that they only have a limited number of techniques on the ground. They have to move from the side of the opponent to in front because they don’t have any moves they can do from the opponent’s right side.

There should be no position, no place on the mat, where your opponent is safe from you. For each of these positions, write down what technique you do well enough to do in competition. That is, not just something you can do in a demonstration, but that you can make work against an opponent who is resisting you.
1. You’re knocked down with your back to the ground and the opponent standing in front of you.
2. You’ve knocked down your opponent, his/her back is to the mat and you are standing in front.
3. You miss a technique or are pulled down so that you are on your hands and knees and your opponent is standing in front of you.
4. Your opponent misses a technique or is pulled down so that he/ she is on hands and knees in front of you.

In the photo below both of the players should have practiced attacking from the position she finds herself in.

5. You miss a technique or are pulled down so that you are in front of your opponent with one knee on the ground and still holding on (this is a terrible position, by the way, against a knowledgeable fighter and you should try never to do this).
6. Your opponent misses a technique or is pulled down so that he/ she is in front of you with one knee on the ground and still holding on.

7. You are on all fours with the opponent your side.
8. The opponent is on all fours with you at the side.
Do we need to say it again? In the photo below, whether you are the person on the top or the person on the bottom, you should have practiced an attack from there.

9. You are on your back. The opponent is between your legs.
10. Your opponent is on her back. You’re between her legs.

11. You have been thrown to your stomach and your opponent is behind you.
12. Your opponent has been thrown to the stomach and you are behind him/her.

In this case, for the person on the bottom there is not a very good attack, but what he should have practiced is getting out of there and into a better position.

How do you get an attack from every position? Go back and read some of those posts about drills and repetitions.

We want you to notice something here. All of those pictures above are from one tournament, the 2008 Olympic Trials. If we can go to just one event and find examples of all of these situations, they must occur fairly often. If you know you’re likely to find yourself in a situation, practice for it. It only makes sense.

And that goes not only for positions you're going to find yourself in, like on all fours with the opponent in front of you, it also goes for situations you'll find yourself in, like behind by a yuko and at the edge of the mat. If it's likely to happen, you should practice for it, don't you agree?

Drills versus Repetitions

2011-07-13T15:27:00.000-07:00

In one of the chapters on matwork in THE BOOK, we talk about the importance of doing drills and repetitions. Which brought me to the point of what is a drill versus what's a repetition?

A repetition is easy - it is doing the technique against less than full resistance. As Andy Lee so eloquently put it on twitter, "repetition is about muscle memory". I am a very, very big proponent of repetitions, doing the technique over thousands of times.

When you are first learning a technique, do repetitions with no resistance. For example, in the photo below, Jerry is allowing his partner to reach under his arm, reach behind his neck and apply a choke.

Take a close look a the position above. What she should be doing at this point is rolling to her RIGHT and getting on TOP of Jerry. When she does that, she'll drop her right elbow and have a cross choke. More importantly, she'll be in a pin while she's choking him. Also importantly, she'll be in a great position to do other techniques as a combination off of that pin/choke.

The instructor's role in repetitions when a technique is NEW
You do a lot of repetitions, slowly, with no resistance, when you are first learning a technique. As an instructor, this is the time when you are correcting players, telling them to move their hips further to the right, adjust their grip, drop the elbow lower. You, too, are doing a lot of repetition, reminding the student of each part of the technique that makes the whole thing work.

As you become more experienced with a technique, you gradually do your repetitions against more and more resistance. This builds up your strength and it is more realistic in training for a tournament situation.

Musicians do scales, basketball players practice free throws, martial artists do repetitions
There is no point at which you have become so awesomely great at a technique that you don't do repetitions. Here I am doing a matwork repetition for a rolling choke. I've probably done this move for 40 years now and I still practice it. Tina resists about 50% ....

As a more experienced player, you should do your repetitions faster and faster. Try to be done before anyone else in the room, and still do the technique correctly. As I tell players all of the time, there is no point in being able to do a technique badly faster than anyone else.

Notice, Tina is trapped. I have my leg keeping her from escaping, my left hand is sunk deep on her lapel and my right arm is shoved through under her armpit and far past her neck. That completes one repetition.

Another term for repetitions is newaza uchikomi. However, I switched to using the term repetitions because over the last few years we've had more people from outside of judo coming to practice. People in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, grappling or mixed martial arts seldom know any Japanese terms, and neither do many of the younger judo players.

Speed drills aren't really drills. Those are just fast repetitions.

What are drills, then?

Drills are training for a specific situation.
Here are four examples of drills. Why four? Why not? In all of these drills, both players are going 90%. (I say 90% because it's not a tournament, you want to look out for your teammate a little. If you go 100% in practice what do you do in a tournament?)

One player has just been knocked to one knee. The other is still standing with a grip. Start matwork from there. They have ten seconds before the referee calls "break". At the end of ten seconds, the two players switch positions.
One player is in the guard. The other player is between the legs. This is a disadvantage for the person on top so he/she has 30 seconds to get out of there.
One player is on elbows and knees in the "turtle" position. The other player is in front. They have 30 seconds for someone to score.
One player is on elbows and knees. The other player is on the side. They have 30 seconds left in the match and the player on the bottom is behind by a score.

Wait a minute - there are dozens of possible situations - you're in their guard, they're in you're guard, they're on all fours with you in front, you're on elbows and knees with them at your side, you're ahead, they're ahead. Do I expect you to practice for all of those situations?

Do they all occur in a match? Yes.
And yes.

Ever notice how some people just know what to do when they hit the mat? It's because they practiced for that exact same situation before.

P.S. Thanks millions to Jerry Hays, USJF Archivist for all of the way cool photos.

What Judo Statistics Would You Collect

2011-07-12T18:36:00.000-07:00

Chuck Wall of Fredericksburg Judo Club (also known as Wall 2 Wall Martial Arts, and a great place, check it out) asked this question,

"As a competitor or club owner, what do you think that most important stats should be for me?"

Never one to let any work go to waste, I thought I would post my answer here as well

As club owner these are some of the statistics I think are important:

Number of students
Number of PAYING students
Number of families
Age of students - average and age distribution
Length of time students have been members of your club
Average number of practices a student attends per month
Average attendance by day of the week
Average attendance by month
How students heard about your club - ad, word of mouth, demonstration

(Thanks to Jerry Hays, USJF Archivist, for the photo above from the U.S. Olympic Trials )

As competitor, or someone analyzing a competitor's performance, I think these are important

Number of repetitions of specific techniques each practice
The trend in the number of repetitions of each technique you do each week and in a given time, e.g. in one minute
Your average number of practices attended each week
Average number of minutes you spent in standing randori and in matwork
Number of tournaments you fought in each month
Number of matches in tournaments you fought each month
Number of matches in tournaments you won against people your level or higher - I'd define your level as around your age and rank - so if you're 50 and a 3rd degree black belt, I wouldn't consider a 25-year-old 2nd degree black belt your level.
Percentage of matches you won against people your level or higher
Number of different techniques you used to win
Percentage of times you lost by a throw, matwork or penalty

The above aren't all of the statistics that might be important, but I think these would be a very good start.

Deja Vu All Over Again: Ronda Armbars

2011-07-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

There has been some discussion lately whether Ronda uses judo in her mixed martial arts matches. Yes, stupid, I know. Coincidentally, I had lunch today with USJF archivist, Jerry Hays, who gave me a flash drive with photos that also included a few videos. One of those videos happened to be the finals of the 2008 Olympic Trials. Look familiar?

Armbar Escape Drill

2011-07-08T21:58:00.000-07:00

When someone is trying to break your arm, there is a natural tendency to panic. One way to overcome that tendency is to practice escaping from armbars. Look at Bradley here (I have no idea why he is so happy about this drill), he is on top with both hands on his partner. This is where we would start the drill where you are almost in the armbar.

When I say "hajime!" you have 10 seconds to either get the armbar or (if you are on the bottom) to escape. This drill is good practice for the person on the bottom in escaping from the armbar and the person on top in finishing it. LISTEN! If you are the person on the bottom, your main goal in life at this point is getting your elbow on the mat. If your elbow is on the mat, the most they can do is pull your arm out so it is flat against the mat. That doesn't really hurt.

Here's a picture of the exact same position in a tournament:

This is the situation for which you are practicing in that drill. (Thanks to Jerry Hays for the tournament photo above.)

Another advantage to this drill is that it allows you, as a coach, to watch how your players are doing armbars and make sure their technique is perfect. For example, Crystal! (yeah, I'm talking to you)

Why is your left hand on the mat? You know both of your arms should be locked on his arm, and I know that you're tired and I can see your gi is all sweaty but that's no excuse.

And Bradley, yeah, you, all smiley in that photo above. You see how Crystal has her body up against that arm. That's how you should be.

The armbar escape drill is supposed to benefit the person on the bottom who practices getting out of an armbar so quickly it is a reflex, but, as you can see, it can benefit the person who is applying the armbar as well, especially if you have an alert coach available to correct any mistakes.

Drill week! Guest cinch podcast from Hayward Nishioka

2011-07-07T18:44:00.000-07:00

Since this week has been declared DRILL WEEK by the unanimous vote of all people polled in the entire population of me, we have a guest cinch podcast on situations where drills can be useful, with my special guest, Hayward Nishioka. You'll have to turn up the volume near the end when Hayward answers the last question. He is more shy and soft-spoken than me. Yeah, hard to imagine.

In the podcast, Hayward talks about two situations, fighting at the edge and taking an unorthodox grip. If you have a chance to watch his video, Get a Grip, it is well worth it. One of the drills he does in the video is have players fight for 30 second or 1 minute rounds with a specific grip. Personally, I like to get very tight to the person, almost a bear hug. As Hayward says, most people are uncomfortable in positions like that, and since I have practiced attacking from that position (in my drills) and you probably haven't practiced being in that position at all, the advantage goes to me.

In case you have been living under a rock most of your life and don't know who Hayward Hiroshi Nishioka is, let me enlighten you. Hayward is the only one I know who, in the course of his judo career, has participated in the world judo championships as a player, a coach and a referee. Not all the same year, of course, he's not THAT awesome.

He has a new book out, called Judo: Coaching, Strategy and the Science for Success. It's available at many local bookstores and on-line at Amazon, Borders, and just about everywhere books are sold. It's nice to see a judo book getting such wide distribution, but not too surprising, because, after all, he IS Hayward.

Oh, I want to say something about the Get a Grip DVD. Someone made the comment,

"Is this the same old videos copied to DVD?"

So, I just want to make the comment

"Who the f*** are you, buddy? It has great drills on it and great ideas. People who think they invented judo last week ought to be taken out and submitted to uchi mata by Hayward about 10,000 times until they learn some manners. Yes, it was done a long time ago and has some great concepts and drills for improving your gripping significantly. It does not have the latest computer graphics with ninjas riding in on my little ponies. Shut the f*** up, watch it and learn something."

NOTE: Previous statements not endorsed by Hayward nor his publishers, who are no doubt at this very moment asking him very politely if he could please never speak to me again.

Drill week! Standing corner drill

2011-07-05T20:58:00.000-07:00

Hey, it's drill week! I just decided it would be a good week to put up a new drill each day on my blog. Yesterday I showed a drill for the situation where one player is ahead and wants to stay down on the mat while the other player is behind and wants to get up. Today's drill is another one that uses the edge of the mat.

This one used to happen to me a lot - I was much better on groundwork than standing, so my opponents, who knew this and were no dummies, would try to go to the edge of the mat. Their strategy was to attack at the edge and if the attack failed, either go out of bounds before we hit the mat or, if we did go to the mat, get out of bounds immediately. My strategy was not to let them do that.

How many times have you seen these things happen when players are at the edge of the mat:

One steps out and gets a penalty. A little while later, he steps out again, gets another penalty, can't score to catch up and loses the match.

Or this

In trying to avoid going out of bounds, one player moves into a bad position and gets thrown.

Or this

One player lets up, thinking they are out of bounds. The other player attacks and slams him/ her.

Incidentally, there was a pattern a while back, particularly among players from one particular place, who would deliberately attack when they knew they were out of bounds. Their reasoning seemed to be that if the referee called it correctly out of bounds, at worst nothing happened, and at best they would get a score. Somewhere in between there was a third possibility that the referee would call the throw out of bounds but the other player would be shaken up enough, either physically or mentally, from being thrown that when they went back in bounds and started up again the "cheating" player would have an advantage and win. It really is against the rules to deliberately throw your opponent after the referee has called matte but usually referees give you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't hear them.

Of course, there is a fourth option. I started coaching the players I worked with that whenever the referee called break when they went out of bounds to stop attacking and be ready. If the opponent attacked, they were to counter and slam the person into the mat as hard as they could. I never cheated and I never teach anybody to cheat. But that doesn't mean you have to put up with cheap shots. Consider it giving the person a lesson and doing the community a favor.

As for practice, this week we did corner drills where players are at the edge of the mat and have to throw or get away from the edge without getting a penalty or getting scored on.

Matwork Drills: Don't Make It Up on the Spot

2011-07-04T23:48:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has been to practice with me can tell you one of my favorite sayings is,

"If you don't know what to do in a situation, the middle of the match is a hell of a time to be trying to figure it out."

Hence, matwork drills! Below is one of my favorite ones. Actually, they're all my favorite one. How many times have you seen this one in a tournament ...

A player is ahead by a score, say a yuko, and there are 30 seconds left in the match. All she needs to do to win at this point is not get scored on. The players are on the mat, with your player on the top. What does the player do? She gets up and ends up thrown for waza-ari, losing the match.

What should you do in this situation? If you are winning, you should stay down on the mat and eat up the clock. If you are losing, it depends. If you think you have a better chance of scoring on that player standing, you should stand up. One way to stand up is to get the player off of you and stand up. A second way is to get out of bounds so the referee stops the action, makes you stand up and come back to the center. The video below shows a drill we did at the West Coast Judo Training Center yesterday.

The first couple of rounds we did the drill in the center of the mat. The next few rounds we did the same drill but at the edge of the mat, so adding in the option of escaping by going out of bounds.

Conversation with Yoda

2011-07-02T20:52:00.000-07:00

Okay, I confess, I wasn't really talking to Yoda, from Star Wars but my old friend, Steve Scott, who is married to my even older friend (in how long I've known her, not in years) Becky Scott. Steve has written a dozen books on judo, sambo, conditioning, combat sports and everything related. You can buy most of them from Turtle Press. They're all good.

Becky was a teammate of mine on the U.S. judo team. She and I both went to the Panamerican Games and won gold medals, and both went to the world championships and won gold medals. I won mine in judo and she won hers in sambo wrestling.

Steve and I got to reminiscing about old times for over an hour and I made him late for dinner. I'm sure Becky will forgive me. In that time we ran over a whole host of subjects but here are a few I thought were particularly interesting:

Hypocrite much? The lack of respect for judo matwork. I've talked about this in other posts and it is true that MOST judo players do not have matwork as their strong point. That doesn't mean that judo players who are excellent mat technicians don't have very, very good matwork. Steve mentioned some judo coach who was complaining when commentators said that Ronda's armbars were "jiu-jitsu skills". I told him that was the most hypocritical statement I'd heard this year because that exact same coach criticized me when I taught matwork at a jiu-jitsu school saying that judo people should leave matwork to "the experts". So, let me get this straight, I'm a world judo champion who won 99% of her matches with groundwork and good enough to teach my daughter who is an Olympic & world medalist in JUDO but not good enough to teach white through brown belts in jiu-jitsu? And then you criticize that judo matwork doesn't get much respect?
The short memory for when judo in the U.S. didn't suck. Sad, but true, when I was competing we were at our peak, which is sad because I thought we would be going up from there. Women I competed with who also won world and Olympic medals for the U.S. - Darlene Anaya (world bronze), Margie Castro Gomez (world silver and bronze, Olympic bronze), Lynn Roethke (world and Olympic silver), Mary Lewis (world bronze), Eve Aronoff (world and Olympic bronze) and Christine Pennick Lincoln (two world bronze). These are women who were my TEAMMATES. How awesome is that?
How people helped one another. Diane Pierce Tudela, who was my HERO when I was a kid, armbarred me in the finals of the U.S. Open when I was 17. Several years later, I moved to Los Angeles and when I saw her at Tenri Dojo the first thing I did was ask her to teach me that armbar - and she spent countless hours doing just that. I won more matches with that armbar than I can remember. You can see some variations of it in my last post.
Ronda's decision to move from judo to mixed martial arts. I have mixed feelings about this (no pun intended). I love judo and it would be nice to see Ronda win another Olympic medal for the U.S. On the other hand, she is an adult and has to make her own choices in life. In MMA, she has her expenses paid, she gets paid when she wins, sponsors pay her to wear their gear while judo players are begging people to donate a dollar so they can go to tournaments to qualify for the Olympics. Obviously, I made different choices than her, but I can understand why she made the choice she did and I support her.
Freestyle judo is starting to take off. There are competitions in several states and there will be freestyle judo in a world martial arts competition this year. I'm hoping I can take some players to the freestyle nationals next year. It really is a fun tournament. Some people don't approve of the lack of formality at freestyle tournaments, but that's one of the things I like about it. The referees stay out of the way and let the players decide who wins. If you want to wear a red gi with a pink shirt underneath, you don't get thrown out of the tournament. (Although Steve, Becky and I all reserve the right to laugh at you for looking like a complete dork.) In freestyle judo, if you pick the other person up and slam him/ her on the back, you win, you don't lose because you touched their legs without saying "Mother, may I?"
Some people want to be the coach they never had. When Steve said that one of his players commented that "All your life you've wanted to be the coach you never had," Steve said that he felt that described him perfectly and it described Jim Pedro, Sr., too. Some people have a real dedication to coaching and I think it probably does stem in part from feeling that they didn't reach their own athletic potential due to lack of a coach. I love judo and I like coaching but I don't have the same passion for it that I did for competing. Personally, I was really lucky to have some very good coaches. On the other hand, I do try to give my children the family I never had. We try to be that which we never had - I thought it was an interesting idea that explained a lot.

There should be no escaping your lethal matwork!

2011-06-24T19:52:00.000-07:00

I talked before about transition from standing to matwork, both for armbars , and for pins .

For example, Ronda could start in this position, grab his wrist, put her foot above his knee and end up in a position like the one below.

In the post about armbars, I talked about moving from standing to matwork, started out like Ronda in the photo above (except shorter, older and less blonde) and ended up in this position.

There is a second kind of transition and that is when you move from one matwork technique to another.

In the armbar photo above, the person in the armbar could have tried to escape by twisting his arm so that instead of his elbow being pointed toward the ceiling it is toward the floor.

If he does, switch to COMBINATION #1 , which Ronda had helpfully demonstrated below.

Ronda could not get him into the position she intended at first. No worries, because she has practiced for this. She locks his arm tight against her body, and arches for the armbar.

What if that doesn’t work? He tries a forward roll to get away. Ronda keeps hold of his arm and rolls with him, going for COMBINATION #2

If she can stop his roll right here, she’ll lock his arm to her body and arch.

Ronda won a match in her first world cup, the London Open, with this exact armbar. What if it STILL doesn’t work and he rolls all of the way over? Then you go for COMBINATION #3, follow him over and do the same armbar from your back.

Let’s recap, then. You start from standing and go to one armbar, pushing down against the elbow with your leg and pulling up with both hands. If he turns, you lock the arm against your body, and arch, trying a second armbar. If the twists on to his stomach, lock his arm against your body and push-up, trying a third armbar. If he tries a forward roll, follow him, lock the arm against your body and arch, doing a fourth armbar.

Matwork for judo and mixed martial arts: A conversation with me, Ronda, Ben & Jerry

2011-06-23T21:49:00.000-07:00

Ronda and I were having a discussion of matwork for judo and mixed martial arts over a pint of Ben & Jerry's S'mores ice cream. I thought this would be a good opportunity to use cinch for a sort of podcast. For those of you who are good at analogies

Cinch: Podcast as Twitter: Blog

If you're not good at analogies, just click on this link to learn more about matwork. And stay away from Ronda's big toe.

The biggest mistakes in matwork?

2011-06-22T21:40:00.000-07:00

I've been writing and deleting paragraphs in the groundwork section of THE BOOK (Building martial arts champions from the ground up ) as I have an argument with myself. I can't decide if I think there are two or three major mistakes in matwork.

Of course there are an enormous number of mistakes that people can make. I do think, though, that there are two or three that overshadow all others.

These two are definitely at the top:

Not practicing transition from standing to matwork. People in jiu-jitsu are poor at this because they mostly focus on groundwork and not so much on that split-second of opportunity as you go from standing to matwork. People in judo are poor at this because they generally focus on standing technique and don't give enough thought to matwork. People in mixed martial arts tend to be good at either standing or matwork, but, like people in judo, they tend to practice the two separately.
Not practicing matwork combinations. Judo players and mixed martial artists don't even give much thought to combinations from one groundwork technique to another. Jiu-jitsu players talk a lot about matwork combinations (at least the players I know), but they aren't as good at those combinations as I think they should be. They're just too damn slow. I will admit that MOST judo players do not have their ground game as their strong point, but those who do have an advantage over jiu-jitsu players in that the difference in judo rules has forced them to be sudden. In judo, you have, at most , 30 seconds and usually much less, to secure a pin or submission before the referee makes you stand up. (No, that's not the rule but it's the reality.)

So, those are definitely in my top two. Improving on those two aspects would make anyone's ground game over 100% better.

There is a third mistake which is not having an attack from every position. I'm debating with myself over that is as serious a mistake as the other two. Let's get this straight - if the only mat moves you have that succeed are from one position, say, when the other person is on all fours and you are standing in front - then the truth is that your matwork sucks and I don't care what your coach, dad and your girlfriend tell you. If you have good transition from standing to matwork and a few good matwork combinations, you can still get by okay if you only have successful attacks from two or three positions instead of eight. But, that's just being okay.

I'd call Jim & ask his opinion but it's late on the east coast and tomorrow morning I have to be up early to give a couple of guest lectures on statistics to middle school students in downtown LA.

So .... if anyone has any thoughts on this, please jump in.

Matwork Secrets: Part 3 Smoother, better, faster, more

2011-06-17T22:01:00.000-07:00

You know that faster, smoother, better, more - this is the MORE part.

Yesterday, a couple of people commented that you need to just do an armbar thousands of times in randori, and no, it's not that simple and BJJ people proved that.

Here is part of my opinion on it.

Actually, I thought Jorge's comment was funny and right on target. I have worked out with plenty of BJJ folks and so has Ronda and the schooling has been primarily in the other direction. It IS true that most judo folks aren't very good at matwork but what Rob is really saying is that most people who are not very good at matwork won't do very well in it, which, of course, makes sense, but that is true whether you do judo, BJJ or anything else.

I think what Jorge was saying is the trick is to do it thousands of times - and THAT is what most people in judo don't do.

Here is what I had planned to talk about today - thank you Rob and Jorge for the lead in !

To make your matwork automatic, you need to practice it thousands of times, and from both right and left side. Here is just a little example using my favorite armbar. This is a common position in a tournament if you have just been knocked down. You are on your butt or side and the opponent is attacking trying to follow up an advantage. Here is what you practice:
1. Grab his right wrist with your left hand.
2. Place your right foot above his knee and push.
3. As he stretches out, let go of the lapel grip you had with your right hand and grab his wrist. Now you have two hands on his one arm.
4.Throw your left leg over his arm.

5. Push down with your leg on his elbow at the same time that you are pulling up with both hands.

Repeat this thousands of times.

Now do it again on the left side.
Notice how I'm originally somewhat curled up as my left leg is bent, with my foot above his right knee.

As, like Jorge said (what? you didn't read the comments?), I stretch out everything, my leg, my body, Peter's arm goes straight. Once again, I have two hands on Peter's one arm, my leg pushes down, I pull up with both hands and that's a submission.

What happens if he tries to escape?

If someone tries to escape, they'll most likely do it by trying to twist the arm. If he twists toward me, I'm going to lock the arm against my body and arch my hips.

If he tries to do a forward roll or flip to get out of it, I'm going to hang on to his arm, lock it against my body and roll with him, ending up in the position that was demonstrated in yesterday's blog.

I'm often amused when I teach matwork by the number of people in judo and jiu-jitsu who tell me "this will never work". "This" could be referring to any number of techniques. I am amused because, of course, those techniques worked very well for me in a great many matches and now they're working for my daughter.

What is the secret of getting your matwork to work? Do more of it. Do thousands of repetitions, do them as nearly perfect as you can make them and from every possible situation. Notice that I just covered three different situations - I get the first armbar attempt, he twists and I get the armbar, or he tries a roll and I get the armbar.

P.S. Ronda - congratulations on your win in Calgary.

MATWORK “SECRETS” – Smoother, More, Faster, Better - Part 2

2011-06-14T00:55:00.000-07:00

It was the first time the Panamerican Games had a women’s judo division. I can’t speak for the rest of the competitors, but I know I was nervous. I’d had a good run, won a lot of tournaments lately but that only made it worse. When I told Dr. James Wooley, the team manager and a two-time Olympian that I was stressed because no matter how much I trained I knew that there was a possibility I could still make a mistake in a match. He laughed at me and said,

“You’re thinking about it all wrong. You don’t have to be perfect to win this tournament You don’t need to never make a mistake. You just need to go out there and in each match make one less mistake than the other person.”

How to do armbars without a mistake

When you do an armbar, lock the opponent's arm against your body. You should not be using your arms trying to pull the person's arm in any direction. The most efficient way to do an armbar is to have the opponent's arm tight against your body, between your legs. If the opponent is on his back, as in the example below, rotate towards his head as Karo is doing here

LOCK THE ARM AGAINST YOUR BODY!

Karo has perfect form as he has no space between his body and Rob's arm.

When you are in the position above arch your hips, either the person will give up or the elbow will dislocate.

I'd just like to point out here that although these two gentlemen are at grappling practice, the technique they are demonstrating is EXACTLY the judo technique, juji gatame, with no modification whatsoever. Karo is, in fact, a judo black belt.

P.S. Rob, who is also a judo player, wanted me to point out that he in fact LET Karo get him in the armbar just so I could get good pictures and there is no possibility that does not involve shackles, snipers and a troop of little boy scouts in which Karo could actually get him into a position where he would be required to tap out.

P.P.S. Thanks to both of you for taking a few minutes away from practice to pose for pictures.

MATWORK “SECRETS” – Smoother, More, Faster, Better - Part 1

2011-06-12T00:43:00.000-07:00

If you want better matwork our training should have a PLAN and you should follow that PLAN. Think this is obvious? As a public service, the next few blog posts will point out common mistakes seen in competition, ending the week with recommendations for how to fix these.

Watch a tournament and see how often you see this:

Hesitation
A player throws and there is a second or two from the throw until following up to the mat. In that second, the opponent turns on his or her stomach, rolls to the side or sits up. All of these split-second moves put the opponent now into a little better position. Why didn’t the player who threw IMMEDIATELY follow up to the ground?

Look at the players below. They are in a beginning class and just learning to do throws and hold- downs.

They are practicing a drill where one person throws and then goes into a pin the second they hit the mat. The student has just thrown and he already has the opponent's right arm locked under his left arm for the pin. He didn't need to move his right arm because it was in the right position for the pin when he came into the throw. Unfortunately, this is NOT the way most people learn matwork from the very beginning, which is why they make mistakes later on.

Why there are fewer competitors in judo : The enemy is us

2011-06-10T10:56:00.000-07:00

There is no denying the fact that there are fewer people competing in judo than twenty or thirty years ago. Many explanations have been offered for this, pretty much all of which can be summarized as the U.S. is a bunch of lazy slackers and judo is the second-biggest sport in the world, so there!

In fact, there is considerable evidence to suggest that judo is NOT the second-biggest sport in the world, if one defines "biggest" as the one with the most spectators or the most participants or the most competitors, but that is a myth to be busted another day. Let's take our myths one at a time, shall we?

Three new sports have become extremely popular in the U.S. - grappling, mixed martial arts and Brazilian jiujitsu. While jiujitsu has been around for a long time, the particular style that has given rise to all the new schools is relatively new. If the soft, wienie theory were true, it is hard to understand why a sport that allows you to slam people on really thin mats (grappling) or punch people in the face AND armbar them, is gaining players by the day.

Let's look at the four P's they teach you in marketing - price, product, promotion and place. Of those four, the one we are the worst on is product.

I can hear the screams of outrage already - judo is a wonderful sport! We love it! If people only knew …

I believe we have at least two major problems with judo as a product. The first is the lack of respect we give to our consumers / students.

Look how judo is taught in many clubs (not all clubs, but too many). Some old men tell a lot of young people to do exercises. They get to do this because they have a higher rank. If anyone complains that practice is the same every day or asks why they are doing a certain drill, it is pointed out that the instructor is a volunteer. I have been in judo classes many times in many places where the instructor will yell at students,

"You're not here to have fun!"

Well, what are they here for, then? Personally, I had a great time when I trained and I won a lot. I did it because it was fun. I've heard instructors say,

"They'll have fun when they win."

Yes, winning is an awesome amount of fun, but someone who is a really good athlete can probably win at something besides judo, too, and maybe that thing will be more fun. You see, most people think the whole point of recreational activities is, well, recreation. Sports are SUPPOSED to be fun.

Contrast this with grappling or MMA. People come in and work out. The person running the class does some demonstration of techniques. Since they have no belt to validate their qualifications, people make a judgement as to whether this person knows what he or she is talking about or not. No one yells at them to tie their belt, their uniform is not tucked in, or they forgot to bow.

Some might argue that judo teaches you respect. This is true, in some schools, but respect is not how you dress, it is how you behave and it is mutual.

I meet people who are in grappling, MMA and jiujitsu all of the time. Some of them are complete jerks - just like some people in judo. Most of them are extremely polite, just like people in judo. I'm not stupid. I realize that part of that politeness is because I'm an older woman and people are raised to be polite to older women, and most especially to mothers, because being impolite to someone's mother may earn you a kick in the teeth. The fact that I'm the mother of four beautiful daughters is not lost on me and no doubt adds to the politeness factor.

My point - and you may by now have despaired of me having one - is that I haven't seen any evidence that yelling at people to tie their belts, tuck in their judo gis, and bow properly has caused a drastically higher level of politeness.

This may seem to contradict the experience of some older instructors at tournaments, who will tell me that they have been extremely rudely spoken to by young people from MMA clubs. I believe respect is mutual. If you walk up to a person you don't know and berate him for the way he's dressed, bowing, shoes, etc. you see it as your right because you are a higher rank. He just sees it as a stranger yelling at him about something trivial that's none of his business. Seriously, what gives you that right?

This isn't to say I haven't made some young people unhappy. For example, I've told 18- 20 year old men at tournaments that they can't be drinking beer in the lobby because they are under age, it's illegal, they were being bad role models to younger children, people who provide funds to our organization could see them and it could hurt our chances for additional funding, and a lot of other reasons. They were NOT happy, but they quit drinking in public when I was around. What I did NOT say was because I said so, I am a sixth-degree black belt, I am a referee. What I hope they understood (and I think they did) is that I talked to them because I care about them, our younger players, and any players who might lose out on funding due to their bad behavior. What gives me the right is I'm a person in the judo community, with no or more less rights than them or their parents.

The second area where we have failed as a product is the arbitrary and capricious rules. Rules change at random with no input from the coaches or players and no apparent rhyme or reason. I've been in judo 40 years and I have a Ph.D. and I can't figure out why one year a certain throw will be legal and the next year not or why a certain grip is illegal. Judo matches are determined by the referees' intervention FAR more than other contact sports I have watched (and I'm not counting tae kwon do and other striking sports in here because I don't know much about them and I think maybe they attract a different clientele).

Read this next paragraph slowly because I think it is key --
When someone trains even moderately hard, he or she will be unhappy to go into an event, wait around for hours to compete, only to lose a match due to holding the uniform in an unacceptable manner or touching the leg, or anyone of a great number of other infractions which make no sense. The number of judo matches in the U.S. decided by penalties far exceeds anything I have ever seen in any other contact sport.

The attitude toward coaches and players for years has been

"Screw 'em, what are they going to do? Not compete?"

In fact, it appears that what they are going to do is not compete in judo, but rather, compete in something very like judo. We're not the only game in town any more.

One explanation I have heard for the rule changes is to differentiate judo more from wrestling and grappling. Let me get this right, someone thought it was a good idea to change to be LESS like the sports that were more popular? Sure, that'll work. (Sarcasm alert!)

If judo techniques were named by people in karate

2011-06-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

My niece just got her brown belt in karate and we were discussing names of the different techniques. In judo we have names like one-armed shoulder throw because you have one of the opponent's arms and throw them over your shoulder. In karate they have techniques with names like Thundering Mantis and Do the Locust because, I guess, they were all named by the human equivalent of the honey badger. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg) Okay, first of all, if You think I am kidding try to guess which of these are real karate technique names and which are just shit we made up.

Riding the Staff
Double Darkness
Passing Wind
Mountain of Man
Dance of Death
Song of Death
Crash of the Eagle II
The Lotus of Death
Prance of the Tiger
Toe of Doom

Now, let's try to rename some judo techniques to be more crowd-pleasing. I'm doing this on my iPad in Internet darkness zone so I will have to upload the photos later when I return to civilization. We will see which ones you guessed correctly. Feel free to post your guesses in the comments so we can mock you, I mean , be impressed.

Dance of the Drunken Uncle
Entangling Midget
Snap, Crackle, Pop
Limbo of Destruction
Slipping on the Banana ( some styles call this Dreams of Kwan)
Don't Do this in Prison

Oh just in case you were wondering, every other one of those names was a real karate technique. So, Passing Wind Is a real technique but Toe of Doom is not.

June 5 Gi & No - Gi Grappling at Hayastan or Why Can't Technology Meet Judo?

2011-06-02T00:56:00.000-07:00

I really like Gene LeBell and Gokor Chivichyan. They are two really nice guys. However, even with that said, I have to admit that they are not the first to spring to mind when I think of technology. Gene was a bad ass judo player back in the 1950s but since then he has made his living being thrown through doors and falling off of motorcycles as a stunt man. Gokor used to beat up people and now he teaches other people to beat up people.

They are having a tournament this weekend, Gi and No-Gi grappling. The Gi part is pretty much judo without all the rules against grabbing the legs, with no penalties for not saying "Mother may I" before taking a grip and stuff like that. Anyone who has an interest in freestyle judo will love it.
Ronda is there to coach the players from the West Coast Judo Training Center, but if you are a judo player and confused, just go up to her and ask her any questions. I'm sure she'll be happy to help you out.

None of that is my point. My point is that THEY have a website where you can register and pay on line with a credit card or Paypal. Why the heck don't judo tournaments have that? I know sometimes state or national competitions do, but this is a "Drop by on Sunday and fight tournament".

For YEARS, I have been suggesting that we make judo tournaments easier to register and compete in, that you not have to get up at Dark o'clock in the morning to register and weigh-in.

This tournament gives you three options - pay on-line, download and print the form and mail in a check (sorry, too late for that now) and pay in cash on the day of the event.

They give you two options to weigh in - you can drop by the day before if you live in the area and weigh between 11 and 1 or, if you live further away and don't want to drive in twice, you can come weigh in between 8 and 10 on Sunday.

This just seems so simple and obvious - pay online if you want, download the form and mail it in if you want, weigh-in the day before or the morning of the tournament, whichever is easier for you. In short, make it easy for people to register, pay and weigh.

Why can't judo do that? No, seriously, why?

Memorial Day: The importance of families, coaches and natural ability

2011-05-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

It was Memorial Day weekend and thanks to some forethought, I got tickets for the Getty Villa before they sold out. That statue of Venus, by the way, is a replica, which is why the girls were not carted away by security.

In honor of Memorial Day, and along the lines of what I'd been thinking about the last few posts, I thought it would be good to get Ronda's take on some of the points raised about the importance (or not) of natural talent.

I also have my latest new toy, an account for Cinch , which is to podcasting like Twitter is to blogging.

So here is my first try at Cinch.

I asked Ronda about how her father, who died when she was eight years old, had an impact on her as an athlete.

and here is her response:

And another question,

"In succeeding as an international athlete, how important is support from others - coaches, family,friends and teammates?"

One last question,
"If coaches, family support, work ethic and all of that other stuff is so important, how much does 'natural athletic ability' really matter?"

By the way, if you haven't been to the Getty Villa in Malibu, it's worth going.

Does being a natural athlete matter at all?

2011-05-28T22:44:00.000-07:00

I sent Jim off the last blog post on Athlete: I don't think that word means what you think it means to get his input on whether it should be in the book. I think I will insert it at the beginning of the section on physical conditioning. Any opinions on that are welcome.

We try to split up the work, so Jim is reading Steve Scott and John Saylor's book "Conditioning for Combat Sports" and I am supposed to read another book on strength training that was recommended to us. I guess whichever of us will get done first will read Talent is Overrated, because it seems to bear on an issue we have taken up lately.

Before Jim's time was all taken up getting ready for his youngest son's wedding, we were talking about what I had written about how most of our judo players are good at judo but not good athletes. He disagreed with me that you need to be a good athlete to be a successful international player.

I was a bit surprised but less so when Jim said,

"I was never an athlete. I had to work twice as hard as anyone else to get into shape."

or something like that.

Personally, I was the opposite. The first time I ever walked into a gym, I saw their record for women's bench press, said, "I can beat that" , lay down and broke the gym record on the first bench press I ever did in my life. I was naturally ungodly strong for a woman my size, and that was just a blessing I did nothing to deserve. I can't believe that didn't help me in judo. I certainly wasn't Olympic level fast, but I was fast enough to make the varsity track team in college and win some races.

On the other hand, I tore my ligaments and cartilage in my right knee when I was 17 years old and had so many operations, as my lovely daughter Ronda says, I look like I've been attacked by a midget with a chain saw. There were a whole group of throws I physically could NOT do, but I compensated and won anyway.

Speaking of my little pumpkin, Ronda, she was always a good athlete. She won several events at the Hershey track meet, which was the first athletic event I ever took her to, in the heart of North Dakota. She did quite well on the swim team before she ever started judo.

Jim defines "athlete" as someone who has natural athletic ability while I define it as someone who is in excellent physical condition to perform the athletic requirements of a sport. As I told him, I look at it like when I'm hiring someone for my company. If they are like my husband, just naturally brilliant, taught himself Calculus in the eighth grade and picked up a book and learned C++, that's great. If they went to college for four years and took eleven courses to learn Calculus and become a good programmer, that's fine, too. I really don't care how they got there as long as they can do the job.

So, does it matter if you are a "natural athlete" or if you just got to that level because you trained your ass off? I don't know. I think perhaps it does. Once I laid down and did that first bench press, I trained and moved up from there. I happened to be in the gym because my coach had decided we should get a strength trainer for our team. Two years later I was doing a hell of a lot more than I did the first time.

As Lex (I think it was Lex), commented on an earlier blog, 'other things being equal', the stronger person will win, but that is a hell of a qualifying phrase. So, 'other things being equal', the person with natural athletic talent MAY win more.

When I recall Jim as a competitor (I was but a child at the time - no, seriously, I was), it's hard for me to believe he was not a natural athlete, but I'll just accept it, because he said so. Is that why Ronda and I ended up winning more international medals than he did?

I have no idea. I can say it certainly helped both Ronda and me to have some physical talent. On the other hand, like Jim, we both worked our asses off. I THINK (I don't know), that Ronda and I both had a little different perspective on winning during the match. Both of us would rip your heart out and eat it dripping blood in front of the referee to win a match if that is what it took and the only reason we didn't is there's a rule against it. The difference is Ronda would be nice to you off the mat and go out to a party with you, where I would just hope you died. I don't have that off switch she has.

Reading the comments on Talent is Overrated on Amazon was quite interesting. Many of them raised the same questions I have. If it is just work, what about those people who work just as hard but didn't win? What about support from family and friends?

I think one advantage I had over Jim is that I had one child while I was competing, where I think he had three. Once I had my third child (Ronda), I was done competing. Some things are just more important than winning - well, the only thing I'm sure is more important is your kids. Of course, Ronda had no children (and she better keep it that way until she gets married!)

Another advantage I had was the late Frank Fullerton, may he rest in peace, and the wonderful Bruce Toups, the airplane fairies, who paid for almost all of my travel, so that I could go and compete without worrying that I was taking money away that could be spent on my daughter, Maria.

Yet another advantage I had, and Ronda had, was coaching. One very telling comment Jim made one day was when he said he had to coach himself and I remarked that I thought a coach was really necessary to making it at the elite level and he answered,

"Well, I wasn't that successful, was I?"

I doubt it is coincidence that he was so dedicated to helping people like Ronda, his own son, Jimmy, Jr. and all the kids he's worked with over the years.

I was doubly blessed in having a lot of good coaches around - Hayward Nishioka, Jimmy Martin, Steve Seck, Richard (Blinky) Elizalde and more. I took every benefit I could from all of them. Ronda had me from day one when she stepped on the mat, and then all of my old teammates and mentors, like Hayward, Blinky, Steve, Tony Mojica and more - and then she went to Jim for even more coaching. And she had her own "airplane fairies" (you know who you are, and thank you).

So --- in all of the mix - how much does God-given talent matter? How much does that innate motivation matter, where you just REFUSE to lose? (As my good friend, Dr. Jake Flores used to say, "I can't put in what God left out.")

I don't know. It may be, as we often say in statistics, "a necessary but not sufficient condition". Or it may not even be necessary. Another thing we say in statistics a lot is c.p. or 'ceteris paribus', which is Latin for "all other things being equal" (see what you learn in 10 years of graduate school?). If everything else is equal, natural talent can put you over the edge and make that gold medal yours.

But, as Lex said, how often is everything else really equal?

Athlete: I don't think it means what you think it means

2011-05-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

"You keep saying that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."

If you don't recognize that saying, you never watched The Princess Bride. Oh well.

Some people may be surprised that our book will have 50 - 80 pages on physical conditioning for judo. (More than half of that is photos.) I'm sure that some people will just skip that section and go to the "judo" part. If they want to just be in shape, learn judo and have something more interesting to do than run on a treadmill, that's perfectly fine. If they want to be a successful athlete, they've missed the point.

Years ago, a pretty good judo coach said to me,

"You know, Jim Pedro, Sr. really isn't as smart as you think he is. Any six-year-old can figure out if you have two boys wrestle, other things being equal, the stronger boy will win."

I told him,

"Then we ought to have a six-year-old running our judo development program in this country, because we're NOT winning."

That's pretty much the key point. From what I've seen in California, we have plenty of people who have good judo technique. They're good judo players. They're just not particularly good athletes.

The Olympics are an athletic competition. To win an Olympic event which requires physical effort, you must be in unbelievably good physical condition, better than almost anyone in the world.

I'm surprised I have to explain this to people. It seems obvious, doesn't it? And yet, I have people argue with me about this. They say they ARE in good physical condition. They run miles every week. They exercise regularly. They do push-ups, sit-ups, leg lifts. They lift weights. They can pull up their shirt and show you - they have a six-pack.

Well, guess what, so do I, and I'm a 52-year-old grandmother. The other thing you and I have in common, honey, is that neither of us is going to be winning the Olympics any time soon.

There is a vast difference between being in shape so that people don't hide their eyes when you go to the beach and being in shape to win the Olympics. There's a big difference between being in good enough shape to place in the national championships and being in good enough shape to win the world championships.

Jim and I come from thousands of miles apart, both literally and figuratively. Most of his life he has focused on teaching and coaching judo, while working as a firefighter. Most of my life, I've focused on statistical analysis and technology, while winning a world championships and coaching. And yet, we reached the exact same conclusion about why one person wins and another loses.

It really is as simple as how much harder some people train. "Intensity" is a word that comes up in our conversations over and over. You can go to judo and you can fight my daughter, Ronda, who, as Kevin Earls, of the New York Athletic Club put it, "Looks lovely, but this young lady is Walking Death". Or, you can go to judo and fight my equally lovely daughter, Julia, who is a 13-year-old purple belt and kind of works out when the mood strikes her.

You may say that is an unfair comparison, but it isn't. For example, our book includes four types of abdominal exercises - bent knee sit-ups, knee-ups, V sit-ups and V sit-twists. Most people do sit-ups. Maybe they do two types. Most days. That's it. The point of adding the additional exercises is to make it harder. Take the V sit-up. You have both arms and legs off the floor as shown below.

Sit up in a V.
Then go back to a starting position.
Do 10 of these without letting your arms or legs touch the floor.

Not all that tough, really. Except this one exercise is part of a circuit. You are going to do 10 of these, then 8-10 of several other exercises. That's one circuit.
Then you repeat the entire circuit two more times.
You time it and each day you try to beat your time.

And that is the difference in intensity and in being an elite athlete versus someone's grandmother. Doing one set of one exercise is not all that hard. Doing all of the repetitions of every set is pretty damn hard. Doing it regularly for years on end and getting better and better and better puts you at the top of the world.

One reason this book is taking so long to get finished is that we are including a lot of pictures. There's a very definite reason for that - because we KNOW that people often cheat and lie to themselves. They'll do the exercise above and lay back on the floor between each repetition.

"Oh, were you supposed to keep your arms and legs off the floor? I didn't know."

So, for each exercise, we put in pictures and an explanation of how to do it correctly.

We pause here to prevent stupidity ....

It's easy to show how great your athletes are compared to somebody else. You have your athletes regularly do one set of exercises - bench press, barbell curls, bent-knee sit-ups, chin-ups and as many throws as you can do in five minutes (I just randomly picked those). Then, you have visitors come and they do the same routine and they can't do it as fast or as well or as heavy, so, hey, you're amazing and they all suck. This is a stupid comparison I see coaches make all of the time. They don't stop to think that maybe if they did the workout those other people practiced - push-ups, rope-climbing, five two-minute rounds of matwork drills - that they, by comparison would suck.

In fact, there isn't any magic program, although what we have laid out works very well, certainly variation is possible, even recommended and we do talk about that in the book.

What is key is to compare your OWN performance on a weekly, monthly and annual basis. How much more can you lift than a year ago? How much faster can you do your circuits than three months ago? If you can't answer that, why not?

Let me emphasize again, none of this is INSTEAD of your regular judo work outs. This is IN ADDITION TO. I used to have a sign in my room to remind me - if we'd had email back then, I'm sure it would have been in my signature -

Champions always do more.

The Types of Athlete Complaints

2011-05-24T23:26:00.000-07:00

Since I was busy this week, I stole all of this shamelessly from Jim Pedro, Sr. I'm trying to decide if it should go in THE BOOK and if so, where.

"There are different types of athlete complaints.
There are the 10% or so of people who always complain about everything. They won't be happy no matter what you do.You can't worry about them.

Then, there are athletes who are complaining because they are tired and run down. It's an athlete's right to complain. One thing I've learned over the years is that you can push an athlete further than he or she thinks is possible. In these situations, complaining is a sign the athlete is being worked to the limit. Some coaches take that as a personal affront and think the athlete is lazy or unmotivated. I don't. Of course anyone is going to be miserable and complain in that situation. Wouldn't you? Or are you just perfect? As long as they're working and training, the complaining shouldn't bother you.

One reason this complaining bothers coaches is they do personalize it, either the athlete is lazy or the athlete doesn't like them. If your players are working hard, that's the important thing, who cares if they bitch?

The number one thing you need to remember is that you're athletes don't have to like you every day. Lots of days, they won't. They have to respect you and believe that you are doing what you sincerely believe is in their best interest.

Sometimes athletes complain because they don't understand the concept of periodization. This is especially true with athletes making the move from recreational players to more serious competition. When we have been working them really hard during the pre-season period and they are moving slower in practice, it gets frustrating. What I tell them over and over, is

We're not peaking you for practice! We're peaking you for the nationals (insert whatever tournament you're training for here)!

Then, there are those times when a complaint means something. If somebody who never complains that says he/ she is injured, you better listen. You want to look beyond the complaints. If your whole group, not just one or two people, is standing around talking more, slowing down, maybe it's time to cut practice short. Don't just listen to what people are saying, watch the intensity of the workouts to make decisions on whether you really have pushed to the limit.

Coaches need to have the courage to step into that role and make the decisions based on their own training system. Hopefully, you'll get the results you and the athlete are seeking. If not, you'll know that you tried your ideas, they failed, and you'll be able to change them. You can't grow without having the information on whether your ideas, implemented as you planned, actually work.

If you really believe your training program will work, then you see it through and don't change it because someone was whining and crying about it. You're there to be their coach, not their friend. Following through and monitoring your results will hopefully make your players better athletes and you a better coach."

For those of you who asked me about THE BOOK, it's coming along slowly. I just mailed another chapter off to Jim yesterday. I've been busy with work. Had a very good session today with the North Dakota state judges on our data on ethical judgments on the reservations and tribal organizations. Ironically, the session next door was on courtroom security. You'd have guessed I was teaching that one, wouldn't you?

Controlling the Match

2011-05-23T00:07:00.000-07:00

When you're already going over it is a little late to be thinking about what to do.

If you're in this position, you have failed to control the match, that's pretty obvious.

What do I mean by controlling the match? At least four things:

Control the grip. Get the grip that you have when you do your throws, that's kind of the point of having a grip. Don't let the other person have the grip he or she prefers. This is pretty obvious and yet people don't always do it. Personally, I liked to attack one-handed (back before I was old and slow). I would get a grip on one arm and then hit with ko uchi makikomi or drop ippon seoi or soto makikomi.
Control the tempo. For example, I am not particularly fast. Even before I was ancient, I wasn't particularly fast. When I got one of those people that tried to bounce around like a pinball, I would try to cross grip, get a high grip and pull them down with my weight on them. Most of the time, though, as I mentioned, I preferred to attack one-handed because I was not the world's best standing and if someone else had both hands on me and better standing technique, I might get thrown. This would make me sad. If someone did manage to get say, a sleeve and lapel grip, I would attack immediately. If I couldn't control the grip, I was going to control the tempo. If you let someone get their grip and then move you around, you deserve to be thrown. Silly person.
Control the proportion of time you spend standing versus in matwork. Notice the throws I mentioned above? All of them go almost immediately to the mat and with soto makikomi you are in a pin when you hit. With ippon seoi it is simple to go right into a pin. Same with ko uchi makikomi. My other favorite throw was tomoe nage, which goes straight into an armbar.
Control the position you are in on the mat. That is, if all of your techniques are from when your opponent is on all fours and you are on top at their head, then that damn well better be the position you are in. (Also, that's stupid if you only have techniques that you can do from one position - work on that.)

In general, if your opponent wants a fast tempo, you want to slow it down. If she wants to stay standing, you want to be on the mat. Be in control.

Think! If someone gets a left-handed grip on you and starts moving backwards quickly and pulling you towards them - don't you think it's because they want to throw you? What, did you just think it was "Fight Left-Handed Day" ?

I know these seem pretty obvious tips, but I am amazed by the number of times, even at the international level, that I have seen players just let their opponent dominant the match.