Armbar Escape Drill

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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.