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

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?

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

"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

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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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. 
4. 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.

Reasons for and against Uchikomi

I have heard all of the usual arguments against uchikomi , issued in the usual sneering tones. I read Geoff Gleason's books and I liked a lot of his ideas. Some people follow Gleason almost as a cult and they are the ones who believe anyone who does uchikomi is brain dead.

---

My feelings on those folks was best summed up by the way my friend, Lanny Clark, described one of them,

"He has some good ideas about judo, but he doesn't have ALL of the good ideas, which is what he believes."

If you do jiu-jitsu, wrestling or something else and you've never heard of uchikomi, here is a picture of one type. You can do it with an inner tube, rubber bands or whatever those pulling things Ronda has are called. Uchi komi is Japanese for "winding inside". So, you fit in to your throw and you come back out again.

The second way to do it is at practice with another person who stands there and lets you come in on them usually.

A third way is to do uchi komi with another person moving, and a fourth way is to do it moving with some slight resistance.

When I started judo at 12, we did uchikomi. Not a lot, maybe 40 -50 a night. I thought it was boring. But I thought history class was boring and they made me do that, too. Hey, I was 12.

I was a black belt and senior national champion when I moved to a new city and ended up at a club where uchikomi was considered along the lines of trying to improve your judo by praying to a piece of bubble gum. My judo got somewhat better while I was at that club. We did a lot of throws on the crash pad (believe it or not, a new innovation back then).

Then, I moved to Los Angeles, to Los Angeles Tenri Dojo, with Jimmy Martin, Miguel Tudela, Steve Seck, Tony Mojica, Blinky (Richard) Elizalde, Gokor Chivichyan , Diane Pierce Tudela, Dawn Beers and a ton of other tough players. We did uchikomi - probably 100 or more every night. My judo got WAY better when I was at Tenri. Honestly, I don't think the uchikomi had anything to do with it. It was having a good coach, good strength trainer and good training partners.

The argument against uchikomi is that it is stupid to go half-way into a throw and that if you practice going half-way in, you will do it that way in a tournament and stop. Maybe if you did thousands of them, but I don't really buy that argument at all.

Look at the photo above. Ronda is doing a weight-lifting exercise called a clean. You bend down and lift the weight straight up to your chest. There is another weight-lifting exercise called the clean and jerk. You do the same thing but on this exercise one leg goes back and you lift the bar over your head. I have NEVER heard anyone say "You shouldn't do cleans if you do the clean and jerk because you'll forget to do the last part at a crucial moment."

The second argument is that no other sport does this. You don't see basketball players run up to the basket and stop. Wrestlers don't do uchikomi. I have not done a poll of all other sports, so I can't really say. I am not sure this argument matters. It makes me think of the movie, Cool Runnings, where the captain of the Jamaican bobsled team is smacking the other guys on their helmets an one asks why he's doing it and he says,

"That's what the Swiss team does, and they win."

to which one teammate replies,

"Yeah, well they make them little pocket knives , too and I don't see you doing that."

To argue that the other teams don't do something like uchikomi is somewhat worse of an argument, to me, than that most people who win in judo, the Japanese players, the world champions that I know, DO do uchi komi. Frankly, I think neither is a particularly good argument.

My opinion? I can see three reasons to do uchikomi, in small amounts:

1. When you are teaching someone new. John Dewey (no, he didn't do judo, he was an educational theorist) was a big proponent of the Whole-part-whole method of teaching, the idea being that you showed the student how the whole thing should look, then you broke it down to simple parts and came up with ways to teach each, then you put the whole thing back together again. Dewey is called the father of modern education and his methods are used to teach everything from math to -well, judo. Jigoro Kano was a contemporary of Dewey's and also an educator. Completely random fact - Dewey also created the Dewey Decimal System that many libraries use to catalog books, replaced in many larger libraries by the Library of Congress system. This is the kind of fascinating and useful information 3 graduate degrees will get you.
2. For strength training. This is what Ronda is doing in the photo above, doing her throw against resistance. When she was about 13 or so, Hal Sharp, from Gardena Dojo gave all the kids some rubber tubing to use to practice their throws at home. We tied it to the railing upstairs outside of her room and every time she walked by she'd grab it and do an uchi mata. When she got a little older, I got her ankle weights and she would fit into that uchi mata with 5 pound weights on each ankle. As you can see from the picture at right, she still does a pretty nice uchi mata to this day. Doing uchikomi with resistance, like with the bands, and weights on your ankles, builds the EXACT muscles you will use in doing those throws.
3. For conditioning. I like to run, but some people, and Ronda was one of them, hate to run distances. For those kids, doing 100 uchikomis a night is less boring than running for 10 minutes and it builds up muscles in their arms at the same time. Personally, I'd rather run, but for the kid who hates running, it's an option.

So, for the Gleasonites who want to know why we included a very little uchikomi in our book, that's why. I think small doses can help in certain specific situations, and I have never seen any evidence that it hurts.

Oh, just so you know, you ranting - that doesn't count as evidence.

Gripping and Your Plan B

Jorge asked a question a few days ago that I did not have the chance to answer as completely as I would have liked. In short, his question was that it seemed like everyone focused on attacking from YOUR grip but isn't there an alternative view, that you should have a Plan B and have something in mind to do when you cannot get your grip for some reason, like that they just beat you to the punch or that you can't break their grip?

My answer to this is that I think you SHOULD always have a Plan B. For example, when I was competing, my first plan was to get both hands on the opponent's right arm and attack before they had a second hand on me. The throws I normally did were right ko uchi makikomi (Jim always calls this ko uchi sutemi) and ippon seoi. I used to do drop ippon seoi before I wore my knee out completely.

However, sometimes, for whatever reason, I could not make that work. Then I would switch and try a left side ko uchi makikomi or a tani otoshi. Here is a really key point - both of those are throws I did a lot, fairly successfully. So, my Plan B was a pretty effective Plan B for me. I PRACTICED those throws a lot.

I asked Jim his opinion and it was pretty similar to mind. He said he really emphasizes the discipline of breaking a grip when you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation because far too often what happens when an athlete is in a situation where someone else has the dominant grip, he or she bends over or accommodates in other ways which make it easier for the opponent to throw. Why do you think he/ she wanted that grip in the first place? He did say that they always try to have at least two different grips that a player executes most of his or her throws from.

So, I think we both agreed that it is fine to have a Plan B for when you can't get the grip you most prefer, but that you should be sure it is YOUR plan and not your opponent's.

I had more to say on controlling the match, and some thoughts on uchikomi as conditioning, but since I was too tired when I got back from the meeting in San Diego to finish this blog or do work, it will have to wait for tomorrow.