Sunday 8/8/2010

Smallish Judo class, just seven of us. I was discombobulated the entire class, though this led to an interesting thought. I was on time but realized I had forgotten my gi. so i had to wait for Beth to drop it off when she went out, so I was about 20 minutes late coming upstairs. Alma warmed up the class and started with some three man drills. The timing of the class was a mess for me. The two clocks were 20 minutes apart. I was looking at each of them some of the time so it through off my timing for the class. We did some fits and throws then some randori. I took Scott S. I was so out of sorts I decided to play left sided. I hit some left sided ashi waza scores with him and switched to right sided and was in a very good position. It seemed to screw him up quite a bit. So I made this my theme for the day. In the four sets I did I found that I was able to hit an OK, left Ouchi Gari, an OK left sided Sasae Tsurikomi Ashi and Osoto Gari. I threatened and rocked people with a Kouchi Gari and had poor attempts at left forward techniques. with everyone wen I switched back to right I was in a very good position, including securing several good belt grips. I think that I will make getting an effective left sided game my current project. It wold seem appropriate for a Yodan to be able to perform left sided techniques so this makes sense.

For those who don't know me, I am dedicated right sided player. I don't do anything well on the left side. I can teach it and I can demonstrate it but not use it competitively. My body is totally unwilling to enter to the left. Trying to get my body to drop left sided for a seoi nage is actually comical. I like how it opened up the opportunity to get to the right side in a tight offensive position. It's a little funny but the reference that flashed into my head was when Mickey got Rocky to switch to a conventional right sided fighter from his old school southpaw slugger style, then late in the fight wanted Rocky to switch back to southpaw. Rocky kept saying how he didn't want to use any tricks and wouldn't switch. This is sort of the exact opposite of me  and I, of course, am more than happy to use tricks so I will play with this a bit.

Here is the end of Rocky 2 poorly dubbed into Spanish, which gave me a chuckle.

For ne waza we did the Ancona Roll. It went OK, but still needed work. This is such a simple fundamental technique especially for the clubs veterans, I sometimes struggle getting the new people to do it as well as I would like. But it will go into the list of things to practice and do better. two sets of Ne Waza then we called it a day.