Throws and Dumps

There is a Judo theme happening at Jiu-Jitsu lately.

At the last training day before our one-week summer shut down, we had a couple of new students give us a try.

One of these was a young woman who is pretty high level in competitive Judo. I bet she was finding the differences between what she knows and what we were training in that day interesting, and hope she returns.

Then the Judo theme recurred a couple of days later. Koko and I were on the mat working on her test stuff. Technically, as this was a day of the school closure, we weren't open, but she needed to train, and I have a key.

Anyhow, in walks a guy looking for information. We chatted with him a bit. He's an older gent, like me, who has trained in Judo and Karate. Being a long-time Karate guy myself, that part was just mildly interesting. My ears perked up at the mention of Judo. We gave him the information he was after, and he departed.

Two Judo people present in our building only a couple of days apart.

I would love both, or either of them to become regulars.

But why?

The answer is pretty simple. Every martial art or sport has strengths and weaknesses.

Want to learn to hit people with padded gloves? You should study boxing, but not if you want to learn how to strike bare-fisted. The exact opposite is true of Karate. It's great at striking without gloves, and sucks when wearing them. Wrestling is great at putting people on the ground, and sucks at finishing them off once you do. The list goes on and on.

I was interested in Jiu-Jitsu in the first place due to the massive holes in Karate regarding grappling. It has since become my primary art due to the fun factor.

So what are the holes in Gracie Jiu-Jitsu? It isn't good against multiple attackers. No art is really great, but Jiu-Jitsu is especially bad.

Another weak area in Jiu-Jitsu has to do with taking an opponent to the mat. It is great if the other guy doesn't know anything, but not if he is knowledgeable.

You see it all the time. A couple of Jiu-Jitsu folks start to roll. They happen to be standing. They might grab each others sleeve or collar, and make a few half-hearted attempts to accomplish something, and then one or both spontaneously proceeds to sit down. If only one does, and the other doesn't, the grounded guy often starts aggressively scooting forward on his ass.

Really? In anything like a real fight, or even a UFC bout, that would equal a nasty ass whooping.

In day-to-day rolling or point Jiu-Jitsu competition it is embarrassingly frequent.

So how to improve the standing/take-down phase? One can work harder on mastering the techniques within Jiu-Jitsu that handle that aspect, but that would still leave one limited. The other way would be to supplement things.

The two best styles to compliment what we do in Jiu-Jitsu in the standing/take-down phase would be freestyle wrestling, and Judo.

I am a technique-oriented guy, which means for me Judo would be the better choice.

So having a new Judo buddy or two would be super. There are exactly 67 throws in the traditional Judo syllabus. If you include all the take-downs I've learned in 4 years of Jiu-Jitsu, it adds up to about 20, and only a half dozen of those can be considered throws in any manner at all. That leaves a humongous heap of stuff I can learn from Judo.

There is also a style of training that Judo people do that I really like. Let's say one of the people joins, and agrees to show me one of their dozen or so hip-throw techniques. Judo people do really high numbers of repetitions when they work on things; really, really high numbers of repetitions.

I learn best that way. They wouldn't think it weird to have me do the lesson a zillions times over.

In any case, chances are that neither will stick around long if they return at all. The older gentleman seemed to find our schedule to be out of sync with his, so he's a long shot. The Judo woman made it to one class so far, but she might not find either us or Jiu-Jitsu to her taste. She had a friend try it out at the same time. This means that if either of them doesn't want to return, likely neither will. We shall see.

We shall see.

Hajime (that means to begin).