No You Don’t Have To Be 100% Fit To Train!

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I wrote the post a few weeks ago asking if you had to be 100% fit to train as I was getting
annoyed by weak excuses!

Anyway, last night I got both sides, one guy turned up training, I’ve hurt my arm, had to
have steroid injections, but it’s grading time soon, is it OK if I just go through my stuff
at the back taking it easy just learning the moves. Absolutlely, refreshing to hear, you
don’t need to go hell for leather all the time. It is possible to train around your
injury…usually anyway.

The exception would be a new starter, well a hopeful new starter, she keeps coming down
with her other half, he’s training and getting on with it and she’s frustrated because
she’s had an operation on her breastbone and can’t. Now that’s an injury it’s not so easy
to train around.

But not impossible, there’s still stuff you can do, wrist locks how to apply them, escapes
from joint locks, chokes, strangles etc. Just going to have to be very careful about
progressing, obviously falls and ground work are going to require a lot of time, but how
about strikes, I think some of those could well have an impact on the thoracic cage and
need to be careful with. Need to think about that one a bit more I think!

That’s the beauty of our art though, there’s so much we do that you can train around a
specific injury.

It’s all a challenge, and as an instructor keeps you on your toes.

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Do You Have To Be 100% Fit To Train?

You get an injury should you keep training?

The reason I started thinking about this is that quite often I get people coming to me

saying they are not training tonight or this week because they have hurt their foot or

their arm, or feeling tired.

How valid is this? I know everyone is different but when I was training properly I never

wanted to miss a session, I had to be told, no. It doesn’t seem to be that way anymore,

quite often I get a call saying I’ve pulled this and don’t want to make it worse. Sometimes

OK, fair enough, I’ll go along with that, but, if you’re serious, and want to focus on

every aspect of your art, you don’t have to go at it, big throws, or a whole night of full

physical rolling about.
You can take the oppotunity to work on the finer aspects of your art, step through slowly,

look at the small things that really make the throw. You don’t even have to get to the

throw part of it, there are so many small angle changes you can play with to try to enhance

your moves and going at it full tilt, isn’t the way to find these, it’s too easy to let

strength and speed take the move on, and you forget about the small things, the things that

really make it all work smoothly and effortlessly. I know, i’ve been there and done it both

ways, in fact until I’d passed my Black belt and started teaching, I was still doing it

that way.

So what I’m really doing is trying to give you a heads up, teach you something it took me 4

years to learn myself.

Though saying that, Sensei Hart did try to tell me as well, I still didn’t listen though

I’m afraid, not as well as I did.

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We’re Back!

Hi all

Just a quick note to say we’re all back to normal now. It’s been a busy time the last few weeks in the none JJ world I must inhabit I’m afraid, having to go away with work has interrupted training and posting to this site…Most Inconvenient!

However, that little bit of work seems to have finished now…I hope, so normal service will hopefully be resumed, both in training and with regards to this website, design and progress.

It’s been a bit slower than we’d have liked, it’s getting there but we still have other ideas!

Hopefully, you’ll like them, and maybe have ideas yourself about how we could develop.

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Anyone For Group Press Ups?!

Just another night at training and the guys decided press ups on their own was a little run of the mill!

Next one is…How many can we get at one go!

I’m not in there, Sensei’s privilege!!

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Transitional Flow

What on earth is transitional flow then? Is this a new language we’re learning?

I suppose it is really. Transistional flow is basically the fluid transistion from one move to another.

Sounds easy? It’s not! But then by now I’d hope you’d have come to expect nothing less?!

So, what am I actually talking about? What does it mean in real terms?

You’re training with your partner, doing ground work for example, you try a move and it doesn’t work, what do you do? Well in most cases you end up straining against each other and it becomes a contest of strength rather than technique, seeing who is the stronger and who will tire first? What you should be aiming for is try one move, it doesn’t work, they counter it, you use that counter and immediately go to another move using what you have there. That is basic transitional flow, the ability to flow seamlessly from one move to another when needed.

It confuses your opponent and increases your chances of success. It takes, time, practise, skill and relaxation, in order to feel what is happenning and where the weak points are at any given point in time.

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Why So Much Repetition?

One thing that bugs me is when people come up to me and say, done that one Sensei, what’s next?!!

Have you done it absolutely perfectly loads and loads of times every time? No would be the answer, I suspect any good Martial Artist who is truly honest would admit that it is very rare to do a move perfectly, with every little thing exactly right. In fact they may think it was spot on and you’d find somebody else, just as qualified with a slightly different opinion who’d pick up on a tiny piece that was out of synch! That’s the nature of what we do, that’s the nature of human beings. So to say you know it inside out after a handful of repetitions is not hapenning I’m afraid.

Admittedly it is mostly the juniors, and yes I appreciate the attention span isn’t the same, but still doing it 3 times and thinking it’s sorted…! Seems a different mental ability to traditional training. It’s not possible to spend weeks or months doing the same move, people get bored and move on to something else, there’s got to be a happy medium to it all.

Anyway, moving away from the rant slightly;o)

You need these techniques you are learning to work in a real situation, you need to react under pressure when the brain may want to do something else. The way to do this is to train the body to react independantly of the brain,you can probably guess what’s coming, it’s repetition, doing the move over and over again you are programming your body to just do it. For you slightly older people, think about driving a car, when you first started there’s loads to learn, then after a while you do it without thinking about it, you get to the state where you do things without thinking about it, it’s confidence and repition of a set series of moves to a given action/reaction or circumstance. It’s exactly the same in Self-Defence Martial Arts, someone punches you in a certain way, if you train correctly this then triggers the body to react in a pre-programmed way without concious thought or effort, this is where you start to link in with the Mushin concept talked about elsewhere.

There is a very famous quote from Bruce Lee:

“Before I learned Kung-Fu a kick was just a kick and a punch was just a punch. When I’d learned it a kick wasn’t just a kick and a punch wasn’t just a punch. Now I understand the art a kick is once again just a kick and a punch just a punch.”

Break the move down in your training, understand it, train it correctly over and over again until you have trained your body to do the move correctly, then you no longer need to think about the individual components of a move but can relax and let your bodies muscle memory take care of itself.

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JuJitsu Training - What To Watch

Okay, you’re at your class, you’ve got your JuJitsu instructor in front of you showing you some new move, what do you watch, do you try to look attentive and look them in the eye to show you are interested? Do you watch their hands, their arms, their feet? There’s so much going on you often watch the wrong thing and miss the most important bit.

I follow my instructors lead, he always used to demonstrate moves 3 times. Watch the hands on one occasion, watch the feet the next, then try to take in the whole thing.

Two many people focus purely on the hands and forget the feet, then they end up shuffling into a move and wondering why they’re not getting the same effect, the feet play just as much a part in the moves as any other part of your body, I can’t really stress it enough, focus on the feet just as much as the hands and twists of the joints.

Think I repeated myself in that one enough to emphasise my point?

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Tags: jiujitsu, jujitsu, jujitsu techniques, jujitsu training, martial art

Quick Training Tip

A simple, very quick one, Train hard!

This doesn’t mean you have to bounce each other off the floor, you can if you want but not necessary.

You react how you train, so if you train against weak punches that actually come nowhere near you, that’s how you’re going to react when the pressure comes, and it’s no good at that time blocking a punch that comes to the side of your head, because the real thing has jst bypassed your arm and knocked you out!!!

There’s a really famous saying, The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle!

I like it!

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Tags: jiujitsu, jujitsu, jujitsu training, jujutsu

What To Look For In An Instructor

So you’ve decided what you want to do, you’ve taken the plunge and turned up at your first session, what should you be looking for?

Everyone is different any has different needs, you need an instructor who knows this and is capable of recognising this and what individuals respond to.

An Instructor who does one thing for everyone can cause issues and be either off putting for new starters, creating an air of intimidation, or getting dull and repetitive for the senior grades who want to be challenged more. They need to be able to stimulate their students what ever the level.
Read more

Tags: jiujitsu, jujitsu, jujitsu instruction, jujitsu instructor, jujitsu training