Judo for the home
What are some drills you can do at home alone?
I can think of are the bridge drill, the walking we do at the beginning of class (open toe, closed toe) and the open / close / sweep drill. As well as practicing rolling around on one of the big round balls like in the corner of the dojo.
Are there other things we can do at home by ourselves that would be useful? I found the judo flash cards posted on page 3 and those seem pretty cool.
Well, Sean already mentioned the open-close-open-sweep drill in the Aikido thread. Aikido walking will help as well.
You can get one of the big inflatable balls and use it for grappling practice. We're planning to have some video of Greg doing his thing on the website in coming months.
For competition Judo, use time outside the dojo for conditioning. Lots of cardio, body weight exercises or weight lifting, grip strength, etc.
Research -- read books, YouTube, etc. Brad showed me a slick idea with ushiro-kesa-gatame (reverse kesa) last night that he picked up on YouTube from some Kashiwazaki stuff.
I love me some big rubber ball action, I gotta say... That will do wonders for your ground control.
Also, doing the envelope drill on one of the punching bags is not a bad drill. Now, granted, one of the big issues we're looking to practice with the envelope drill is moving when uke moves us, which you can only do, obviously, with a partner. But working the series on a punching bag can at least help you get the choreography down, and help you focus on some other details (eg, am I keeping my knees down, am I on the balls of my feet, am I lifting up and settling back down inbetween holds or am I keeping constant preasure, etc.?)
What else...?
You can also do foot sweep motions by yourself (sometimes I do this on my own to ingrain the simultaneous on/off sort of push/pull action of my hands).
You can also do the "draw circles in the sand with your big toe" walking drill.
There's the leg switch drill (two hands in place on the ground, like a push up, but hands together, hips on the floor, switching legs one underneath the other).
You can do some harai goshi and osoto gari leg sweeping drills by walking along one wall (your left hand lightly touching the wall for a little support). For harai, you lift your right leg straight out to the side and then sweep it back on every other step. You can do roughly the same thing with the osoto gari sweeping action (Greg described it like your sweeping so you try to touch the back of your head with your toes, and without breaking your upper body posture).
Of course, I've also heard tales of Japanese dudes doing osoto to trees and stuff over and over. 😉
As for conditioning, I seem to remember Greg or Nick (or both) talk about doing a lot of sprints instead of long, slow jogs. Not sure what the science was behind it, so someone might wanna to ask them.
You could probably walk across the mat doing Moose's thing where he uses one foot to sort of kick the other (support) foot out from under himself into a sort of uchi mata/harai goshi leg action (that sort of sounds weird unless you've seen it).
You can walk around doing a sort of random "open-close-open-close" stepping pattern while at the same time lifting one elbow up and tucking the other elbow tight to your side (pretend you've got your grips on an imaginary dude). For the most part, if I'm opening my step to the right, my right elbow will be up, my left one tucked into my side (the up elbow leads, in other words), but there may be exceptions to that.
There's the weird duck walk and pigeon walk: walk across the mat in a straight line, toes point in, close to each other, swiveling the hips, but keeping the shoulders straight (forward and backward), and then doing the same thing but with toes pointed out.
That's all I can think of for now.
I assume the sprinting is to encourage explosion as opposed to marathon endurance. You'll find a similar philosophy in football conditioning -- running endurance is not the same as, pumping legs, push, pull, don't fall, hit, run, turn, lift endurance. If you catch my meaning.
I used to used teh envelope on a heavy bag as my warm up before lifting weights, which improved my grappling and kept me from having to run (which I hate 😈 ).
If you like the big rubber ball try a basketball. Greg was doing his drill with a smaller ball and it was much more dynamic. You get the same work with a basketball, but it hurts a lot more, so it makes you good and tough.
You can always "shadow grapple" where you try to move and around and visualize moves.
Thanks for the replies and ideas on both this and the Aikido side, much appreciated. If you think of anything else, keep it coming! I look forward to seeing the video of the work on the balls. That didn't sound good did it? 😂
I also found this, you can watch the video.
https://www.hatashitasports.com/product ... s=N&page=1
But I think you could accomplish similar results with an old sheet at the park or maybe an old towel in the gym instead of dishing out the $$ for the sleeves (since I don't plan on competing in the Olympics anytime soon). Anyway, I thought it was a cool idea to improve grip strength and I'm gonna give it a shot too.
Since my dog weighs 140lbs...when we wrestle around I will sweep his feet in a humane way of course. I don't hurt him. I don't think anything short of a baseball bat would hurt him. He's actually caught on to it and doesn't lunge at me much anymore...LOL Really hard to put a 4 legged animal down with a sweep. We have fun though
John
My dog is too little and quick to sweep (stupid mutt! 😛 ), although I noticed today when I was pulling a door open..I stepped back as I pulled with my left hand then opened the rest of it with my right foot in a sweeping sort of motion and strolled on in. Funny how we catch ourselves doing weird things like this.