Formosa Neijia

I watched a blackbelt in my judo club get his knee dislocated the other night.

There may be many reasons why that happened. But I took away one powerful lesson from it.

My club has produced many, many BBs in the time it’s been open. But we really only have a few guys that show up regularly on the randori nights. The randori group practices fairly hard, at least by my standards. We don’t do cooperative randori — it seems competition based in that no one falls for you. You have to fight to get the throws and you can expect the opponent to resist to the best of his ability. It can be a tough atmosphere. I’ve seen people thrown around like nothing. It’s just the nature of the game there.

But we get many BBs that haven’t been to practice in a while and they come back into the randori going all out and their opponent goes all out too. Might this be a recipe for disaster?

If I skip a week, I feel a big difference in my performance. I’m more tense, less fluid, and more likely to get injured. I doubt I’m the only one.

Having a fast-paced, randori-based practice can teach a lot very quickly. But stepping back into it only occasionally and then “going at it” doesn’t seem wise to me. We have to respect the medium.

The lesson I took away from last night was to maintain the practice constantly. If not, then you increase the chances of getting hurt. If you do hardcore practices, don’t think you can leave and then just go back at your former level of practice. Adapt to the practice and maintain it to avoid injury.

If you run with the big dogs, best to keep going.