Proficiency in receiving or falling ways is a prerequisite for good judo, and is especially important for Nage no Kata. Let’s take a brief look at some of the principles in Nage no Kata and how they can help you fill out your understanding of judo. Nage no Kata (along with its counterpart, Katame no Kata) is designated as a Randori no Kata. Many famous, high level Japanese champions and sensei in judo attribute a great deal of their success to studying kata: Masahiko Kimura, Takahiko Ishikawa, Toshiro Daigo, Yoshimi Osawa, Isao Inokuma, Isao Okano, and other luminaries of modern judo have all credited the study of kata as an essential component of their success in judo. It is like having a zoom lens that brings out what makes this all work.īy the same token, uke learns how his attacks can be foiled, and receives continuous lessons in how to handle his body in response to tori's actions. With all the ‘noise’ gone, you can focus and see what is really happening underneath the techniques. Techniques are governed by principles, and it is important to be able to grasp and generalize those principles. By providing you with predictable, structured encounters, it gives you the opportunity to recognize these principles more clearly through repeated practice. It allows you to study examples of interactions between uke and tori and to examine the underlying principles that govern attack and defense in judo. The kata highlights and crystallizes important fundamentals. It presents you with some basic situations without the complications of unpredictability that you deal with in free play and contest. The kata strips out all of that noise that comes with randori and shiai. Awareness of these principles and actions needs to be addressed directly as part of the foundation of your judo if you wish to be able to throw freely with seiryoku zenyo, or best use of energy. You want these things to be integrated into your movement and technique. This is not the ideal time to be wondering if you’ve learned the fundamentals to all of this: your mental control, posture, stance, understanding of debana (moment of opportunity), power generation and use of tai sabaki (body control) to achieve kuzushi (off-balance) and tsukuri (fitting in), or your ability to read or connect with your partner. At the same time, you have to monitor your own balance while trying to disturb his you have to look for openings, or try to create some for yourself while simultaneously maintaining vigilance for his attacks and his unpredictable moves. Right away you have to think about getting an advantageous grip, and preventing your partner from securing his. Not noise in the auditory sense, but noise in the sense of too many competing stimuli all happening at once. When you start a randori or shiai session, there is a lot of ‘noise’ in your judo. We won't be discussing the details of how to do the techniques, but will take an introductory look at some of what is inside the kata that you can take away to improve your judo. Let’s start that tour and examine some of the principles underlying the 15 techniques in their specific contexts. Maybe you just need a tour guide who will take you inside the kata for a look at some of its less obvious utility for the rest of judo. by practicing Nage no Kata, my students were better able to grasp more quickly how these throwing techniques should be executed for maximum effect in randori. These are in essence the critical principles of judo. I devised these judo katas mainly for the purpose of illustrating important points that I wished to explain to my students during breaks in randori practice. You can’t perceive the inner workings of a car, for example, unless you lift up the hood and learn about the systems that make it all work. But looking at it as just a set of stylized techniques is like looking at something from the outside without knowing what is going on inside. If you think of the kata as a rote performance of 15 techniques, it will not appear to have much to offer. Nage no Kata might look to you to be just a choreographed exercise in which uke and tori agree, over and over again, to match steps for 2 or 3 paces, at which time tori executes a pretty throw and uke takes a pretty fall. Really, why do you have to spend time on that unrealistic anachronism that has no apparent connection to anything you want to accomplish in your practice? It’s slow and stilted – it can’t possibly have anything to do with the fast pace and excitement of randori and shiai. Then you can forget all about it and get back to real judo: randori and shiai. Time to dust off Nage no Kata, trudge through those 15 techniques, and get that over with.
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