Fun with releases

For some reason, not many people are showing up to class so far this week. There were only two of us in judo yesterday, and this morning consisted of the same two, plus one more. Most be the heat.

But it's always a little tricky when you have an odd number of people; usually the highest rank, the one who is generally leading class, will elect to sit out and wander the mat offering any advice or correction as needed or requested. But today, we decided to do our releases and the 17 in a sort of "round robin" routine: the first guy attacked right side, the second guy attacked left; then it's the next guy's turn; when everyone has had a turn, we moved on to the next technique.

The interesting thing about it was that we did it all from a paradigm of constant movement, rather than the typical method of practicing kata, which is to reset at ma'ai every time and start from a static position. It almost felt like a "multiple attacker" sort of scenario, except that we knew which technique we were about to do.

At least we started that way. By the end, we eventually designated one of us as tori, who would just stick out both his hands; then, the first uke grabbed whichever of tori's hands he wanted with whatever hand of his own he wanted, and tori just did whatever release the situation called for. The two ukes would trade grabbing attacks, everyone always moving. After a minute or so, the next person played tori, and so on.

At any rate, we had a pretty good class, regardless. Everyone else just missed out!