After the bow there will be a period of warm up, during this warm up there will be some movement around the mat, usually quite slow building up a little bit of speed. Once the body is ‘warmed up’ there might be a little bit of light stretching, not a lot at this stage but just a little bit of movement of the joints and the arms, the back and the neck. There will also be some preparation for the type of practice that will be taking place, so for the standing work if we are going to do some shoulder throws we might do some extra warm up on the shoulders, or on the body movements that will make up the shoulder throw.

Once the class is warmed up and is ready to go there will also be some break falls. The break falls are most important in Judo because if you can’t break fall then you’re going to be concerned about being thrown. If you’re concerned about being thrown you can’t practice Judo freely because of your concern. The break falls should take the form of break falls on the mat, laying on the mat, from the standing position falling to the mat, and rolling break falls where people will step forwards and do a break fall. They will appear to dive into the air, roll over, strike the mat with a loud bang. Once the break falls are complete we then go on to the sorts of practice that you’re likely to see in the Judo club. The first one know as Uchikomi this is called standing practice, in this position the players will partner another player and they will come in for a technique and withdraw from that technique and they may do this 15 times each – generally 5 would be for the movement, 5 would be to get some rhythm and then 5 would be for speed. Then once each player has done that technique, we would move on to the next technique.

Aylwin Judo Club South East London SE16