Implementation of new IJF rules by British judo

Like many people I have some issues with the new IJF rule but I would like to see them in action a bit more before I post on that. This post is more about British judo’s announcement today (1st March) that they will now be using the rules at all national events from the British schools (9th March), I am sure the first thing that strikes you is that there is not a lot of notice!

In many ways I can understand why they have done this, there is a perception that if we do not implement them fast then we will fall behind the rest of the world on the international stage. Apparently the “Performance Management Group” or PMG has written a paper justifying this implementation, personally I would like to see this if it is so convincing.

Here are what I consider some ‘headline issue’

1. The referees are not yet trained in these rules (let alone players, officials and coaches) and this causes a huge issue because what happens is people read the IJF handout, watch the IJF videos and then forge an opinion of what they are saying. These opinions have not been discussed so what you end up with is differing opinions and a bigger divide between referees, coaches and players – purely through the frustration of poor implementation.
2. The British schools – really!! You’re not allowed to enter it if you are on the England squad, therefore you’re at least a year or 2 from competing internationally, what’s the point? We should also consider there are non-BJA competitors here
3. We now have a national ranking system under two sets of contest rules

What I would suggest is a phased implementation starting next weekend with a series of rule clinics designed to bring coaches, players and referees together under a common cause. We must remember that the new rules are being trialled by the IJF and some might not come in after the Rio world championships. I think there are some rules that will definitely stay and they’re actually the ones that need very little training, practice or understanding -

1. New definitions of score
2. Golden score continues until either shido or a score
3. New scoring system for shido’s (more about this below though)
4. Shorter Osaekomi
5. I would also introduce the no leg grabs but only award a shido if done in the context of the 2010-12 rules

The more complex skills that require training are also the ones which are more ambiguous to the referees and the ones the IJF are most likely to change in my opinion-

1. Two hand grip breaking
2. Taking the leg when transitioning to ne waza (this is particularly subjective – when does tachiwaza end and ne waza start? with no training we should expect issues)
3. Cross gripping is fairly simple (all though did get a few questions and issues on it last night when we went through the rules) and I would probably implement that rule too but I am not completely sure

Implementing at all national events from now on is interesting and shows that the PMG don’t attend these very often! There were a few events last year where they didn’t even have the correct mat area, one where they didn’t have enough electronic score boards and all sorts of other issues. Not to mention most use the small electronic score that I would guess add the score for shido’s automatically and therefore all need changing or some sort of software update.

I would like to see the BJA use this rule change as a mechanism to bring coaches, players and referees together. A series of clinics that are interesting and innovative, working together to develop innovative ways to use these new rules as an advantage internationally and not see them as a hurdle.

I also feel there are other areas of the IJF rule/tournament handbook the BJA should consider more urgently – temperature regulation in venues, always have a warm up area, player brought from the warm up area to the mat, sokuteiki for judogi control (how is it a player can fight in a kit at world level one weekend and then the referee decides the next weekend it doesn’t fit only using his eyes!) and a CARE system.

Anyway, I have written this quite rushed and off the top of my head but this is my current opinion.

Pre BUCS preparation…

I said I would blog about our pre-training and I wanted to do it before BUCS because I feel reflecting upon the training once you know the result sometimes affects you opinion but I can only do what time allows.

I would say I am very experienced in short term preparation for specific competitions. When I competed for the army it was common to have a 2-3 week intense preparation period for a specific competition and since these competitive days I have coached the army and combined services in a similar scenario, often for the combined services championships or the national team championships.

This year was slightly different in terms of our BUCS preparation. Firstly I now work with a group of full-time athletes, the train around 20hrs per week so their level of preparation is very different. Secondly BUCS was brought forward by two weeks to the end of Feb, whilst this doesn’t sound like much students generally do not return to campus until the end of Jan so that only really left about 4 weeks to prepare for some students. Most of the full-time players did return earlier though in order to prepare for the British trials and some local players train with us regularly.

When I designed the original plan it was very much around the full-time players so there was around 6 weeks of training prior to BUCS and I figured if the kyu grades dipped in and out of the training as much as they could then this would be more training than most kyu grades.

Inevitably things change though and the number of injuries meant I had to include the kyu grades more and more. To be honest I am surprised how much the managed.

Here is the overview of the training:

 

To be honest there is no real secret, for me it is about mat time and volume of randori. I get as many dojo sessions as possible and just increase the volume of randori each each microcycle. I use both 7 day and 14 day microcycles in order to achieve volume, intensity and rest. The preparation ended in an overload week – the aim was for athletes to achieve 60-72 randori’s in the week. The most we did in one session was 13 x 5mins, I nearly always use 2 minute rest periods for hard randori, this is something I have experimented with a lot and I find after about 90 sec players are ready to go again and facing their partner, this leave 30 sec with them thinking ‘come on, i’m ready’ and this means they seem to always feel like they can do more.

Here is an example of a microcycle:

I am fortunate enough to now be surrounded by some coaches and athletes who can challenge my thinking and during the overload week I was challenged by a few coaches who thought we were doing too much and people were too tired. I like to be challenged like this, it forces me to really reflect, a very deep and questioning reflection. I decided to persist, I expected more players to be struggling than were and although there was some emotion it just felt right to me. I have already thought about how I will change things for next year based on a conversation with Yasuke Hayashi (a Japanese judoka visiting us).

Anyway, this post is getting far too long! Next post i’ll talk about the competition itself

Judo Scholarships at Anglia Ruskin

Anglia Ruskin University has confirmed that ten judo players will receive scholarships this year. The players, listed below, are a mix of players who train full-time at the university and players that are part-time students on the European Judo Union level 4 performance coach award.

Seven of the athletes train full-time at the Anglia Ruskin Cambridge campus, two of the the EJU coaching award and one studies at University campus Peterborough.

Name	Year	Course	Results
Michael Stewart	3rd	BSc (Hons) Sports Coaching and Physical Education	Club president, Current BUCS champion u66kg, member of BUCS winning mens team 2011 & 2012
Glenn Miller	3rd	BSc (Hons) Sports Science	Member of BUCS winning mens team 2011 & 2012
Natasha Collins	3rd	BSc (Hons) Sports Coaching and Physical Education	BUCS silver medallist
Matt Kavannagh	1st	BA (Hons) Law	Current British junior champion
Tara Fitzjohn	1st	BSc (Hons) Sports Coaching and Physical Education
Luc Bonnargent	1st	BSc (Hons) Sports Coaching and Physical Education
Ronnie Plumb	1st	BSc (Hons) Sports Coaching and Physical Education
Danny Williams	2nd	BSc (Hons) Sports Coaching (European Judo Union)	Selected to represent Team GB in London 2012
Adrian Markov	2nd	BSc (Hons) Sports Coaching (European Judo Union)	Current BUCS champion u81kg, member of BUCS winning mens team 2012
Josh Plant	3rd	BSc (Hons) Sports Coaching and Physical Education	Studies at University college Peterborough. Member of BUCS winning mens team 2011 & 2012

As well as scholarships all players will receive physiological testing, strength and conditioning, access to performance analysis, free gym access and two fighting films judo kits.

Four of these athletes will graduate in 2013 and are currently considering a masters programme led by Anglia Ruskin in partnership with Kanoya university in Japan, they will spend half the academic year at Kanoya and half at Anglia Ruskin, Cambridge.

Anglia Ruskin University also recently announced a research group dedicated to judo research that is linked to the International Association of Judo Researchers and hopes to forge collaborations with other universities around the world to develop judo research.

For more information on the judo programme at Anglia Ruskin, which includes coach education, full-time training, research, performance analysis and more please visit www.anglia.ac.uk/judo or email judo@anglia.ac.uk.

Some photos from the Olympic judo…….

Here is a selection of some of the photos I took at the Olympic judo event

 

 

I would like to add that Charline van Snick was brilliant, she came into the arena the day after winning bronze and let people wear the medal and have photos taken etc.

London 2012 – Praise UK sport!!

Undoubtably Team GB has had it’s best Olympics ever and in my opinion this is only possible because of UK sport – the funding body for high performance sport in the UK. I have been playing around with the table below and it shows some interesting things in my opinion.

Table 1: Shows the Olympic sports, their funding for the Olympic cycle leading to London 2012, medals won by each sport, whether the sport met its target and how much a medal costs in each sport.

According to this table the most expensive GB medal of London 2012 was the hockey bronze and the most cost effective sport was boxing costing £15,013,200.00 & £1,910,280.00 per medal respectively.
A closer look does show us some interesting points though, five sports exceeded their target, 23 were within their target and only one was below it’s target. We should look at this more closely though. For example, of the 23 on target 12 were not expected to medal (we’ll discuss this below) and judo exceeded its target but it should be clear that this was a new target after the sport became red under the UK sport traffic light system within the Mission 2012 strategy; they were actually on target for their original prediction of 2-3 medals.

So why does UK sport give so much money to sports that were never expected to medal and indeed did not medal? £39,772,587 to be exact! Well the truth is that in order for us to deliver in the future sports need a system for delivering high performance athletes and to build this system takes time – more than a single 4 year cycle. In Beijing we won 47 medals from around 11 sports, in London we won 64 medals from 17 sports. Therefore there were sports in exactly the same position as our 12 non-medal sports that developed from 2008-2012 to deliver – diving, shooting and triathlon for example.

So what does this tell us? Well it tells us that in our achieving sports it costs at average of £4,282,343.33 for a medal, of course this is skewed by the rather expensive hockey medal – without that medals are a bargain at £3,611,664.78. And the big question, now that David Cameron has said the same budget will be in place for Rio 2016, is where should the £264,143,753 go for the next cycle – well  only UK sport can answer this but here are some thoughts:

1. In certain sports you can only win 2 medals (mens and women’s) for example hockey, football, handball, basketball, volleyball and water polo. If this table shows us the average cost of a medal is just over £3.5M then how can we justify more than £7m for these sports? Basketball and hockey both got more than this during this cycle – hockey more than double this.
2. This leads you to consider sports with multiple medals – swimming, judo, weightlifting, wrestling for example. If we could get these sports to consistently deliver 5-8 medals like boxing and equestrian did in this cycle that would be around another 20 medals – we’re not far off the USA then! But if these sports are to produce they need a system.
3. I believe UK sport made the correct decision to fund sports over multiple Olympic cycles in order to develop a system – this is essential for us to continue improving – cycling, sailing and rowing can only win so many medals. I do not have enough inside knowledge to know which sports are close to a system that consistently produces medals other than those that do already although I would guess boxing and taekwondo are close, maybe athletics in another Olympic cycle or two?
4. Can our higher profile sports get some of their budgets from sponsorship thus freeing up some of the UK sport money for other sports. Cycling for example has the sky money on top of their UK sport money but many sports cannot get this level of sponsorship, is this fair? Eventually it would be great if the majority of sports were sustainable in this way.

Of course most people reading this will be from judo, what do I think about judo’s funding. Well lets be honest we have done better than we thought in terms of medals but does that mean we have a system? Certainly not, the BJA are still working with an interim performance director and despite several interviews they still have not offered him full-time employment. If you were UK sport would you give judo lots of money? Do we honestly have a system we feel can consistently produce medals? Do we feel we’re working towards such a system? I personally don’t think so but it is not all doom and gloom. I used to visit the BPJI regularly under our previous management structure and in honesty it was beyond depressing. But I also went after Daniel Lascau had been here a while, of course it was the same place, poorly thought out in terms of high performance training but there was always an air of optimism, athletes were working harder and there was discipline based upon respect rather than fear.  UK sport have seen Daniel change our high performance training without being able to make a single structural change and therefore I would guess they would/should feel confident in his ability to deliver over a 4 year period with complete control. Would they trust someone completely new after what happened during our last cycle?

Anyway, this post is more about praising UK sport for a job well done! They predicted between 40-70 medals (which is a big boundary to be fair) and they got 65. Their consistent attention to detail and challenging of conventional wisdom has proven a great success!

EJU level 4 summer 2012 block ends….

Following a very successful week one the second week of the summer block of the European Judo Union Level 4 coach award has ended. We have had a fantastic second week with two main guest lecturers – Prof Attilio Sacripanti and Prof Stanislaw Sterkowicz. Both of these are leading academics int he field of judo.

Attilio hold a PhD in Biomechanics and one in Nuclear physics, he is the worlds leading expert on biomechanics in judo. He taught three lectures over the second week.

Stanislaw has published 312 academic articles, including six books, he is the head of the department of combat sports at Krakow university and he also taught three lectures in the second week, both in physiology and biomechanics. Stanislaw is the creator of the Special Judo Fitness test that is used throughout the world.

Obviously the students also continued their S&C module with Core-Cambridge and the first years completed there Physiology modules.

Here are some pictures from week two:

The next block of the EJU level 4 coaching award will start in April. We will have a new intake that will stat their first module – Applied Pedagogy in Judo whilst our second year cohort do two modules – Planning for Sport and Technical Principles of Judo, our third year cohort will also do two modules –  Psychology for combat sports and Performance Analysis for judo. We will also hopefully recruit enough for a level 5 intake, they will complete a module in Long-term Athlete Development.

For more information on the EJU coach awards click here or email judo@anglia.ac.uk.

Week one in pictures…

Week one of the summer block of the EJU level 4 performance coach award is complete! Here are some pictures, the students are going down to the British Judo Performance Institute today for the test fights and overload training of the British Olympic team.

Some pictures of the Strength and Conditioning module delivered at Core-Cambridge, more photo’s of this soon. Also our biomechanics preparation lectures, physiology practical sessions and mat based sessions with world and Olympic champion Maki Tsukada.

 

Week two is just as packed!!

The summer block has started….

Monday saw the start of the summer block of the European Judo Union Level 4 performance coach award.

As explained in my previous post there are 4 modules – year one are predominantly doing physiology, year two are doing biomechanics and Strength & Conditioning.

 

Today has seen our first years looking at EMG and our second years doing strength and conditioning. There was also a keynote session by world and Olympic champion Maki Tsukada (JPN)

Here are some photos from so far….

 

 

 

EJU lever 4 coaching award – summer block 2012

In just under a week the next block of the EJU level 4 performance coach award will start at Anglia Ruksin, Cambridge.

This block is looking exciting, with two cohorts we are delivering four modules over the block:

Level 1: Sports Physiology and Physiology for judo

Level 2: Strength & Conditioning for judo and Biomechanics for judo

We have guest lecturers including Alex Bezziner, Sanislaw Sterkowicz, Attilio Sacripanti and Maki Tsukada. I think this is going to be another great two week block

I will update with progress as we go along!

Littleport championships…..

This weekend was the Littleport championships, we only had five players fighting. Rosie won silver, Harry, Orestis and Adam all won bronze whilst Rowan had the best fight he has ever had despite not winning a medal – for me this is more important

Another interesting thing was that one of the torch bearers - Dave Hereward brought along his Olympic torch for people to have a photo with, I think this is really good and 100% in the spirit of the Olympic movement. There are some photos below.