Day 18 - Wed 29 - Osaka: Judo, joint health, clubbells ... and home

This last day in Japan, Cliff had a relaxing day then riding around Kyoto looking for the superb Nishiki Food Market, before making his way to the airport in the evening.

I woke up early and hopped on the train to Osaka, and stashed my bag in a locker there. Then I found my way to a sento I'd read about on the net. It was in a bit of a seedy area ... and while I was there, a Yakuza guy came in to use the sento! I knew him because he was covered from his wrists to his bum in a huge dragon tattoo winding across his body. He seemed nice enough, but luckily by the time he arrived I had to leave anyway; didn't want any trouble with gangsters!



It was a pretty good sento, with its denki (electro) bath cranked up high, second only to our Kyoto favourite Go-ko-yu. And cool interior decorations, check it out :-) I have a video but this connection is too slow, will upload it later.

cold tub in the corner, beside the denki tub.



hot tubs in the middle



(Also a neat little electric bike; actually I just saw one here in Bondi too)



Then I made my way over to the real point of the day, visiting Ryan Hurst. He is Japan's representative of the Circular Strength Training systems of RMAX inc, from Scott Sonnon. Sorry, that was was quite a mouthful!

Ryan is a great guy, very friendly, he and I really hit it off well - for the first hour or so we just chatted about Japan, crazy Americans, sentos, diet, martial arts, children, family ... basically life, the universe and everything. It is such a shame our trip worked out that I didn't meet him until the end -- if I could do it all again, I certainly would have found a way to spend a few of our first days down in the Kansai region over training with him. (Though I sure wouldn't have missed our Butokuden experience for anything!)

I recorded fairly copious notes on the way home, which I don't want to reproduce here, but I will summarize.

So, Soon enough we started on with some Judo.

- posture & weighting concepts

- an interesting angle on the hikkite (drawing) arm; incidently the old tai-otoshi wizard at Maranouchi showed me the same thing

- an interesting cross-crip hidari hiza guruma

- nice tweaks to o-soto-gari

- good 'head control' kuzushi methods

- rolling 'leg-pick' (aka kneebar method from Sambo) good for a failed uchimata

- interesting o-uchi-gari variation, similar to the RMAX joint collapsing method, IIRC

- screwing pushups (get your mind out of the gutter!) and their application in forward driving pushes

- a very interesting seoinage variation

- uchikomi discussion

Then we started talking about my sore shoulder -- he's had some very nasty injuries there, so was quite familiar with the typical tests for rotator cuff problems and the like. It seems I got lucky, should be no serious problems! We practiced a lot of methods that should be really good for rehabbing my injury, such as:


- packing the shoulder

- six directions of rotations

- hands & knees, weighted rotations

- same from forearms

- stretch sideways / forwards

- standing theraband strengthening exercise

- similar one lying down & light weights, apparently very popular with Sumo players

Then we started playing with clubbells a bit (using my good arm of course). It is so great to meet someone who actually knows what he is doing with them! In the past I've mimicked a lot of the motions using arm strength, but without proper form. This is a recipe for trouble. Ryan made it clear how I had to focus on proper use of breath and hip-thrust (actually seven principes all up) when swinging them. We then looked at:

- swings

- swipes

- mills

It was awesome how he related the use of these surprisingly heavyk, awkward bloody things to grappling. In so many situations their proper use requires the _same_ body positions and movements as is necessary in Judo! So you train with one, and it is helping you somewhat with the other. He could demonstrate this quite clearly, which made it so much more interesting for me ... these are far more relevant than a lot of other excercise methods, I think, and I'm highly remotived to practice with them.

Then we went over the old four-corner-balance drill, and I was reminded again about what a great routine that is for building a strong foundation of leg/joint strength coupled with good balance.

By this time, we'd spent over two hours playing around, and it was time to go or else I'd miss my train to the airport. I really look forward to meeting up with my new friend again one day! He has a lovely wife and beautiful little girl; maybe our kids will play together one day.



As it was, I got to the checkin counter 8 minutes before it closed! There was a bit of panic everywhere, let me tell you :-) Cliff was wondering if I would make it ... and if I didn't, maybe I'd be better off _staying_ in Japan, heh.

If only! What an awesome place. Now I'm down in Sydney for a few days ... I will continue this blog one more day I think.