Back in the Saddle. Thursday night practice at Budokan.

Thursday Night practice at the Budokan, was a bit of post hangover recovery. That is, that people were back to practice after the Continental Crown.

Well the Continental Crown was a huge affair with the whole weekend taken up setting up and tearing down the venue, the prep work, and of course the matches themselves. It seems the club is getting tighter, mainly there are a lot of volunteers making the tournament happen.

Thursday Night was typical practice with warm-up, technique and then randori session. My knee has been getting better, and I finally deemed it possible to actually engage in newaza randori.

The technique of the night was an oseakomi pin, which was a bit unorthodox. It involves grabbing the arm passing over the top and pinning from the side. The pin was quite effective, and can easily transition to straight arm bar, or an ude garami. Otherwise it was a good pin.

You can see the technique in this Youtube video at minute 0:45 to 0:48. By the way this is one of my favorite judo video compilations of all time...

I engaged in a bit of standup randori for only one round.

Other than that everything was peachy keen.