center of balance

I've focused a lot on takedowns. I figure no matter what your intent, be it to win a competition, beat someone up, or run away, being able to throw someone is a great way to gain major initiative. Rulesets aside, fighting has three components; stand-up, groundwork, and takedowns. Takedowns are also easier to succeed at against larger opponents than striking or grappling. For me, that's always an important consideration.

In class, we go over different throws each week, but the basics get lost along the way. I do well, relative to most, but I think this is because many don't understand the basics. They attempt throws without thinking through whether they'll have any leverage. I've found it important to keep the mechanics of it in mind.

Every throw, from a seio nagi to a double leg, requires leverage. This means thinking of the person being thrown as a lever to your fulcrum. Keeping in mind which way the lever needs to move, legs going one way, upper body the other, with the pivot point somewhere in between. Focusing only on the legs when doing a sweep make it easily defended against. 

The double leg is an interesting example, because it can look like an exception. It can look more like a football tackle. A properly executed double leg is more about trapping the legs while driving your opponent's center of balance over the fulcrum of your arms. Once they're off their feet, they become easier to lift - or at least their legs do, for a brief moment. That's why double legs can look like a lift. A common mistake is trying to do them that way, people straining to lift each other. Judo throws can be similar in how once a person is off their feet, they can go flying head over heels with surprising ease.

Osoto gari is a common throw, as it's almost similar to how little kids might trip each other. It can seem like one of the most intuitive. That's probably why so many people do it wrong. Myself included, before noticing that it wasn't working out well. You basically put your leg behind theirs and pull them over it, but if they see it coming, they're not going to let you. 

The kid's trip works against someone who isn't expecting it, but if they are, you need to figure out how you're going to get their center of balance past the fulcrum point. Judo practitioners quickly learn to guard their center of balance, so it's important to know how to deal with that, but more fundamentally, to understand why. The tricks used to get a person off balance are no less important than the throw itself.

This can be an arm drag to make someone stumble, so that you can use their momentarily misguided momentum against them. Or in doing a shoulder throw like seio nagi, really understanding why you need to drive your hips down and back to get under your opponent's center of balance. People often screw that one up, because they don't realize how critical the little detail they keep forgetting is.

Class went well. Knee and side were fine. Mondays after kickboxing, we do Judo. Throws and takedowns instead of submissions. It really is amazing what an anti-depressant it is. Just yesterday, I was writing this...

"I think a lot about the nature of self-esteem, and why there seems to be a gaping hole where mine used to be. I think maybe whatever was holding it together failed to survive contact with humankind. I don't know what matters anymore. It doesn't seem to matter what I think. All my ideas," I trailed off, trying to think of another way to say pointless. I think more to the point I was stewing over, ideas have hardly been a substitute for living.

The things I say when I'm miserable aren't wrong, but they only tell half a story. They omit almost everything positive. Not because I think the positives are wrong, but because they feel so much less important. The better my mood, the less important the negatives seem to be. Why does it seem like I'm the only one who sees what's going on here?

There are no objective values we can place on anything. It's all arbitrary. When a negative feels like the worst thing in the world - or easily dismissed, because such is life, and life is beautiful - there is no decision making process involved here. It's just brain chemistry shifting one way and then another. It's neither true nor false, right or wrong.

We don't create physical reality in our minds, but what of all the values we assign to everything? We make that up entirely. The values we place on everything are much more significant to our understanding of life than objective reality, which people are pretty clueless about. e.g. Ok, you stubbed your toe and it hurts, proving objective reality? What does it mean to understand such a thing? Do you know anything about the anatomy of it, the neurology, physics or chemistry of it? Or are you just placing values all over the place and calling that reality?

It's all made up. All the "important" stuff, or whether anything at all is important. Ideas are largely predicated on presumptions of importance, while the very concept of importance is nonsense. Some times this bothers me more than others.