The Corpse Whip

I was well enough to go back to training this week. I feel good. I haven't had an alcoholic drink in maybe 2 weeks. I feel much better mentally. If I tape my knee up tightly and put some deep heat on it, I don't feel any pain in it at all. For about a month; I had to sit out and watch the other players train. It was boring and demoralizing; but it was a good way to learn. I watched the other students throw each other in randoori. It gave me ideas; it was a good learning experience to see how skilled players use their techniques; how they fail in using them; and how they adapt them to their own purposes. For the most part; Japanese people have low slung hips and short arms. They have upper bodies like crabs and hips like bulldozers. This kind of physique is perfect for Judo. I am not built this way; I have the physique of a newborn giraffe. I'm all knobbly knees; wobbly balance, and kneck.

One night, I watched a 70, or maybe 80 kg player throw another in right ko-uchi gari. He got his left foot into position behind uke's, and tried to break his balance over it. Uke jigotai-ed his balance back into stability. Then I watched the attacking player do something cool. He pushed off the mat with his right foot; and let that force roll through his own body toward his head. Like a wave in a bath; this force bounced back off the top of his skull and sloshed back down his body into his left foot. Then he transferred this force into Uke's foot and swept it out from underneath him.  Uke tried jigotai-ing again; but this force was too low to try and block with his hips; and so he fell. I watched a player use his own body like it was a whip, he diverted energy through his body like he was a jelly that had been slapped. I thought it was awesome; and it gave me an idea.

For about two weeks or so; instead of training with the other players I have been doing my own thing off to the side. A lot of the exercises I do make me look like a lunatic. I'm trying to develop a style of judo so unusual that the other players won't have a context to place it in when I use it against them. People look at me wierdly; but divert their gaze when i am looking in their direction. In a way it is liberating. I get that kind of look regardless of what I do. I have blond eyebrows; a weird bent posture, and ghost white skin. I look radically different to the standard Japanese person; I may as well be a martian. If I sat quietly off to the side; I would get these looks. If I started pigging out on horse manure; I would get the exact same looks. Once I accepted that these looks were a natural and inevitable concomitant of coming and training in this place; then all my fear of embarrassment evaporated. There is no point for me to try and avoid it; I must embrace it as an ordinary part of life. And so I feel completely free of any kind of social pressure; because anything I might do would result in the same outcome.

Recently I became capable of standing on a yoga ball while catching medicine balls. During training one night I saw Nobuyuki Sato talking to someone else. I was watching them out of the corner of my eye. He had his arms out in front of him; as if balancing on something; and looking in my direction. I think I heard the word "ii barance". No idea if he was talking about what I hope he was talking about; but I'm willing to delude myself that he was.

Ive been drilling one particular exercise. I kneel in seiza on the yoga ball; and throw my balance forward. I fall over my base and extend my body over the ball. Then I recover my balance by slamming my hands into the yoga ball, and regain control on all fours. If you miss the right spot; you fall over, head first. I like the feel of this exercise; it feels almost exactly like being thrown in tai-otoshi. If you fight the momentum of your unbalance; you fall on the floor and it hurts like hell. If you slosh your body, as if it were a garbage bag filled with water, and cooperate with the momentum of the movement; you can guide it and re balance yourself.

I had a teacher in Australia show me a way to unbalance opponents by relaxing your arms. He would get his grip on me, then he would loosen his arms until they were floppy. Then he would use his hips to whip them against you. He would use his arms too; but not in a way I was used to. When I grappled with people, my muscles would tense up as if trying to lift something heavy. This made me strong, but also made my balance very brittle, and my teacher often unbalanced me with ease. He would not use raw force. Instead he would use a quick burst of power, like he was throwing a light ball. This power would traverse the lengths of his relaxed arms and unbalance me. It took me a few years to understand how it worked. It felt really powerful, and so I tried to emulate it by using my strength. It never worked. I couldn't understand how someone nearly double my age could be twice as strong as me. It took a long time for me to understand that what he was doing was shutting down all resistance in his arms so that a small force could travel unimpeded from him into me. 

Most of the Japanese people I train with that look to be around my weight are shorter, stockier, and stronger than me. They have a strict gym regime, they have guns. Because they have short arms, they can use their elbows like can openers. They concentrate a lot of power into their grips. Every time I try grip battling with them; I may as well be grip battling with a crab. It's just not a good idea; it doesn't end well for me if I try. So I think I have come up with a way to get around this. I call it "the corpse whip".

I am trying to adapt my teachers balance breaking technique into something I can use to transfer power throughout my whole body. When I start a round of randoori with someone; I start stumbling, and making a show of being unstable. I cross my feet; I lean sideways. My opponent gets wierded out. I grab my opponents lapel. Before my opponent can start methodically prying my grip apart; I shift my feet, and push off the mat. I let this force wave through my legs, hips, then body. Then it arrives into my hands. Then I pitch my balance into them deliberately. Doing this; I gain the power of my body weight and the strength in my arms. Like this, I can force heavier players to adjust their balance to react to me. The key is to shut your body down so that you are only using barely enough muscle to stand. If you are completely loose, any force you or your opponent uses will wave through you like ripples on water. People laugh when they watch me do this. I look insane. But it seems to work.

On Wednesday; I was standing off to the side waiting to get a round of randoori. The other students kept choosing other players. It feels a lot like being back in school, being the last kid to be chosen to join the team for the mandatory PE class exercise. When a team from the UK was here; their coach would yell to the visiting players to run onto the other players and bow them on if they weren't being chosen. I have started doing this; it works. I ran up to Varlam Liparteliani, a visiting judoka from Georgia; and bowed him on. He let me do the round with him. I'm not entirely sure what it is about judo that I love so much; but this has to be one part of it. I love that it is possible for me to train one on one with a European Judo Championship gold medalist. I went against him armed with an idea and the experience of having watched my favorite Jackie Chan movie twice.

Going against such a skilled player was a good opportunity to explore the justification behind my training goals. There is no throw that I know that he wouldn't have trained at least 10 times more than me. I cannot outrun him, I cannot outmaneuver him. My only chance against him would be if I derailed the thread of the round and took him to a place where his experience would not help him. If I try and play the game that he is employed to play, I will certainly lose. My only chance to succeed would be to make him play my game.

The round started; and I started staggering like a black out drunk. He had been watching me while I did this for a few weeks, and so he knew what it was. He smirked through his breathlessness. He was exhausted from many rounds of randoori with the heavy weight players.  I got the first grip; and started repetitively corpse whipping him. It was like the inverse of jigotai; I was deliberately throwing my balance into him to destabilize his stance. He had to move to avoid me; it was working. The corpse whipping itself wasn't all that difficult; but recovering my balance afterward required a lot of speed and maneuvering. I felt exhausted after a few minutes of this. Once my lungs started to shut down; my movements lagged; and he got the overhand grip on me. Once that happened; I was playing his game and had no chance of escaping his throws. He threw me maybe 3 or 4 times in some variant of hip throw.

We stood again; and I corpse whipped him; and moved into a deliberately sloppy seoinage. He stepped off it to his right to avoid it. As he did this; I let my momentum carry me behind him. I stuck my right foot behind his left foot and did some kind of sloppy yoko gake. I fell onto the ground before my momentum had actually traveled though my arms and into him. He had his back to the direction of the throw; and so I unbalanced and threw him. I'm still patting myself on the back over it. It was ugly as hell. I am not sure if he let me do it or not. But you don't get to throw a internationally famous athlete every day. We stood again and he continued to methodicaly wipe the mat with my back. After we finished; he said half to his coach; half to me, "he is strong".

I am not delusional; it is not possible for me to be half as strong as a judo athlete. But I think I am beginning to see how you can get strength, body weight and balance to cooperate with one another. If you can guide them into one unified force; it becomes more powerful than anything you can do with strength alone. It is not easy. But i think it is possible.

I am working on another variant of this technique; if I can get it to work I will call it "the back handed apology". I tried a grip breaking technique in randoori last night; I call it 'the crab hammer". It works but is too unsafe to use yet; but i think it has potential to develop into a good opening for sode tsukuri komi goshi. The yoga ball keeps giving me ideas; so I will keep using it. I want to see where it can take me.