The Shintaro Higashi Show - Doing Judo Where There Is No Judo

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

It's an unfortunate reality that for some people, it's hard to find Judo near them, especially in the USA. There may be no Judo schools nearby. You want to compete in Judo, but there may not be a competition nearby. What can we do in these situations? Shintaro and Peter discuss some ideas on what you can do when you live in a "Judo desert." Please support us on Patreon if you can: https://www.patreon.com/shintaro_higashi_show. Any amount helps!

hello everyone welcome back to the shintaro higashi show with peter you today we're going to talk about living in a judo desert doing judo where there is no judo yeah that's right but today i just want to say i'm sorry for not having uploaded a video on youtube from this podcast in a very long time and i must say it's ha ha. Yeah, it is in a way. Yeah. So what was the issue? The. Oh, hold on.

I thought you were going to say something. Oh, yeah. The issue is this. The issue is this. Right. We log on to Squadcast. We have this conversation. You know, I could see Peter.

He could see me. And then Peter just kept having these technical issues. He just kept getting logged out. And he's the computer programmer. Right. And I'm just the judo goon. I'm like, damn, what's wrong with your goddamn computer? He's like, oh, yeah, we just couldn't figure it out.

We were hitting up Squadcast day in and day out. What's going on? What's going on? Peter's doing something funny with his Linux and Windows running on the same computer and all this stuff. Then we finally figured it out right yeah so it was uh I have to thank the squad cast of pork because they've been great you know they've been really knowledgeable and responsive um but the issue was that on my desktop that I record this on I have two operating systems Windows and Linux and they track their time zones differently

so basically when I got on my Windows operating system my time zone was wrong and that caused an authentication problem with Squadcast which kept kicking me out so my video wasn't getting uploaded to squawk has uh properly and then so squawk has actually came up with the solution that they asked me like hey does your desktop happen to have a happen to be in a wrong time zone and i was like you know what it is because and i've never fixed it because yeah yeah i've never fixed it because it never caused a problem until now.

Yeah. And it turns out there was a problem. That's a very out-of-the-box solution. I know, yeah. We were like, oh, man, the software is messy. That's pretty cool that you run Linux and Windows. I run macOS and Windows. I have a partitioned hard drive.

Oh, you still do? But I never use Windows because i can't figure out windows windows i was able to get there very different yeah yeah i mean that's still good the worst yeah apple makes it easy yeah makes it easy anyway so let's go back to uh doing judo when where there is no judo yes this is very common thing and this was a suggestion uh from our one of our patreons actually yeah and especially a common thing in the u.s i guess yeah so what does that mean right yeah so oh man i'm doing jujitsu or i'm into karate or i'm into some martial arts and i want to do judo because i've been looking up judo but there is no judo in my neighborhood what do i do it's a pretty common thing that i hear uh just the first thing

it's like when you're watching judo online and uh observing stuff like that i think is the first step right once you're watching it and once you're interested in it i want you to keep that interest going and you know if you can keep up with the IJF competition circuit, that's great. If you can watch tutorials, find your favorite instructors, that's great. And then that's like the first, very first step. Right. Right. And then you have to kind of take it from there to the training. Yeah.

But I guess that's a big problem. I mean, everyone can watch videos. Everyone can watch videos. Yeah. Yeah. You need another body to train. Yeah. You do need another body to train. Yeah. You do need another body to train.

And I don't suggest just grabbing your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend and just start doing throws on them because it's unsafe. You definitely want to be trained with a professional. What I say to people who are looking for dojos all the time is visit all the dojos in the region. That's the most important thing. You have to go visit all the dojos. Because when you go into a dojo and say oh i really like this place i'm just gonna join you don't know what else is out there right right you have to be sort of an educated consumer and that's one of the things that i always suggest

like go visit all the schools and see which is a good fit sometimes you go in and you know the you just vibe perfectly with the community the teacher's amazing and you just kind of know right and maybe it's one of those things uh but first visit all the dojos and i would say judo and jujitsu because those are very related martial arts right that's first so anything like first do some research on uh to see what's available see what's around yeah yeah yeah so the bjo. Yeah. Yeah. But I guess the question is like it would there might not be one, you know, around. Yeah. I mean, I think I don't know how common that case would be. But, you know, they're doing, you know, that they do exist. Like, that's true. If you're in the middle of nowhere, it might not be, there might not be an option. But I would say, you know, a close option is I feel like jiu-jitsu would be there.

Right. BJJ. Yeah. BJJ would be there. And if not, you know, go into some other martial art like wrestling. There's wrestling all over the place. Right. Some kind of grappling martial art is good. So you join a martial arts school or a grappling school, and then you want to have an open dialogue with the instructor.

Hey, I've been watching these things. Hey, I've been, right? And of course, you don't want to overstep your boundaries because there is an immediate hierarchy when you join a martial art school. There's a belt and system, and there's a teacher. You're the student. You're walking in. You're like, oh, you know, I've never done this before, but, you know, I've been watching judo videos online.

You know, let me just, you know, work some of the stuff out on you. That's not really going to feel well. No one's going to like you if you do that. So if you're joining a wrestling club or a jiu-jitsu club, you know, learn that martial art first, right? Get into it. Learn it. If there is no judo, I'm saying. art first right get into it learn it if there is no judo i'm saying learn that art and then start trying to make connections between what you see online and that grappling style and see how

can potentially connect i see yeah jiu-jitsu is a good one because it's so relatable and accessible because even a lot of our patreons they're jujitsu guys yeah the jujitsu guys who are interested in judo and exactly what we're talking about now oh we don't have a judo school in our neighborhood right right yeah and there's always a time before class after class where there's sort of like that you know depends on what martial arts school you go to but there's sort of this downtime right Right. Downtown, downtime, uptime. And during that time period, you could grab someone and say, hey, can I work some of this stuff on you? The key is to drill those things slowly because it's dangerous.

So during those downtimes, you're saying you could work on those things that you see on YouTube online. Yeah. you could work on those things that you see on youtube online yeah yeah yeah and i'm not like uh too big of an advocate on like watch stuff on youtube and try it out you know right i mean even though that's my whole thing right you want to learn from your teacher not just the internet right i think maybe you're trying some stuff out yeah and then you want to talk to your teacher yeah you should bring it up is yeah bring it to the teacher yeah right like oh this is what i saw but then don't do that during the uptime so to speak right like yeah yeah do that during the downtime you know during the uptime like focus on the main parts yeah so another interesting point so that's on the training side

so say you know you got you got some training experience you found a gym although it might be far away but now you know competition going to a competition is a big part of these all of these grappling arts yeah although we do say competition may not be for everyone but if you want to go to a competition but there's no competition around like that's close by what do you what do you think people could do? I mean, you got to travel. Get on the airplane. Airplane drive. But even then, I will go check out the scope of the competition first.

I try to, not that I discourage all competition, but if someone in my judo school is like, I want to compete. It's like, okay, do you have any idea what it's like out there competing against you know oh i you know i trained for three months i feel like i'm really good and tough uh okay but you know white yellow green belt division now you might get a guy that's been doing judo for six years how's that fair it's not fair but it's just how it is you know yeah so go check it out i would go watch it and then see if it's something that you might be interested in most people take the time to do it. Watching.

I mean, I guess one. Yeah. You could make a trip out of it with your teammates who compete. You can kind of go on that. That's an option. This is the thing. Most people don't really know how they're going to fare in competition. Right.

And the thing is. How would they know? I want to compete. They will know. They will know. A lot of people have not competed. Now, all of a sudden, they're doing this martial art and they're pretty good in the dojo. They're like, I want to test it out.

Great. I love that you're enthusiastic about it. I want to support it. But I have no clue whether or not this guy or girl is going to crumble under the pressure or get injured. I have no clue. It could be the worst experience for this person ever.

It could be. Go watch it. Be in that environment and see if you take to it. right could be the worst experience for this person ever could be or it could be the best yeah yeah be in that environment and see if you take to it and so like if there is no judo tournaments right near you then i would go to jiu-jitsu tournament and check that out there are more of those i guess yeah yeah there's a lot more of those. What do you think about asking your teacher to organize intraclub competitions or small interclub competitions? I've never been to one of those, so I don't know how you've done those. I've done a bunch of stuff in that kind of world. I've taken the kids kids and we had like

uh you know my buddy joe's school down in staten island and you know we had a crisscross thing where he would bring his guys all his kids students to my dojo and i'll bring all my judo students to his dojo and you know we did it you know back when the kids program was something yeah and that was pretty good you know and we're to make safe matchups and you know we'd have an open discussion about is this kid that my kid is about to fight a killer or not right right we'd be you know very

transparent about that because we don't want any mismatches the goal is not for any of our kids to get bombed right right right the goal is for them to get a you know experience and have fun experience and have fun. Yeah, experience and have fun. I've done that before.

I've done little tournaments in the house, in-house tournaments where they're showing technique and doing technique demonstration for the kids. I think it's one of the best things. I've done that. Not doing full-on matches. Not doing full-on. Although it gets a little bit tricky. You know, there's not too many clubs nearby but it's a pretty big ask right it wednesday night instead of having practice at our dojo we're going to go to this other person's dojo and we all have to travel we're off to do this

some people can do it some people cannot right right right so i'm going to leave most of the people that can't go and then just for you know maybe eight or nine students that are going to be able to do it it's hard to justify right and they're also there's a little bit like that you know political like no they come to me kind of a situation you know between the dojos like for the dojos yeah for sure yeah and there was a dojo in queens that had a workout at 2 p.m on sunday and i wanted to support that he has a new location. He combined forces during the pandemic with another dojo.

So it's two dojos in Queens that said, you know what, we're both losing our lease. We're both suffering. Let's find another location and combine schools. And they did it, and they have a much bigger facility, and I want to support that. I really do. But I'm not going to burn a Sunday with my daughter to go to workout in Wondori with these guys. Right, right. It's like, what am I going to get a Sunday with my daughter to go to work out and do Rondori with these guys

it's like what am I going to get out of that you know show my support yes but I'm not you know me and my daughter we had like a thing that we were planning on like we're going to do this you know Sunday and oh honey I'm going to go to this judo thing and do Rondori for two hours and hang out and then

I just can't justify it you know what I mean so like something like that's great and you know mikhail from philadelphia uh in that region he came and he's the man you know he's uh the coach for usa sambo and he brought his team and you know i was watching some of the clips online and you know mikhail's like in his 50s and he's like throwing down and he's also running white belt and he's the man you know yeah so i love that guy it was nice to see that yeah yeah you know if he would have been like if i and he's also wearing white belt and he's the man, you know? Yeah. So I love that guy. It was nice to see that. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, if he would have been like, if I knew he wasn't to be there, maybe I would have gone. Yeah. Maybe later. Yeah. It's tough to justify,

man. Mikal always brings his kids. So maybe when, you know, your daughter gets older and she gets into judo, maybe you can take her out. I think it's very difficult with the these kinds of things because everyone's on different wavelengths when it comes to this stuff oh okay right you see it

administratively with the back end of judo organizations some people do it full-time a lot of people don't do it full-time some people do it part-time some people do it for money some people do it as volunteer yeah right now all of a sudden it's like hey you know we're gonna do friday night workouts at my club let's do it it's like wait a minute you know i have a club and i have practice i'm not gonna shut down my practice to go to your practice right right yeah and then oh you know i have a full-time job i worked all week you know uh nine to five nine to seven you know it's friday i just want to fucking watch tv with my whatever you know so it's it's a tough ask for a lot of people who are running clubs who are in the position to do it maybe we're competing on sunday you know maybe my guys are banged up maybe i have a young team you know maybe all these different

factors kind of contribute to it and i think think it's very difficult to rally everybody and do something like this. You know, it's been done. People do it. Right. But I think in judo, there's a lot more people running dojos part-time. Yeah, that's true. Right? That's without a doubt.

I know lots of people. Firefighters during the day, running a dojo at night. I know a guy who's a nurse during the day day running a dojo at night I know a guy who's a nurse during the day running a dojo at night this person's a school teacher running a dojo at night those people have

different time constraints right you know what I mean those people aren't bought in as much as the people who are doing it full time and I guess there could be those type of people.

That type of people are more common in areas where there's not a lot of judo. Because that's just the nature. I think so. That's just my opinion. That's just my opinion. Yeah. I think so. In summary, I think combining forces to have inter-club competitions could be a good idea. And there are not that many competitions around.

But it requires work, I guess. It requires work. Everything requires work. Yeah. It really does. It is a great idea. And I'm not trying to push people away from it. But there's reasons why I don't do it.

If I was a single person, when I used to be, I focused a lot on things like this. We did KBI Super Fights, which was like this, you fought in that. Oh, yeah. We made a production out of that. We made a production.

It was like 100 people spectating in the dojo. It was too much. It was a fire hazard. A videographer, we had everything. I was so nervous i was like oh man oh really everyone you know gets trampled or something or run out of oxygen in this run yeah it was crazy yeah i was like oh man i hope no one breaks a leg but you know we've done all sorts of cool events but it gets harder and harder you know right the more you have a kid or the more

you know life gets in the way because everyone's in a different place in life right i mean it's not like uh you know i remember seeing an interclub competition in japan it's like all right we're gonna invite you know 20 high schools in the region everybody's coming in yeah and there was 400 people in the room and the teachers are full-time right like those judo teachers they're all full-time. That's all they do. Yeah. All right. Okay, we have 400 kids in the room, and we're all going to have matches. And they divided the mats up into small little competition areas. They had like 10, 15 match areas going. Yeah.

Two, three hours we were out of there. And then they had to have practice after that. It was brutal. I competed in that. It was a high school intra club right you uh we talked about that in uh on the episode that thing yeah oh yeah because you were there for a training camp right i was there with the university team but they went on summer break but the high school were still going so i was training with the high school team and the coaches were like you want to

go out there and compete against these high school kids? I was like, all right. I go out there and all the coaches are like, that kid's not in high school. It says USA on the backpack. Some of the other coaches are like, ah, he's fighting for the U.S., not that good anyway. And I hear all this stuff. Right. That's funny. so that maybe maybe um another solution i mean it could be a long-term solution for this judo desert would be to get judo integrated into the ncaa the scholastic programs maybe that's a big ask man i gotta tell you people have all these ideas you know people

give me ideas like this like you should teach the nypd judo i'm like yeah that that's a great idea that's a big ask you I'm going to network my way into the right decision maker and then teach them a little bit of judo. That's too much work for me with no... I'm not saying that's not worth my time, but my time is already stretched thin. Yeah, you can't do everything.

You can't do anything. I got work and daughter. Daughter, yeah. And podcast. That's all I do. It's not gym, tent, laundry. It's like judo, daughter. GTO, yeah.

Gym is a big part of it. GDP. Oh, no. JPD. JDP. Yeah, something like that. All right. There's a story about Kashiwazaki i kind of wanted to share

when we were talking about this topic oh yeah yeah yeah so if you don't know kashiwazaki just youtube him he's spectacular he does all sorts of weird moves like sumigaishi tomonage niwaza so during the niwaza like niwaza specialist or something right because he was a niwaza specialist yes yeah so he was doing a lot of this jiu-jitsu stuff, looking stuff, you know, before it got popularized. And, you know, that's how he made a name for himself. But he was a high school judo coach. So he didn't have training partners. So he devised a way to train against his students because he knew he wasn't going against the biggest and the best oh he was

training high schoolers yeah he was a high school coach so if you look at the era of that time of judo he has a very very distinct and unique style which i love that yeah right so in theory can you win an all japan or i forgot what title he won but can you win one of these major titles only training with high school kids right he can you can he proved this yeah similarly can you do just bjj learn judo and develop your stand-up game while you're belonging only to a-jitsu gym while watching videos and putting together a little downtime pod situation. Yes. And I have people reaching out to me specifically and then sending me videos. Hey, is this good?

Hey, is that good? I have this virtual coaching thing. I don't charge for anything like that. And 90% of inquiries I just generally ignore. But sometimes somebody will get through with the right message uh and then i'll check their profile yeah and then you know they're really trying hard and they seem genuine and it's like you know sometimes you scroll through somebody's instagram and you're like i want to help this kid yeah yeah every now and then you get that

yeah right and then i have a couple people that I'm like kind of going back and forth with and, you know, they send me videos. And now they kind of have a, you know, I wrestle. I want to learn some judo throws. What techniques are great? Here are some videos from my YouTube. Check it out. Here's me doing them.

Nogi, what do you think? I think you should do it from an underhook instead something like this you know now they kind of have a throwing game yeah and every now and then i'll see them throwing on on instagram like just you know out of the blue i'm like ah you know maybe i made a little bit of a difference on this kid's life yeah right i see usually it's not a kid kid because i don't really want to be interacting with minors or anything like that online You know what I mean But I'm talking kid like you know

Anybody under 30 is a kid to me now Because I'm pushing 40 I see I get that You're not pushing 40 Come on now I am man I'm 37 Oh

That's not pushing 40 Masters division coming up So yeah that's an idea I am, man. I'm 37. Oh. Pushing 40. It's not pushing 40. Yeah. Master's division coming up. So, yeah, that's an idea. Yeah, BJJ, guys, is very, very... But, you know, BJJudo is, like, seeping its way into jiu-jitsu now. So, I don't think you have that hard of a time finding people to do stand-up with. So, wait.

So, how did Kashiwazaki practice with his... What was his strategy to train with his high school students? I don't really know. I just know that story. I was able to interview him like, hey, Kashiwazaki, what's up, man? How did you train with Japanese? We got to wait a minute.

I think the biggest advantage, edge that he had, was that he was watching judo in Japan and saying, okay, Tomonage Sumigayashi, not so utilized. That's my gap. That's the niche that I want to exploit. And that kind of stuff always happens. If some people are doing mostly this, then you find something that's a little bit different. Then you excel at that and you understand those positions well. Leg locks has been around forever, right? But then as soon as Donaher and his team were like,

all right, I love leg locks. I want to explore it because people aren't really using it properly. That's what we're going to specialize in. That's what they did. They specialize in this. Now they want everything with it. Now everyone does it. Now they've moved on to something else.

Which is? I don't really know because I don't really follow them so closely. But they've moved on to something else which is i don't really know because i don't really follow so closely but like they've moved on to something else they did a back attack system open guard this and that i see they're always a little bit ahead of what the trends are doing so this is something you could of it yeah this is something you could do when there's uh like you don't necessarily have to do what every judoka is doing when there's's not much judo around you, you can try to study the art carefully and then try to find a gap and exploit that. Yeah, and even my dojo, when I was young, we didn't have high-level competitors at the school. We had a lot of hobbyists, enthusiasts, people who were tough grapplers, but they weren't competing day in and day out on the international circuit. So I was the only one really coming up through those ranks.

Right, right. So you go travel and do a training camp. That's another thing that you can do. There's training camps all over the country. Right. Not all of them are good, but the ones like Jimmy Pedro does, very good. In January, they're doing a training camp in Florida. Actually,

it's coming up. By the time this goes up, it's probably not. It's already passed. I think late January, they're doing a four-day camp or something like that. Jimmy's going to be down there. All the best US guys are going to be down there. At one point, they used to make it mandatory

for people on the team to go to these things in order to get funding i see they used to have a lake placid winter camp every year we used to go to the training camp in montreal all the time in the winter we used to have like world championship uh camps so like if you live in a judo desert you can go to these things and i've been to like the world you know championships training camp you know up in wakefield massachusetts two weeks before the world championships in the summer you know whether i was competing or not competing uh let's go to train yeah yeah and there would be the people there like you know not a lot of them but blue belt jujitsu guy or this guy does judo but he he's only like a brown belt, but he's there. I've seen that.

It's pretty open, huh? I've seen that. It's pretty open, yeah. Yeah. You know, they put you up in a little bit of a hotel situation. Right. You know, you have morning practice, night practice. You kind of hang out during the day.

You can go to seminars too, I guess. Go to seminars. You have some seminars coming up i do have seminars coming up i have one in uh north dakota dakota yeah that's in april and i have one in las vegas in march so that's my pack i don't usually do seminars you know i used to do a lot of them but then i got you know tired of them and i used to do a lot of privates and then i got tired of them but you know during corona we didn't do any and then the inquiry started really rolling in and then this is a special one because he's also a patreon and he i've been having a lot of conversations with him through our discord so i was like you know what i will do it he's you know there's a minimum fee to like

get me out the door right right uh it's below it but you know he gets special treatment because you know i'm very grateful that he's a patreon he's contributing to the community so i'm gonna do my best to you know give you know my best out there yeah i'm gonna do my best to make sure that he has a good time and it's worth it for him and his people out in north dakota must be beautiful las vegas too i'll be in vegas that yeah i gotta say that one i'm looking a little bit more forward to maybe i'll play some blackjack or something yeah nice yeah but it's beautiful out there in north dakota yeah yeah so i'm in the game with that a little bit. So maybe I might consider doing one seminar a month,

like an away seminar a month. Yeah. Maybe, right? So you could reach out to me and then you could ask me for my pricing and all this stuff. Usually I split it with the gym. I split 50-50 with the gym so the gym can make some money. Yeah.

That's an option, bringing some big names like Shintaro Higashi to your local judo scene or seminar. There you go. That's the solution. That's leading up to this whole thing. Judo desert, fly me in. Fly me in.

That's right. And he'll, Shintaro will save you from the desert. Yeah. We'll do 50-50, right? And then there's like sort of a floor, a price floor, you know, because I don't want to go out there for, you know, $300 and then, you know, burn a weekend with my daughter. That's everything really right now. Yeah. I'm trying to spend as much time with my daughter as I can.

And I mean, I spent a lot of time with her, but still, you know, I want to make sure I don't, you know, daddy, where are you going? It's like, I got to go away for three days to teach judo for $300. It's like, I don't really want to. Yeah. I can't justify that. It just doesn't make sense. Yeah. Right. But it's a couple grand and it's like

you know what I'm going to fund my kids 529 and you know do the right thing and what a great father then it could be worth it

I try I try cool alright so here are some ideas for those of you who live in a

judo desert where there is no judo let us know if you have more suggestions please support us on Patreon if you can anything else we missed? no that's it man cool alright well thanks for listening

guys and stay tuned for the next episode