The Shintaro Higashi Show - London: What I Learned | The Shintaro Higashi Show

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

Shintaro is back from London and shares key takeaways from his recent judo seminar at Gracie Barra Royal Tunbridge Wells in England. In this solo episode, he reflects on the success of curriculum-based martial arts systems, the potential for judo scalability, and how Judoka can learn from the business models of BJJ and Taekwondo schools.Whether you're a judo coach, BJJ instructor, or martial arts entrepreneur, this episode is packed with valuable insights on dojo growth, curriculum development, and how to create a more accessible, scalable training experience.🚨 LIMITED-TIME OFFER: 40% OFF 🚨The All-in-One Instructional Bundle just got even better.Every major instructional. One complete system. Now at our biggest discount yet.Grab yours now at 40% off : https://higashibrand.com/products/all-instructionalsThis won’t last. Build your game today.🔥 Get 20% OFF FUJI Gear! 🔥Looking to level up your judo training with the best gear? FUJI Sports has you covered. Use my exclusive link to grab 20% OFF high-quality gis, belts, bags, and more.👉 https://www.fujisports.com/JUDOSHINTARO 👈No code needed – just click and save!Links:🇯🇵 Kokushi Budo Institute (The Dojo) Class Schedule in New York, NY 🗽: https://www.kokushibudo.com/schedule🇯🇵 Higashi Brand Merch & Instructionals: https://www.higashibrand.com📚 Shintari Higashi x BJJ Fanatics Judo Courses & Instructionals Collection: https://bjjfanatics.com/collections/shintaro-higashi/

The Shintaro Higashi show is sponsored by Judo TV, your premier destination for live and on-demand judo coverage. Never miss a throat. Higashi brand. Train hard, live strong, wear Higashi brand. Hakuin AI. Hakuin AI helps you measure, predict, and solve customer churn. Visit Hakuin AI and start your free churn on it today. All right, guys, I'm back from London.

It was an amazing experience. I did a judo seminar at Gracie Baja Royal Tumberge Wells. In England, it was absolutely amazing. If you guys are in London, please hit me up. I would love to do a seminar over there. London was absolutely gorgeous. I'm from New York, so it's like New York, London. I felt at home over there.

Absolutely underestimated how much I would love it. Gorgeous place. Here are some of my takeaways from my trip. First and foremost, thank you to Alex and Daniel for having me over there at Gracie Baja Tumberge Wells. The Gracie Baja system is absolutely amazing. they have 1,200 locations across the globe. And I think one of the reasons why they're so successful is their curriculum.

They have an airtight curriculum, Gracie Baja 1, Gracie Baja 2. They have a 16-week rotating program. And, you know, that's one thing that a lot of us judoka should take from that. And, you know, they're all skill-based, right? Like passing guard is like this week's theme. Next week is like the back attack stuff. And they're positional as opposed to like a judo curriculum that's like Tayo, Osoto, It's a sigh.

You know, and what are you going to do with these individual techniques that exist in isolation? You can't really do much with that, right? So the curriculum stuff, the skill-based curriculum, I absolutely loved it. And that's the way to really scale the dojo, I think. You know, and right now, from where I am, there's a taquado gym right down the street from me, and my friend owns it. And at his peak, he had 550 students. Yeah, that's right.

Right, 550 students. And then you might be thinking to yourself like, oh, there must be like a 10,000 square foot facility. No, it's like 2,500 square feet. So in terms of revenue per square foot, it's absolutely like, what a, what an amazing thing. Like, seriously, that blows your mind a little bit, right? And obviously you can't have the same number of guys doing judo at once.

You know, you're doing Taekwondo, so it's a little bit more space efficient. But yeah, what can you learn from that, really? You know, the curriculum? them, really great. You know, they have white belts do this, yellow belts do that. You know, they call it Pumse, right, in Taekwondo. And then you get to unlock these skills. It's like every video game lever, you know, like you play Call Duty.

It's like level one. Bang, bang, bang. You get this many kills. You get this many assists. You go to level two and it unlocks these weapons and then unlocks those weapons. And then the time in between the levels in the beginning are very, very short. So it kind of accelerates you through. and then you sort of gamify the thing

and then you know it makes it a much more fun thing you know learning thayo what is Osoto getting grilled on like what is technique is that and then do this test

I don't think that's a very good way to scale the thing I don't think that should be part of the curriculum you know and eventually I'm going to do my own curriculum I sort of have my own curriculum but it's not perfect yet

it's not ready for public consumption but yes if you want to work with me on it I'm all yours. I love it. So, you know, reach out to me definitely. But yes, that was my sort of first takeaway, how amazing it was, 1,200 gyms globally doing the same curriculum. And I got to look at the curriculum. And then the 16 week rotating program, I love that. So what a beautiful thing. And, you know, judo guys should learn from these mega gyms, mega businesses, mega whatever it is. If they have the success, we should learn from it. And then Gracie Baja has a system.

The university is another one by Hanna, and the Takondo guys and the United Takondo Federation and all this stuff have curriculums that all the dojos can follow. And this sort of scalability situation is an absolutely amazing thing. And, you know, people will criticize, right, and say, oh, you don't credit the curriculum, waters it down, whatever it is. But it makes judo more accessible to more people. And then if you could triple the number of people doing it, if anyone could come into the gym and it's sticky. enough just following the curriculum any person even like a purple belt or brown belt can run this program and then every gym has two or three hundred members and we have a thousand more gyms across the country now we're just doing so much better in terms of uh right judo as a whole

as a as a group you know so i really love that and you know the problem with some of these mega judo gyms, it's very hard to replicate a me or a colton or Aaron Cohen who have these gyms that have over 200 members because a lot of it is based on, you know, us. You know, it's sort of a, I don't want to say cult of personality, but it's like sort of this individual, special thing that you cannot scale. For instance, when I teach, I teach sort of something new. A lot of the platform that I sort of teach is for me to work new stuff out. And it's this perpetual cycle of, like, I want to, like, I give you an example, Tomonage, I wasn't very good at it back in the day. I used it to bail out.

It was almost like I was pulling guard out of bad situations by Tomonage, all right? And I would very rarely score off of it, but I did it. Therefore, I wasn't very good at it. I wanted to teach Tomonage, therefore I needed to learn Tomonage. So I would try to learn Tomonage. I would study Tomonage, watch videos, and I would try to do it. And then if it worked, I would try to teach some of it. feedback loop, try it, learn it, teach it, try it, teach it, learn it, try it. And then there was

sort of this feedback loop. Eventually, I was like, okay, sleeve side tumunage, lapel side tumonage, yoga tumonage, straight back tumonage, pump faking it, combining those things with Asiwaza, little by little, I became very good at the point where any average blackboard I could throw with Tomonage, right, any one of my tumuneges. So, yeah, that was kind of the thing. and the teaching platform that I have was a great motivated for that and then I would work on it I would show it people can't do it

therefore I'm not doing a good job teaching it and then it was this sort of feedback loop and now I'm really good at teacher Tamanagi you know so that's the kind of stuff that I really love about the way I teach the dojo the way I teach judo but that doesn't really scale right so that was my takeaway really

from that whole experience aside from the fact that they do a really, really good job and they're scaling up, even the owners of the dojo that I went to in London, they're going to open up two more. So there's going to be three in that region of the similar

Gracie Baja type. What an amazing thing. Congratulations to you guys. I hope you guys keep that thing rolling. But yes, if you are a jiu-jitsu school, you know, you don't have to be a Gracie Baja affiliate, but you're more than welcome to reach out to me to do a seminar.

I will show you guys stuff that works. I have experience in judo, BJJ wrestling, so the thing that kind of works all together in a synergistic way. Because if you do judo, like traditional stand-up judo, a lot of the stuff can be ineffective

in a sort of a very defensive posture. I need to understand the rule sets of Brazilian jiu-jitsu in order to teach it, you know, because some things that may happen, that may not happen in judo because of the rules and you have to adapt for that, right?

So if you guys are interested, Shantarahagashi.com, like I said, I would love to go to Europe again. It was wonderful experience. Please hit me up. Shantarahagashi.com for the seminars. And, yeah, if you want to learn how to do seminars

and get into that seminar game, you could also reach out to me. And, you know, I'm more than happy to help you set up these things. Yeah, you know, and kind of collaborate with you guys. You know, I want to do more collaborative stuff I found out. And I just recently took a call. Not all, I can't always take these calls.

But like, I recently reached out, somebody reached out and say, hey, can you give me some tips about YouTube and, you know, I'm more than happy to share some of my knowledge. And we also have this new thing that I'm doing, my, the marketing company that I work with, that I've hired, they're taking on new clients. And, you know, they've been vetted by me. They do my video. They do my social media. They do my website.

They do literally everything. So you could definitely hit me up to learn about that as well. Thank you so much.