The Shintaro Higashi Show - Make Judo Easy | The Shintaro Higashi Show

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

In this solo episode, Shintaro Higashi delivers a passionate monologue on why Judo needs to be made easier and more accessible, especially for beginners. Drawing on personal experience and insights from both his dojo and national trends, he offers practical advice for reducing injuries, retaining new students, and helping Judo grow in the U.S.00:00 Why Judo Needs to Be Easier01:30 Early Randori Is a Mistake02:45 The Rare Beginner Who Pushes Through04:00 Redesigning the First Phase of Training05:00 Preventing Injuries Through Smarter Pairing06:00 Controlled Randori for Beginners07:00 Why BJJ Feels Safer for New Students07:45 Lowering the Barrier to Grow Judo🚨 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. Make Judo easy. Okay, first and foremost, it has to be accessible to most people if you want to grow. and I know a lot of you are like, oh my God, you know, it's going to be so watered down. It's not going to be great. But think about how hard judo is right now. You enter the dojo, you bow, you do some breakfalls.

You learn one take down, then you go live. Majority of the time, these guys get injured. And it was almost a running joke in my dojo growing up that 10 people will join per month. Two people will stay for the second month. And maybe one out of those 10 people will stay the third month, and then the cycle repeats. and then of course there's churn in every business therefore you lose people and then the business just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks

because it's so hard and then the number one reason why people get hurt is because it's just a dangerous thing and people are doing Rondory right away that is just not a sustainable thing and U.S. judo and judo in the United States are on the verge of a collapse the thing is contracting at such a fast rate

we all have to do something and I have the platform to be able to speak my mind and give some advice about this stuff. So here I am telling everyone we have to make judo easier. And for those people who are quick to criticize, oh, judo's supposed to be tough. It's not for everybody. I went through it. You look at somebody who's really, really successful in the sport, like Jimmy Pejo, who's a two-time Olympic bronze medalist. Even he says, hold off for beginners to do Rondori at the minimum of one or two years. Okay, two years I think a little bit too long, you know, but one year absolutely reasonable. Me personally, I think they should

not do Rondoy for the first three to six months at the very minimum. It has to be easy. We have to reduce the injury risk to keep these people in the sport long enough so that they have fun, they enjoy themselves. It has to be easier. They can't come to practice and get put through the grind and oh my God, it's so hard, it's so brutal, my fingers hurt, my getting thrown. They're just not going to last. There's too many options. It's so easy to quit something these days. You're just competing with too much. So first and foremost, we have to make judo easy. Just recently, I went down to South Carolina to do a judo seminar, and I was talking to one of the Marines who went through the boot camp and always a drill sergeant, and he told me

judo was so difficult, it took him six months to absolutely fall in love with it. He said he went in, learned some breakfalls, learned one or two throws, and gotten smashed. Every single time he went, driving to the dojo, it's like, why am I doing this? Getting taken down, slammed all the time. It's really not fun. Getting slammed and slammed and slammed over and over. It took him at least six months to say, you know what, this is actually pretty fun. I'm kind of getting good at it.

But he is an absolute exception because he went through 13 weeks of boot camp. I mean, he's a Marine, Joe Sergeant, all those things. That person is truly a standout individual that, but you know, how many people can you say that are going to be put through the ring that's going to stick around for? that long in order to love judo. Not that many. So I hereby say, make judo easy for everybody and make it fun. Start with breakfalls, of course. You have one or two things. Don't make it a huge thing. You know, you hear in Japan like, oh, do breakfalls for six months, etc., etc. I think just too much. You know, just a little bit of breakfalls, right? And it's like, oh, why would you not show

breakfalls? It's injury risk, this and that. But if you're not throwing and doing one door, you don't really need it as much. You know, so if you have a new person, you learn, you teach them a little bit about breakfalls, just in case they get taken down by accident. No one should ever get taken down in the first couple weeks. They learn a couple throws, and they try to master that mechanic, sort of in a cooperative setting, and that should be the first phase. And there should work on that first phase.

You should make it interesting. You have to see how they get incentivized in order to learn, and not everyone is the same way, you know? And I think first and foremost, if it's easy enough and easy, I'm talking about on the body. You know, not everyone wrestled Division I, and of course you have to differentiate from background to physical abilities and all this stuff. But first and foremost, man, you have to differentiate your instruction and make it overall easier and accessible. The biggest problem I feel, right, aside from like make it easy, not easy, all this stuff, is when you love, learn an outside trip on Osorogari, the time it takes for you to successfully hit that

on someone of a similar body size and body type who's resisting, that is extremely long time. And even if it gets accidentally taken down or if it accidentally succeeds, the risk of that person taking that throw, getting injured, goes up. In order to reduce that risk, because you don't want two white belts trying to take each other down, you let the newcomer go with a much higher, higher skilled opponent, therefore that person's never going to take that person down. And I've seen dojo's like

white belts. Learn this throw. Learn this thing. Go do it. And they try to kill each other, going for this thing. And someone almost always gets hurt. So how can we combat this? We make the overall class a little bit easier, more accessible.

The difficulty of taking someone down live, it's just too much. And here's the one thing that I do, okay? When the beginners dovandori, within a very short amount of time, they've started maybe like one or two months or so, I tell them all, listen, you're not trying to actively take this person out. This is false. It's almost fake.

These people are going to let you take them down sort of in a non-cooperative, semi-combative setting. That way you could work on your skills and the black belts or the brown belts or the green belts that are working out with you, they are not going to throw you. They will give you a little bit of resistance and you will take him down once or twice. That's it.

So you're already sort of putting it out there that it's going to be cooperative. They're going to take the breakfall for you. And then while they're gripping, they'll figure out how difficult it is, how difficult it is. They're going to try a couple new entries. And then overall, the experience is easier, in air quotes.

Therefore, it's more, you could do more of it. And the risk is reduced. And everything is semi-controlled. So this is sort of my thing. You have to make judo easier for the average person for the sport to grow. I mean, I'm not trying to say like Brazilian jiu-jitsu is easy. It's not by any means. But if a new person comes and learn how to pass guard,

the risk of them getting injured while trying to pass someone's guard is very, very low. And you could almost have two beginners try to pass each other's guard with minimal amount of injury risk, as opposed to like two white belts doing judo taking each other down with an outside trip. Really, really risky business. So that's what I mean by making judo easier. You have to make it sort of reduce the risk. And the goals of the actual live exercises has to be more manageable and accessible,

not this big pie in the sky like you're going to go take this person down in front of you with the move that you just learned when you don't know how to grip or don't know how to fight for position. So, make judo easier. That's my whole thing. That's my spiel for today. Thank you guys for listening. Have a great day.