An expertise acceleration experiment in Judo
commoncog.com
commoncog.com
I've been a judoka for several years; I also started late, in my 30s. I train 4-5 times a week for 2+ hours a day at one of the best dojos in my country, and my country regularly medals in international events - there's no lack of high-level talent.
I've sparred with literal Olympians, and receive instruction from one of the most highly ranked and respected judoka in the world who has produced Olympic medal winning athletes, in addition to our other instructor who was a top 9 finisher in the Olympics, World Cup winner, and multi-year Pan Am champion.
And you know what I've found out after all that? Competitive judo is fucking hard. It will brutalize your mind and body in ways you never thought possible.
And just when you think you're getting anywhere, you'll have a match with someone at a national/international level, and you feel like you're a day-one white belt getting ragdolled by someone having fun and going at 40% of their competition-level intensity.
You reminded me of a nice memory. I never trained competitively, nor very far, but was fortunate to see some people with amazing ability.
As a young teen learning Aikido, one time, our great sensei (at a local public school auditorium that was converted to a dojo in the evening) had a very high-ranking person from Japan visit. The visitor was middle-aged and jovial, and his family was also there.
At one point, the visiting sensei was demonstrating throws in the middle of the mats, and would indicate a student who was to attack. Then he'd do some subtle, conservation-of-movement whole body thing, and the student would go flying.
I received the technique myself, and the students weren't just being polite or trying to show good rolls/breakfalls -- the technique was surprisingly powerful, and you were definitely getting thrown, whether you wanted to or not. But done gently enough that you wouldn't get hurt. He would smile and maybe give a good-natured little chuckle each time.
Then you roll with a legit seasoned black belt, and realize you are even worse than you thought.
And it's not because of the team, or the gear, or someone cheating or lag in a videogame. It's just him being better.
And you either let that beat you up, or you look forward to how high the scale goes, and keep on growing
That's pretty much the case with all sports. Try to go skiing for the first time, and compare yourself with a champion. Fighting sports are similar, but maybe we wrongly assume there's something innate with fighting. In the end, it's all technique! at least in a sport context.
One funny thing in fighting sports, is that sometimes there are big thug-looking guys joining the class, they look intimidating and dangerous, and you realize they're just as harmless as any other beginner!
Obviously me, and any other black belt, has sparred with white belts and it's like a club tennis pro playing tennis with someone coming in for the first time ever to play tennis. The gulf between beginners and pros is massive.
That being said, I always had the imposter syndrome, and always felt like I was the exacts same level as when I was a white belt.
And yes, if you have great technique, you're going to wipe the floor with someone who is a lot bigger than you are.
He sometimes brought black belts from his Dojo to the University class, and I loved playing with them. I got so many good learning opportunities. Even if that did mean that a 300lb black belt threw me to the ground harder than I've ever hit the mat, and then he proceeded to fall on top of me. The problem was that my natural defenses were good enough to stop his first attack attempt, but he could plan multiple attacks in sequence, and rip right from one failed attack into the next one while I was still piled up on his back. But doing so meant he had less reserve to brace over the fallen opponent, as he would normally have done.
In the end, I had a minor injury to my neck, and a separate older minor injury to my hand. And I also attended one tournament at his local Dojo, which meant that I also encountered my professors Sensei, who was a 5th degree black belt. He was also the meanest and nastiest prick I ever met, and after one encounter with that asshole, I was never going back.
Thus ended my year playing Judo.
Most of the match was him trying to throw me, and my natural defenses being good enough that he couldn't quite manage it. And then I'd try to throw him and his trained defenses were much better. And so we would kind of drag each other down onto the mat, and that latter would continue -- his trained attacks weren't quite good enough to get through my natural defenses, and my attacks were not remotely close to good enough to get through his trained defenses.
Ultimately, his training won out, because he knew of more ground attacks than I did, and he managed to get me into situations I couldn't get out of. And he did that three times in a row.
After the match, my teacher told me if I had not attempted to attack but had instead gone more defensive, I probably could have changed tack and easily walked him out of the ring, which would have automatically caused him to lose. But then we agreed that wouldn't have been a very sporting win.
Nevertheless, I was technically the winner of the heavyweight adult class in that tournament, simply by showing up. But it was fun doing a demo match with this brown belt, even though it didn't impact who won which weight class.
Unfortunately, that was the only fun thing that happened at that Dojo.
I wanted to post specifically because mentioning the Granby roll, it's one of those memories that stick out to me. I went to a camp specifically focused on it, I think in Pennsylvania, with someone who was pretty well known but I can't remember who it was. There I learned how to do a standing granby.
Many years later, in recent history, I demonstrated a side flip, all thanks to that camp.
Interesting Cedric seems to have started as a teenager, and wants to get back to it because of a regret of not doing well in nationals. This is similar to a regret I have in a tournament that I know I could have done better in.
But there's really no wrestling as an adult.
There's a lot of feelings I have wrt the article, and similarities to programming, and learning. But I'll save the wall of text.
I then switched to Muay Thai which seems like a more violent sport, but it's much easier to control the intensity, as long as you're in phase with your sparring partners.
I trained months in Thailand, and the instructors (pros or ex-pros) were always sparring ultra light as they didn't want to get injured before their matches, and also because it's a better way to improve. In the West, some (rare) guys tend to have a bigger ego and may actually get some pride to harm beginners in sparring which is a bit ridiculous. A healthy gym will typically discourage such behaviors.
Coming back to my initial point, I feel it's easier to spar lightly in boxing than in judo.
I feel like you're being a little hyperbolic. The founder of HackerNews says that he trains less than half of what this guy does, so I don't see why this guy has reason for failure any more than anyone else.
Winning is an entirely different case (because resisting getting thrown too much results in points loss), but if you just want to avoid falling, just be in your upper end of your weight class, don't be short, and pay attention to footwork. You won't win any competitions this way but you won't get thrown easily during tachi-waza either.
You must be The Chosen One™ if all you need to do to avoid being thrown by an opponent who is more skilled than you are is "pay attention to footwork".
> just be in your upper end of your weight class
Nearly every single competitive athlete is at the upper end of their weight class. If you compete in -81kg, you're training/walking around at more or less 85kg, and cutting weight for competition. No one is showing up to the -81kg category weighing 75kg.
> don't be short
At the top level, weight classes are, effectively, height classes in disguise.
There's some variation, but the distribution of heights for a particular weight class doesn't have a very large standard deviation, especially as athletes get a little older and have packed on as much muscle as they physically can onto their frame.
This is just not true. Lots of people gain weight in working out or training that they meet the low end and it’s stigmatized to lose a few pounds so you can be at the top of a lower weight class.
I think it is quite sad that judo and taekwondo have become olympic sports. The emphasis on winning and rules has taken away far more than it has given (IMHO). Also, even as a martial arts fan, I think both are really boring to watch. Judo is mostly 2 guys trying not to move. Taekwondo is mostly 2 guys alternately bouncing up and down and hugging each other. How do you make a sport where people are trying to kick each other in the head boring? The olympics managed it.
This is why Judo (like most combat sports) is weight-class sport. That being said, technique can compensate weight difference to some extent.
> Judo is mostly 2 guys trying not to move
That's what happened when these guys have almost identical level. If not, one is going to move toward the tatami very fast.
I am not judoka, but I really enjoy watching judo matches. It looks to me like long positional game with the goal to achieve dominant position and catch sub-second opportunity window to perform explosive winning movement.
Also, I like that techniques are not brute force, but with the goal to put opponent off the balance, or find some angle for attack.
Why let them get a grip? It's strategy. Bigger means higher center of gravity, which is easier to throw.
> The emphasis on winning and rules has taken away far more than it has given (IMHO).
I completely agree. The IJF has ruined the sport of competitive judo. They would rather make a new rule about something being illegal than evolve the sport.
Just this stuck out, this was one of the worst parts of high school wrestling, just two people, one on one more or less fighting. At least in football you can blame it on the team all together.
personally at least, i grew up playing sports with friends and losing was ok and happened, sure they were competitive though and maybe the occasional sore loser. high school sports were different for sure. probably to intense for the average kid.
Even the parts that hurt are memorable in a good way. I remember someone quite expert performing a move that made my body feel like it was about to split into 4 pieces, but the pain was not that bad and only lasted for a moment (because they knew when to stop).
It is amazing (and humbling) to experience first hand what a skilled fighter can do to you in a safe context.
Now I train gymnastics and “drills” is basically the name of the game. I prefer the drills, gives a clear feeling of progression that I like.
You can get really good at kata by, well, doing kata, but that doesn't mean you're going to be able to employ your knife-hand block when someone's trying to punch you in the face. That drill lacks an important aspect of the actual practice.
On the other hand, if you can pull off an armbar against a guy that's really good at defending armbars, you can almost certainly pull one on a drunk guy in the Kroger's parking lot.
Gymnastics doesn't have that dynamic variable. The drill and the skill are largely the same, or the drill is at least a component of a larger skill. There's huge transfer between the two.
Now, this experiment! I'm excited to learn more. I want to know more about the mental strength work and about constructing drills for softer skills.
I’ve heard folks do mob programming on simple problems (eg “implement fizzbuzz in a few different paradigms”). Perhaps also a little time spent on advent of code would be good too? Everybody on the team does Day X and then we discuss and compare solutions?
Edit to add: thinking about drills - what if we merged interviews and team drills, spent some time setting up a realistic work scenario as a drill, and added an interviewee? That way, during an interview the team gets to drill, say, reviewing and debugging a feature rollout. The interviewee gets to actually spend 2-4h in a realistic work simulation instead of solving LeetCode problems.
Atomic drills as performed for sports allow you to use System 2 (slow, deliberate, logical) to train System 1 (fast, reactive, emotional). But when programming you are almost always going to be in System 2. Programming does not deal with instantaneous reactions in the same way sports does. Sure, you might react to a bug report (dammit, Johnson, I told you async was a bad idea for this!) but its not like sports, where by the time you consciously process input your physical reaction should have already occurred. To take the example from the Judo article, if you have formed the thought of "that guy looks about to throw me!" you are probably already on the ground.
There may be very time limited, competitive programming events where you need to think so fast that atomic drills can come into play. I do not know of any but they could exist.
But basically, when programming, at least on a professional basis, you are not relying on physical reactions to get the job done. And atomic drills are about training physical reactions.
There is definitely value, lots of it, to the "realistic work scenarios" you describe, it is just not the same as figuring out the bare fundamentals of a sport and practicing until they are entirely subconscious.
a lot of success as a leader is creating such fast feedback loops for a team
Training the subconscious to do (automatically know what to do next, want to do it, get on it) is the self-management goal.
Do something measurable, and arrange things to experience some meaningful response to any milestone.
I may be doing this when I design and code in different rooms of my house. Obviously speed isn't the main point of either task. But my subconscious definitely registers "I completed an actionable part of the design" as I move from living room to my study to code. And vice versa.
Helps that this mini-milestone context-switching "feedback" is a natural part of doing the work. Part of the flow.
Steven Brust, in his books, has a recurring advice "do not think about what you can do; think about what needs to be done, and do it"