The last and final Improve Your Club Seminar was conducted by 8th Dan, Mr. Hiroshi Katanishi. Mr. Katanishi has a vast experience in developing both, players and coaches, since arriving in Europe after graduating from Terni University (Japan). During his time here in Europe, he has coached the French National Judo Team and has been Technical Advisor for the Swiss National Team. In addition, whilst being a regular on the renowned Italian camp ‘Tre Torre’, Mr. Katanishi is also one of the busiest experts representing the European Judo Union as the leader of the ‘Improve Your Club’ programme. This project is aimed at coaches improving the technical excellence of 8-12 year old judoka.
Today, his session focused on acceleration off the feet and action-reaction in judo. After a rather amusing session, we took the opportunity to discuss his chosen topics in details. In addition, Mr. Katanishi also spoke about his first impressions of the Judo Festival.
“In judo, there are two possibilities to throw somebody. One is taking advantage over the opponent, or else, take advantage of their reaction. When you take advantage of your opponent, you usually do that by applying Kaeshi-waza (counter attack) and when you take advantage of someone’s reaction, that is called the Ranreku-waza (combination). It is important for all judoka to learn different type of action-reaction. There are loads of different way to do Tandoku Renshu (shadow uchikomi), which helps your body to learn basic but very important coordination skills as well as action-reaction, which ideally should be part of your muscle memory.”
“Overall, I am not satisfied, but this is purely because I don’t speak English, neither Croatian. When I am teaching or delivering a session, I like to see the initial reaction of my students, however, I did not have the chance to feel or see that today as even with excellent translation, it is very different. Although, the spontaneous moment was missing today, I still saw passion and high level of concentration on the mat.”
“I think the idea of this Judo Festival is great, there is a really good atmosphere here. It is really like a judo family gathering. There are people here from different ages, groups and specifications but we all have one thing in common: we are all connected by Judo.”