Last night I had the pleasure of catching Dave, a brown belt (as opposed to Dave-the-blue-belt, or Dave-of-Dave-and-Alice) with kata grumua, albeit a half-arsed execution that had him rolling across my back as much as my shoulders. This made me very pleased with myself, not least because I was feinting a leg grab to try and set it up. I’m not sure Dave was actually falling for it, but it worked. Repeatedly getting thrown in tomoe nage or variants thereof while trying to make it work was a little less flash; I need to be able to drop down quicker, and also work out a useful counter for when the kata guruma doesn’t come off.
We also did some [kata](http://judoinfo.com/kata.htm work before hand; kata has become Alan’s main focus for his own competition these days, and I think he’s trying to build on our enthusiasm for Jaap’s class to drill us in the formal side of things more. I’m pretty keen on this, actually; while randori is the most playful and enjoyable part of judo for me, having some of the concepts of kata drilled into me has fed into the quality of my general judo already.
Take a question we were asked last week: why do three steps during most naga-no-kata exercises? Because it reinforces the three points of each throw: coming together with uke’s attack tori’s preparation (tsukuri), kuzushi, and then the execution of the throw itself (kake).
Of the kata we practiced, uke goshi is easily the weakest for me: I usually ended up with poor grips and more or less hurling my uke around the hip, rather than pinging them off it. My uke otoshi was only so-so (and rubbish compared to some of the beautiful executions the dan grades were able to show), but I’m getting fairly comfortable with seoi nage.