Part 3 revealed Cal’s frustrations with Welsh Judo bureaucracy.
Five-hour drives. Useless governing bodies. Insurance companies calling the shots.
The modern grading process?
“Farcical.”
And katas?
Just Kano’s way of keeping bored students busy while others did the real work.
Now in our final round, Cal shows us the magic that happens when students learn through play.
This post is part 4 of 4.
PART 1
Cultural Difficulties in Introducing the Ecological Approach
Why bother trying to spread the Ecological Approach?
Tensegrity & Unity of Action
PART 2
How did people find Cal Jones?
Lesson Learned in Applying the Constraints-Led Approach
The Mysticism of Names
PART 3
Regulatory Difficulties for Rogue Gyms
Improving the Belt System
Where do Katas come from?
PART 4
Emergent Skills
Games for Turn Throws
The Role of Memory
Emergent Skills
With that student, what surprises you most? What do they come up with?
Everything.
The thing that always gets me is when they start doing stuff with names. Things that exist as techniques, completely organically. That’s always wild to me.
These things are just emergent movements.
You know it intuitively. Because for somebody to do it, they must have once made it up. But the fact that it will happen. Over and over again, if we forgot everything. All the moves of grappling.
If everybody had their minds wiped, and they went back and started play-fighting, they’d come up with the same shit.
There’s only so many ways you can do it.
I love that. You have a complete novice that you’ve brought on, and they do a drop fireman’s carry. And you go, “Where did you see that?”
“See what? What did we do?”
“Well, you just did a drop Kata-guruma.”
“Oh, I just grabbed his leg and it felt natural.”
“You see that old guy there, that’s sort of limping around? He’s been trying to do that for thirty years. He can’t do it. You’ve just come along and grabbed a leg and accidentally done it.”
These moments, I think, are joyous.
On a more nebulous level, you end up with far more creative players. They’re not limited by spider diagrams in their head. Where they’re trying to remember what the correct sequence of events is.
They’re more in-tune to what’s happening.
You know, somebody puts a hand down. They grab at that hand, and they’re trying to sweep or armbar. They’re testing it. They’re looking for haptic feedback.
They’re just well-tuned to the performance environment.
It’s so much more fun to watch.
I might be biased, but I’d rather watch my guys, then. The people down the road that I know.
Oh, I see. We’re going to be doing that now, are we?
Games for Turn Throws
What do you use for turn throws? What situation do you put people in that they do turn throws?
O-Goshis, Koshi Gurumas, that sort of thing?
Little games.
One of the ones I do is just, ‘can you get your back to touch their chest’.
At any point, if I can get my back to touch your chest, I get a point. That’s a really useful way of getting them into position. They start to turn away from their opponent and chip those distances down.
And then you just progress it.
Can I get your chest to touch my back? Can I get your feet off the floor? Once I’ve got your feet off the floor, can I get you to land on the ground?
So it becomes a series of tasks that become more and more representative as you progress in it.
The fun thing is, I know the black belts are going to be way better at getting their back to touch the opponent than the white belts. If it is the case that the better players are consistently better at the tasks, it’s probably helping.
There’s probably something useful, there.
If I did it as a practice task and everyone was shit at it- the black belts were useless too, then I might have to think: is this going to be transferring? Because it’s backwards compatible, a bit.
I do that quite a lot for all the hip techniques.
Well, Seoi Nage isn’t classified as a hip technique, but it should be in my opinion. There you go. Anything where you’re standing in front of them, turning, bending, and picking them up to rotate the move.
Really useful game for that.
If it’s something more like a Tai Otoshi, where your foot is on the floor, I’ll just have ‘can you use the back of your leg to block the front of their leg’. I don’t specify if it’s the near leg or the far leg, because if you block in the near leg then it builds into Uchi Mata stuff, or a thing the Americans call ‘The Chop’.
It’s not a scoring thing, but it’s a really useful way of engaging into Ne-waza.
That’s worked brilliantly.
I’ve had some massive success. Some really good Tai Otoshi players, purely from ‘can you use the back of your leg to block the front of their leg’. It’s such an intuitive thing.
That builds into Harai Goshis, Uchi Matas, O-Gurumas, and Ashi Gurumas. You’re doing the exact same thing. You’re just not putting your foot on the floor. If my leg is up and across your thigh, it’s an O-Guruma. If my leg is up and across your knee-line, it would be an Ashi Guruma.
You’re basically taking a cluster of every forward-facing throw in Judo, and putting it as one of, probably three different entries. Yeah…there’s a few more. But it’s ‘can you turn and get your back in’, ‘can you turn and block with your leg’, and ‘can you turn and get your leg on the inside’.
An overwhelming majority of named throws come from that.
What do you think someone was trying to do when they came up with turn throws? I’m not sure if it’s just particularly unintuitive for me or something like that. But it seems like such a weird thing to be forced to do one day. Whoever first started doing these, what situation do you think they were in?
It would probably be, you’re moving away from someone, right?
If someone was shutting you down, and you’ve gone, “Ah!” and turned, grabbed, and managed to flip them over, maybe that was the starting point. And they’ve built from that.
But you’re right. It’s fairly rare that you’d decide, ‘well, I know, I’m going to turn away from you’. All of my weapons are now going to face…that way. You wouldn’t.
But again, it’s common across all cultures. There’s a whole lot of people that have stumbled onto it.
I definitely see Senegalese and Mongolian wrestlers doing this stuff. I guess when someone’s pushing against you hard enough?
Yeah, I guess that’s that, isn’t it? If we’re here, and we’re under tension with each other, and I’m moving backwards. I want to steal that. Turning is one of the only ways. I could block your knees, but we do that as well.
You’ve ended up bound up with each other. Locked into position, and that person is stronger. I can’t feel them that way, so I’m going to have to try and move this way.
And turning is a good way of doing that.
The Role of Memory
What is something you wish someone had asked you that they haven’t yet?
I can tell you what I don’t enjoy them asking. Anything to do with memory [in the ecological approach]. That’s the bane of my life at the minute. You could just say, ‘I don’t have a good answer’, but it kind of kills it. So you offer a breadcrumb bit that is a conceptualization. And it just feels so hollow, when you have an answer you’re not happy with.
It’s so difficult to understand it for me at the minute.
Like, the processes behind it, because it’s definitely not a retrieval thing. We’re definitely not going through the filofax and picking out the relevant file and pressing play on it. It’s just a truism to say that we have things stored in our head.
There’s neurons, there’s architecture in there that’s changing based on me interacting with my environment. But it’s not this recall, it’s not this processing thing that’s going on. I am just directly attuning to the stuff around me, right?
It seems that people can completely totally accept it so frequently. But the second you start talking about ‘when John shouts, “4492 hut hut hut”, he wants me to run a slant route’. So that’s me remembering the play. That’s me processing that information and doing something on the back of it. I don’t think that’s what’s happening.
Sounds really hollow, when you can’t give a really good, precise answer to what is actually happening.
So yeah, that’s the one I dislike the most, because I don’t have a great answer to that.
When a door has a handle that’s not a knob- the kind that you pull. A door that triggers the pull response, but it won’t open unless you push it. Something like that?
Yeah, I hate those doors so much.
In rugby, you’ll have calls for lineouts. The ball will be thrown in. There’s two sets of teams, and they jump to take the ball. The person throwing the ball in will give a call to indicate to their team if they’re throwing to the front, middle, or back.
The claim is that the call is a pre-planned move.
There’s a shared mental model. We ‘press play’, and run through this action.
But if I call the thing that means I’m throwing it to the back, and just before I release the ball, I fall over? Well, they don’t still jump. They’re not ‘pressing play’ on that thing.
They’re attuning to the information.
They’re still looking for the ball.
If the ball went really short and it was going nowhere near the back, they wouldn’t bother jumping. The people that are in front of the ball would catch it. They wouldn’t go, “No, no, no, this is going to the back.”
They’re looking at the ball and picking up on information.
Making decisions based on that.
The call is directing their attention. It’s supplying an intention and where to place their attention. Rather than ‘pressing play’ on the motor program that corresponds to the call that’s played.
If I said, “I’m going to punch you in the face”, you would probably defend yourself by raising your guard.
But if I just tried to smack you as hard as I could in the stomach, you’d bring your guard down. You wouldn’t just stand here and go, “Oh, he said he’s going to hit me in the face.”
This is just directing you, as a ‘probably start here’.
But it’s still this direct perception thing that’s going on.
I think that kind of thing is what’s happening with memory.
So the memory is some sort of pointer.
It kind of acts as a heuristic, honestly. It just acts as guidelines. It’s ‘this is the path that has been previously trod’. But again, I hate memory.
That’s why I drink.
Get rid of yours.
It works alright.