Almost everyone expected the CMCO (partial lockdown) to be extended, perhaps for another two weeks. Turns out it's for a month. But that was the the surprising part. What was surprising were the initial reports that all indoor sporting activities were not allowed.

So, it would be back to the playground again, to do outdoor training. Not ideal at all but at least we could still train. I started making arrangements for that. Then, I started getting messages that indoor sports is allowed after all. A check with Forum Pudu confirmed that we could continue training at our dojo!

Everyone was relieved. Training outdoors is okay but training in the dojo is much better.

We've been doing indoors, contactless training for about a month now. So far it's been good. I had come up with a lot of creative ways to keep the training interesting. But I was a bit concerned. Can we continue to do the same thing for another month? Won't it become boring by then?

I didn't have a solution straight away but after I slept on it, when I woke up I suddenly had a Eureka moment. There two ways I can make the contactless training interesting.

Firstly, introduce solo newaza drills. It's not easy doing newaza solo but with a little creativity it can be done.

Secondly, instead of having the players just do footwork or shadow uchikomi for basic techniques, I will start having them do more advanced variations of those techniques. For example there is basic ippon-seoi-nage, which we are all familiar with. There are also many contest variations of that technique. Getting the players to work on different variations will introduce some variety to their training program. It will also be more challenging, which is what they need, to keep it interesting.

With these two new concepts (newaza, advanced variations), I should be able to keep the sessions interesting for the rest of the month. After that, hopefully, we will be able to do regular judo again.