If your sport is a full-contact activity and there's a government ruling requiring social-distancing during exercise, it could very easily be the death knell for your club.

Judo without contact really isn't judo.

So, if you want to keep your club going, you have to be innovative and come up with an interesting program that will keep your members engaged and interested in coming for training.

For sure there will always be some members who don't want to come for training during such times. Some might be afraid of contracting the virus. Others might feel that judo training without contact is not worth coming for. But there will those who are open to training and it is incumbent upon the coach to come up with a really interesting and innovative program.

The typical thing clubs do when required to train with social distancing are the usual stuff: HIIT, training with uchikomi bands, tandoku renshu (shadow uchikomi). That's all pretty standard fare. And pretty boring.

I wanted to offer something better for my players. So, I put a lot of thought, did a lot of research and spent a lot of time planning the classes. I don't want to just show up and ask them to do the same old things over and over again.

It's important to have some structure to the classes so for each one, I try to have a little warm up (usually a fun, challenging game), then some gripping drills, followed by technical training and ending with physical conditioning drills.

For each of these, I try as much as possible to incorporate either the judo belt or judogi. We also make use of other accessories like Penalty Boxes, cones and sticks.

It's not very easy to do judo-related drills without gripping your training partner but it's possible. There's lots of information and ideas out there on the Internet. If you do some Googling and browsing on YouTube, you can find lots of ideas.

Many of the ideas might not be suitable but if you go through enough material you will find some really novel and interesting ideas. If the ideas are really ideal, you can just adopt them wholesale. But if they are not quite suitable but interesting, perhaps you can take the basic idea and modify it to suit your players.

It takes a lot of effort and time to do all these things. But when you have lots of good ideas and you plan your classes very well, it will make a difference and your players will want to come for training.