What is Seoi Nage?

In Judo, ippon seoi nage is a very dramatic throw. As in: someone literally goes flying over your shoulder like the arm of a trebuchet. There are several variants of this throw, but when jiu jitsu people do it - because of their crouched posture - they typically like to execute the knee drop version of it. That is exactly what I wound up doing one wednesday night during randori when I was partnered up with one of the brown belts. He’s younger than me, about the same height, and just a tiny bit heavier. This particular guy is very cagey, and when I train with him, I have to keep an eye out for his foot sweeps.

Getting grips

My partner and I spent the first minute or so just trying to get grips on eachother. Most people who don’t train judo or jiu jitsu think this is pointless and boring. I can understand why, it just looks like you’re trying to grab somebody. But there’s a great deal of skill to getting useful grips. We wound up having neutral grips - where we both had a sleeve and lapel. When this happens, I try to work my favored setup: osoto gari, then into either sasae or uchi mata. But my partner was stiff arming me to prevent me from really getting a good penetrating step. As I tried dealing with the stiff arm, I realized I could maybe elevate his arms every now and then by flaring my arm out to the side - as though I was strictly interested in getting around his stiff arm. My real motive was to bring his right elbow up so that I could wedge my right forearm in there. I wound up feinting in this way about three times within a minute or so - just to tease it out and see if he’d react in the same way each time.

“Selling” the throw

In general, when you go into a throwing sequence where a secondary throw is attempted off of a failed first throw attempt, you MUST convincingly execute the first throw as if there were no follow-up throw behind it. I did that on wednesday. With my left hand grip on my partner’s right sleeve, I shucked my left arm further out to my left and also up. I did this to “break” my partner’s stiff arm so that it would look like another attempt at osoto gari. When his right arm and elbow came up, I snapped right into place, balled up underneath him, dropped to the floor, and gave a final push to slingshot my partner right over my head. Then, still holding on to my grips, I popped up into a tripod, started caging his torso in with my forearms, and put some good downward pressure on his chest with my head and shoulder. I immediately asked him…

“Was that legit”

To which he replied…

“That was 100% legit.”