On Saturday 22nd July I attended the Craig Fallon Cup cup and awards do back up in the midlands. Big well done to organisers Gav and Jag for creating and leading both elements of the enjoyable day.  For anyone unaware who Craig Fallon was; Craig was one of Great Britain’s finest ever Judo players, with key career highlights being World Champion in 2005 (one of only 3 British males to do so in the history of the sport), European Champion in 2006 and two times Olympian, competing at both the 2004 and 2008 Games. Craig very sadly took his own life in 2019.  I was lucky to have known Cr ..read more

Being too tight to upgrade my phone because of storage issues, at times of my day where I would usually listen to an audiobook, I’ve had to get on the TED talks again as I’ve no apps left to delete to try and make room for a new book! I was in between coaching sessions a few weeks back when, having YouTube shuffle TED speakers at me, my interest was piqued by the title to Josh Kaufman’s presentation; The First Twenty Hours- How to Learn Anything. A reader doesn’t have to delve too deeply into sports or skill acquisition literature to come across the 10,000 hour theory, the idea that it takes ..read more

At the time of writing I have enjoyed the past week containing the 2022 World Judo Championships, which took place in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Like a lot of the British Judo community I’d have liked to have been able to support more British males at the Worlds. A consistent message echoed  is that, “the future is being prepared for,” again, looking at this years Junior World Championships and seeing only two male GB participants, that leads to further confusion and deflation. I decided I would retire from competitive Judo at the end of 2021. Something I’ve become aware of in my own day to d ..read more

“What will I do when all of this (competing) comes to an end?” That is a question I’ve asked myself since I was a child. I suppose in times of more desperate uncertainty I could translate that to, “HOW will I COPE once this is all over? Thankfully, after speaking to many other athletes, I began to see that those thought patterns aren’t all that unusual.  At the back end of 2021 I began to arrive at that destination. As of March 2022, pretty much 28 years from first taking up Judo, and 13 years after making the plunge to become a full time Judo player, here I find myself, a retired athlet ..read more

For the majority of our seniors at Camberley Judo Club last weekend’s European Cup in Dubrovnik saw us return to competition for the first time since the pandemic kicked off last March.   My last tournament was actually mid 2019 sometime after which I said “no more” to making 73 kilograms. For a short while after that point I was very unsure about what my future in Judo looked like; I mean, I don’t foresee a point in my life in which I’m not involved in the sport in some way but, regards to fighting, I really didn’t know what may or may not lie ahead. With the support and guidance around ..read more

The other week myself and a few friends at Camberley Judo Club went to watch Russell Brand perform at Camberley Theatre. Big thanks to Russell for sorting the club out with some tickets, we had a great evening. During a part of the show Russell discussed an element of the book Tribe by Sebastian Junger, which sparked the idea for this post. A good friend of mine, Rob MacDonald, must have been recommending Tribe to me for about a year before I finally got around to reading it last summer. My reaction, as someone that often puts things like that off, was typical, “Why the hell did I wait this l ..read more

To drive the point home that I repeat frequently in these blogs is, when commenting on coaching, I am coming from the perspective of a maturer senior player. I do coach but senior international level is miles away from where I am currently operating. For me, I believe that the old school knowledge of the importance of a great coach can, at times, be lost in the obsessing over, and discussing of, programmes, systems and such things. A pattern that has clearly emerged, and been pointed out to me a number of times, is that if someone hasn’t worked with a truly great coach they often remain blind ..read more

I grew up in the rural county of Shropshire. I largely attribute my lack of technical development at a younger age due to my own 100 mile an hour pace in everything that I did and, although the club that I spent my first decade involved in Judo at had a wide membership base, with kids that did regularly partake in some competitions, it is more of a ‘recreational’ club. Our coach at the time there, Roger Houston, installed a passion for Judo in all of his students. Both Sarah Adlington (Tokyo 2020 Olympian) and I started at the Bushido Judokwai with Roger. In 2009 I left a plastering apprentic ..read more

I’ve always been a note taker. I suppose the first record of anything I kept was a training diary after, in my first year at secondary school, reading Neil Adams highly recommend it as a process for improvement in his first book, A Life in Judo. I’m also old enough to remember the mobile phone game Snake 1, with today’s technology though, specifically Apple’s notes app, I find recording anything that’s interesting or potentially useful a quicker and easier process. Particularly with the training diaries, I would not only record my own training but, also, if I over heard anything I liked, or w ..read more

A few weeks back I released an article titled Being a Funded Vs Unfunded British Judo Player, to which I received a very positive and supportive response from many people within the British Judo community. In said article, I focused mainly on the funding of trips and, what that looked like after I made the decision not to centralise back in 2013. I was almost exclusively ‘self-funding’ from that point. In 2013 I was also removed from my Athlete Personal Award (APA) which is personal financial support. I was on one of the lowest awards, which increase with improved results, that equated to aro ..read more