June 2023
‘Japan was an amazing 7 week experience. I trained at multiple universities and training centres and shared the mat with world and Olympic champions. The biggest name being Shohei Ono, who is 2 time Olympic champion and 3 times World champion.
While in Tokyo we travelled to many dojos throughout the weeks, to train with a large variety of players. This was my most enjoyable part of the trip as when I wasn’t in the dojo or the gym, I used the opportunity to see japan, as i love the culture and it has definitely been one of my favourite countries to travel to for training.
The final 2 weeks of my trip, the team and I travelled in an overnight bus for 6 hours from Tokyo to Tenri. Here we trained only at Tenri University and endured some of the hardest training sessions I had completed while out in japan.
Over the 7 weeks I completed 1389 randori minutes (sparring minutes), meaning my training load on a weekly basis was almost double compared to my training back home. Unfortunately it’s hard to replicate this in Britain as there simply isn’t enough training partners, and you would have to fight the same people too often and it becomes stale. This is why our coaches wanted us to be in japan for such a long period, compared to other training camps we have done.’
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