Satoshi Ishii compares his Olympic judo training to his new MMA training

Chadi looks stylish

Respect for Satoshi Ishi and Chadi.

WOW Satoshi Ishii. COOL !!

Not everyone realises how much you have to sacrifice and dedicate if you want to be the best, you live that thing all day every day. Ishii did apparently nothing else than work for his sport in different ways all day.

And that's the level difference of recreational athlete and professional, and even professionals don't necessarily train like you would to be the top in the world. Like the Finnish international judo team in the recent years didn't train like this before Rok Drakšič started coaching them. The athletes said it was tough but they liked it. And it has started to pay off. The Japanese do even more randori than anybody else, but they also have a lot of good training partners even at high levels. In smaller judo countries you hire your uke or two to be there for you so you can even train. People from bigger judo countries probably don't get that, they can just walk to just about any dojo and have good training partners. In Finland they moved to national training center type of thing in the past few years and still have to have dedicated partners. But it's also good to remember you can't just start training like this, these guys trained judo since kids and added other training modalities over the years as they were adapted to the training volume. A regular person is done in two weeks if they just decide to start training like this. And obviously you can't have three sessions or more a day if you have any responsibilities in life.

Not being an Olympic sport would be a massive hit to international judo. Japan will always maintain it, but even Japan might tone down the massive system built to support judo. Countries fund federations that are in the Olympics. A lot of sports have had almost a killing blow if they've been dropped out of Olympics. It could happen to wrestling and weightlifting for example. What about small countries where you can get a medal in a tournament just because you signed in, there's no enough players in the weightclass present. They would no longer produce international players, no way people had the economy to support training full time and attending all the international events (attending is really expensive and you need regular exposure especially if you're from a small country). We would choke judo's richness and spread around the world down greatly, it would widen the gaps between huge and small judo countries from what it already is.

Thanks for the moment in Ishii's head. What he said at the end highlights how important it is to have a coach. So you can push your training and your coach can tell you how intense it should be and monitor you and tell to scale it down if need be. People who go through what Ishii have all the will power to push hard.

pure souls

+100kg climbing rope is absolutely bonkers strength