How to Be a Good Uke (Training Partner)
When people first take up Jiu-jitsu, they find the idea of willingly letting someone “beat you up” a little odd. They don’t know whether the idea in being an uke is to be a difficult, resisting attacker to make the applications “more realistic” or whether they should be trying to make it easier for their partners by going to the ground actively for them. As with most things, the secret to being a good uke is somewhere in between.
When your training partner is just starting out, you shouldn’t offer much in the way of “active” resistance as an uke. Attacks that you make on your partner should be slower and done with less intensity so your partner can focus more on learning the defensive techniques without being put under too much pressure.
As a student gains more experience, you can increase the speed and intensity. When your partner strikes you as their uke, protect yourself in a way that won’t interfere with the person’s training. Turn your chin away for strikes around the head/neck area. Breathe out and tense your abdominal muscles when receiving a strike around the midsection. When receiving a strike to the groin, trust in your groin protector and in your partner who will do the strike in a controlled fashion.
When someone is taking you to the ground, try to stay relaxed and focused on doing a proper breakfall to protect yourself. Don’t go to the ground prematurely (i.e. before your partner has properly taken your balance). But don’t actively fight being taken to the ground. In our style, Can-ryu Jiu-jitsu, we use strikes to weaken, distract and/or off-balance a person. If the person lands their strike in the proper location, the throw or takedown comes much more easily when done with real power. You must pretend a little, knowing that as long as the strike was on target, your partner should have been theoretically been able to set you up for the takedown. The reason for this is that it is simply not safe to practice on your partners with full power when connecting on target. Only use active resistance against throws when it is the purpose of the exercise.
When someone is practicing applying a lock, don’t use your strength to resist the application. If your partner knows proper technique and they fight through your resistance, your strength may give out quite suddenly and then you have all that extra force being put into your joint, which could easily result in an injury. If you’re free grappling with your partner, resistance is expected because that is the point of the exercise, but then in that case neither of you are playing the role of uke, so it’s a different situation entirely.
Have fun and play safe everyone!
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Very true, being a good uke is an art onto itself and it usually takes quite some time to get the concept behind it. The quality of one’s training in large part depends on one’s uke: if he/she resists too much your technique will either fail or you’ll have to use more force which could be dangerous, if they resist too little or are lazy on their attacks (a classic example would be to leave the fist dangling out there after a punch) then you’re not training realistically. In our dojo we have both: there’s a guy who always tenses up so much you have to very careful or something might get broken (I know him personally and he has a very stressful job so it’s not like he does it on purpose), on the other hand we have a young girl (age 20 – 22) whom you can barely touch or she’ll drop to the floor like a rag doll or start tapping out like she’s doing tapdance. Like everything else in the martial arts it’s a learning-process and I know sooner or later they’re going to get there. Not offering realistic attacks is something that is very common and it’s one of the biggest pitfalls in training: a few weeks ago my sensei was asked to teach at a federal seminar, there were a lot of higher belts there and I actually had to correct quite a lot of them on their punches (leaving them out there for the partner to grab instead of snapping them right back forcing him to go after it), even two black belts. I guess the problem is that a lot of jujutsuka were never properly trained in a striking based art and in most dojo’s I know there isn’t a lot of emphasis on punching or kicking. Makes me even more grateful my sensei took the time to teach me some basic boxing and made me more aware of the vulnerabilities of our art (every art has them) and how to correct these by studying different systems. Before my sensei started studying jeet-kune-do, thaiboxing & panantukan our defensive techniques against punches and kicks weren’t great: for one they were more karate-orientated and secondly they were designed to function mostly on lunge-punches not on short, snappy hits. If you can’t intercept his attack you cannot execute a good defense let alone controlling him with locks, throws or chokes as is the custom in JJ.
Especially with locks the standard procedure is to go with it and offer no resistance: relax and whatever you do don’t struggle or you might get a limb broken or dislocated and it wouldn’t even be your partner’s fault per se. Ju-jutsu is still the gentle art and some people would do well to remember that. With beginners or laymen there is often the confounded notion that tensed muscles equal strength while in reality the opposite is true: even boxers stay very relaxed and loose until the very moment their punch is actually going to connect. There is great strength and speed in suppleness & relaxation.
Zara