Curated by Simone Forte
Judo is a combat sport, and like most of these sports, athletes must fall into certain weight categories.
This means that in addition to preparation based on improving muscular, circulatory and respiratory performance, it is also necessary to work on weight variation, trying to achieve a balance, as correct as possible, between lean and fat mass.
With the same technique, the athlete in question will have an advantage, but if the challenger has a superior technique then the muscles are of little use, the challenger will try to exploit his weight deriving from the fat mass to use it in certain techniques as a throwing ballast. .
This concept is valid only if the athlete with a lower lean mass will have a superior technical mastery.
When an athlete is prepared for professional competitions, we always try to make him fall within the limit of the lower weight category; let's take one of the seven categories men, 73 - 81 kg, we will try to bring the athlete into this category with a weight of 80kg, to ensure that already from the muscular point of view it has an advantage over an athlete who weighs 74kg.
Obviously this concept is valid only if body composition is taken into account as previously mentioned.
This means that the athletes are not only trained in the gym as regards the fights but are meticulously followed over 24 hours, there is the person in charge of technical training as the person in charge of physical preparation, rather than mental, rather than food.
It is "a team that moves behind the individual in order to win all together; many mistakenly think that individual sports concern the individual athlete but this is not the case, in the competition phase the" athlete is seen alone but behind him there is always a team that works to achieve the purpose (mission).
Another peculiarity in athletic training at 360 °, and which many neglect, is the psychological preparation; many forget that the body has a control center which is the mind, if the mind abandons the athlete for a single moment his potential drops dramatically.
Emotions enter the athlete as disturbing elements in the form of distractors, self-esteem, self-worth, but also the fear of winning (nikephobia) or the fear of losing can affect anyone who practices a sporting activity at a competitive level. strongly the activity.
As far as muscle preparation is concerned, all training must be planned based on the competition dates and technical preparation, first of all to be trained is the maximum strength, then carefully evaluate based on the technical characteristics of the athlete, if it is necessary to increase more the resistant force rather than explosive force or vice versa taking into account that they are inversely proportional and that is that as one increases the other decreases.
Generally, every athlete has some preferential techniques that he feels most of his own and that he manages to spin with extreme ease, but taking into account an athlete with complete knowledge, we will try to train more resistant than explosive strength.
In this sport it may happen that the judoka will have to fight for the entire duration of the match, which for men is 5 minutes while for women it is 4 minutes.
Fighting for the duration of the match means that there has been no knockout and no abandonment by the opponent, so we need a good resistant strength that allows us to maintain isometric contractions alternating with sudden changes, as well as explosiveness in the "technical execution such as projections.
At this point we can deduce that the optimal preparation for a judoka is to train the maximum strength in advance (therefore not increasing the hypertrophy in order not to have a weight gain if you are already at the limit of the category), then maintain a correct balance between explosive strength and resistant strength, keeping the latter slightly higher.
Hypertrophy is the increase in the size of muscle cells, larger muscles mean greater weight and this must be carefully evaluated by the athletic trainer, in an example cycle we will try to increase the maximal strength in order to then also increase the hypertrophy, if necessary, then return to maximum strength and subsequently heal resistance and explosiveness.
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