Judo for adult beginners: what training looks like and how belts work

You're in your thirties, you've never trained a combat sport, and you want to know whether your first judo session ends with you landing on your head. It doesn't. For the first few weeks you'll mostly be learning how to land, not how to throw.

Most clubs are built around children, but a growing number run a separate adult beginners' group. Here's what happens in that group, and how the belt system works once you get past the folklore.

What judo actually is

Judo is Olympic jacket wrestling. It came out of Japan at the end of the 19th century, from Jigoro Kano's Kodokan, and has been in the Olympics since 1964 for men and 1992 for women.

The aim is to throw your opponent onto their back. If that fails, you take them down and either hold them, strangle them with a grip on the collar or sleeve, or lock the elbow. There is no striking, in training or in competition. Joint locks are restricted to the elbow only, and most federations only teach strangles and armlocks from cadet age upwards.

A senior contest lasts four minutes. If nobody scores, it goes to golden score, an overtime with no time limit that ends the moment someone scores or picks up a third penalty.

There are two scores. Ippon ends the contest immediately: a clean throw onto the back with control, speed and force, a 20-second hold, or a submission to a strangle or armlock. Waza-ari is a throw missing one of those elements, or a hold of 10 to 19 seconds. Two waza-ari add up to ippon.

Penalties are called shido and are given for passivity, false attacks, stepping out of the area and similar. Three shido and you lose. Grabbing the legs with the hands has been banned in contest rules for about fifteen years now, which is why modern judo runs almost entirely off collar and sleeve grips.

What a session looks like

A class runs 60 to 90 minutes and nearly always follows the same order.

• Warm-up, 10–15 minutes: movement across the mat, rolls, crawling, neck and shoulder mobility.
• Ukemi, 5–10 minutes: breakfalls backwards, sideways and the forward rolling fall. You'll still be doing these as a black belt.
• Uchi-komi, 10–15 minutes: entries into a throw without the throw, done in sets. Typically 3–5 sets of 10 on each side.
• Nage-komi: the same entry, but now your partner actually goes over and lands.
• Ne-waza, 10–15 minutes: groundwork — holds, transitions, escapes from underneath.
• Randori, 10–20 minutes: free practice in rounds of three to four minutes.

Randori is not a contest. It's judo's version of sparring, and the same rules apply as for sensible sparring doses: you set the intensity by your partner, not by your ego. With an experienced player you work technically and calmly; with someone at your level you can push.

For your first month as an adult beginner you probably won't do randori with the stronger players at all. You'll do breakfalls, two or three basic throws — o-goshi, o-soto-gari, ippon-seoi-nage — and a couple of pins.

The three phases of a throw

Every throw is taught in three steps: kuzushi (breaking the opponent's balance), tsukuri (getting your body into position) and kake (the execution). Beginners nearly always skip the first step and try to muscle up a person who is standing solidly on both feet. That's why uchi-komi is repeated thousands of times — until the entry is automatic and you stop thinking about your feet.

Belts: kyu and dan

The system has two tiers. Kyu grades are student grades and count downwards, from 6th kyu towards 1st kyu. Dan grades are the black belt ranks and count upwards, from 1st to 10th dan.

Kyu colours are not the same everywhere, which confuses people. In Britain the senior sequence starts with a red belt at 6th kyu, then yellow, orange, green, blue and brown. Across much of continental Europe the first grade is white instead of red. The traditional Japanese adult system has only white, brown and black.

Black belt covers 1st to 5th dan. From 6th to 8th dan the belt is red-and-white, and 9th and 10th dan wear red. Tenth dan is awarded very rarely, and for contribution to the sport rather than results on the mat.

Grading usually requires three things: a minimum time spent at your current grade, a technical examination, and — for higher grades — contest points or a kata. The time requirement varies by federation, typically a few months for the early kyu grades and a year or more before black belt. An adult training twice a week is realistically looking at three to five years to first dan.

In practice the technical exam means demonstrating the required throws on both sides, defending against them, performing part of a kata (almost always nage-no-kata for black belt) and knowing the Japanese names.

Preparing off the mat

Judo is short and hard. An attack lasts a second, a contest four minutes, and a tournament can mean five fights in one day. What you need is repeatable explosiveness plus tolerance for grip fatigue — your forearms give out long before your legs do.

Two strength sessions a week alongside two or three judo sessions is plenty. Squat and deadlift for 3–5 sets of 3–6 reps, rows and pull-ups for the back, and dedicated grip work: hanging from a towel or from a folded lapel, 4 sets of 20–30 seconds. The same principle applies as with strength work in a fight camp — the lifting serves the judo, not the other way round.

For conditioning, use intervals that match contest length: three to four minutes of work, a minute's rest, five or six rounds. The way a training week is built around rounds transfers almost directly from boxing to judo.

If you start competing you'll meet the weight categories — senior men from 60 to over 100 kilos, senior women from 48 to over 78. Cutting weight before the scales is its own subject, and there's a clear line between safe and dangerous. For your first two or three years you have no reason to go anywhere near it.

Common misconceptions

"Judo is a kids' sport." Adult groups exist because adults learn differently: slower to absorb breakfalls, quicker to understand the mechanics once someone explains why a throw works.

"I should get fit first, then join." The warm-up and uchi-komi are the conditioning, and the pace in a beginners' group is set for beginners anyway.

"The belt tells you how good someone is in a fight." It tells you how much they know and how long they've been there. Plenty of blue belts throw brown belts, and the reverse.

"Judo is only throwing." Groundwork is half the sport, and it's usually where an adult beginner gets their first wins while their throws are still ugly.

"The stronger person always wins." Strength helps, but grip, timing and balance decide more contests. Expect to lose to people twenty kilos lighter for your first year.

When to see a doctor

The usual judo complaints are jammed fingers, bruised ribs, and irritated shoulders and knees. See a doctor if a shoulder pops out or feels like it is slipping, if a knee swells within a few hours or gives way under load, if you have neck pain that travels down an arm or pins and needles in the fingers, if a knock to the head leaves you nauseous, confused or seeing double, or if rib pain on a deep breath doesn't settle over several days.

Check with a doctor before joining if you have high blood pressure, a known heart condition, epilepsy, a disc problem, or a reconstructed shoulder or knee. Most clubs require a sports medical for a competition licence in any case.

In short

• Your first month is mostly ukemi. Learning to fall is the single most useful thing judo gives an adult.
• A session runs warm-up, breakfalls, uchi-komi, nage-komi, groundwork, randori — 60 to 90 minutes.
• Scores are ippon and waza-ari; contests last four minutes; three shido and you lose.
• Kyu grades count down (6th to 1st), dan grades count up (1st to 10th). Colours differ between federations.
• Twice a week on the mat plus two strength sessions is a realistic, sustainable load.
• Black belt typically takes three to five years of regular training.