The 2017 Rules and you.

At the end of 2016 the IJF published the new experimental ruleset that will be trialled during the start of 2017. This article covers a little about these rules and how they relate and affect aspiring Judo athletes.

The short version is this… they don’t affect you.

That is unless you will be participating in IJF (and possibly EJU) events in the first 6 months of 2017. These rules are experimental, which means that they will change before formally being adopted by the IJF, continental unions and national federations.

They will change; but we can expect they to relatively unchanged. If we look at the rules; there is one bug change that will probably have the most impact on aspiring (male) athletes.

Contest Duration is probably the change that will affect you the most. Why not any of the others? Because the duration change should affect all your preparation. A male contest will now be 60 seconds shorter than previously, so endurance becomes less important and attack rate and ability to be explosive more important. There is less possibility that the most well conditioned (in terms of endurance) will gain an advantage in the last part of the contests.

Your training sessions will require tweaking so that your internal clock knows where you are in the contest. You will need to adjust your attack rate too. The new changes to gripping will affect the required work rate too; but we shall have to wait and see before we see how athletes react to the changes.

As an aspiring Judo athlete, my advice would be not to worry too much about the changes. The IJF is testing them at first; after which time they will have some amendments I am sure. I do not think there is much advantage to be gained by trying to optimise your play for the new rules.