Randori Training Plan

The companion guide to Randori: How the Hard Part Makes You Good. This plan assumes you have finished the First Month plan in this series: your falls are reliable, you have tapped and been tapped in practice, and you have had your first light randori against a senior working at your level. What it builds over the next 12 weeks is the skill that month pointed at: free practice you improve from on purpose, in stages, with your instructor confirming each stage before the next one starts.

How the Plan Works

The plan runs in three stages of four weeks. Each stage has its own round formats, its own weekly checklist, and a safety gate at the end. The gate is not a test you pass by surviving. It is a short list of behaviors your instructor watches for, and their sign-off line sits at the bottom of each stage. You do not start the next stage's formats until your instructor has signed the gate. That rule is the plan's spine, and it matches how the First Month plan ended: your instructor says so, and the last word is theirs.

Intensity words in this plan mean specific things, and every partner in every round should be able to repeat them back:

Before every round, the form and the intensity get agreed out loud, in words, in that order. It takes three seconds and it prevents most of the bad rounds you will ever have.