Pinning System: The Four Core Holds, Weight and Base Checklists, Transition Roads, and the Eight-Week Holding Plan

Mat Manual companion guide to "How to Hold a Pin That Stays." Print it. The article teaches why pins leak one small gap at a time. This book is the working system: cards for kesa, yoko-shiho, kami-shiho, and tate-shiho gatame with weight and base checklists, contact point audits, transition road tables with feeder scripts, escape signal reading drills, hold-time progressions that keep training honesty separate from contest counting, and logs that record how every pin ended.

Player: ______________________________ Club: ______________________________ Coach: ______________________________ Weight class or training weight: ______________ Usual training partners (name three): ______________________________

SAFETY, BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE ☐ Tap early and often. Any tap — physical, verbal, or a foot tap when hands are trapped — ends the hold instantly. Release first, discuss after. ☐ Pressure honesty: a training partner must be able to breathe in every hold in this book. A hold that works by stopping breath in training is a fault, not a technique. ☐ Never crank. Pins in this book apply control, not joint or neck force. Weight is never driven through a partner's neck, face, or a trapped twisted arm. ☐ Partners declare rib, neck, shoulder, or breathing issues before the round. The holder adjusts without debate, and the declaration is never treated as weakness. ☐ Weight drops onto a partner in stages during drilling, never as a surprise, and never from a jump or a fall in pinning practice. ☐ Newer and smaller partners are pinned at the drill's stated resistance, not the holder's maximum. Coaches set pairings where size gaps are large. ☐ The stop word ends any round instantly, from any player, including a watching coach.

Part 1: The Family Card — Osaekomi in the Kodokan Map

The wider family beyond the core four — ushiro-kesa-gatame (reverse scarf hold), kata-gatame (shoulder hold), and the kuzure (modified) forms of each core hold — enters in Part 9, after the core pictures hold against honest escapes.