Tokui-Waza Builder Workbook

Mat Manual companion guide to "The Throw That Fits: Finding and Building Your Tokui-Waza." Print it. The article teaches how the choice is made. This book runs the choice and then the build: a candidate inventory, the body-type matrix as a worksheet, a six-week trial rotation, randori tally sheets that let your conversion data decide, and then entry cards, combination cards, counter watch, and dosing plans for the throw the data picks.

Player: ______________________________ Club: ______________________________ Coach: ______________________________ Height: ______________ Weight: ______________ Dominant side: ______________

BEFORE ANYTHING: THE AGREEMENTS ☐ Trial data is honest or it is nothing. Every attempt in a trial block is tallied, the ugly ones first. A log edited to protect a favourite is worse than no log. ☐ Trial throws are thrown with controlled landings. Building a tokui-waza never licenses throwing a partner harder than their ukemi has agreed to take. ☐ Candidates are trialled on peers, not collected on beginners. Scores against new students are tallied in their own column and weigh almost nothing. ☐ A coach signs the shortlist and the final choice. The data proposes; the coach, who has watched your body for longer than the log has, disposes. ☐ Nobody is demoted in public. When a favourite throw loses the trial, that is a worksheet result, not a mat announcement.

Part 1: The Candidate Inventory — Everything You Already Throw

Before any shortlist, the honest census. List every throw you have attempted in randori in the last three months, from memory first, then check it against a partner's memory in the second pass.

What the census usually shows. One throw attempted often and scoring sometimes, which is the incumbent. One or two throws attempted rarely and scoring at the same rate, which are the quiet candidates the trial exists to examine. And one throw attempted often and scoring never, kept by loyalty. Name all three kinds plainly in the margin. The trial is designed for exactly this shape of census.

A worked example, so the shape is unmistakable. A mid-grade player censuses eight throws. O-soto-gari: attempted often, scores sometimes, chosen deliberately years ago — the incumbent. Ko-uchi-gari: attempted rarely, scores sometimes, never chosen at all, it just happens when rounds get scrappy — a quiet candidate with a conversion rate the incumbent would envy if rates were computed, which is exactly what the trial will do. Uchi-mata: attempted often, scores never on peers, kept because it is beautiful and because it flattened people when the player was fourteen. The shortlist writes itself from this census: the incumbent defends its chair, the quiet candidate gets its first honest audition, and the beautiful failure is trialled once more under counting rules, with its demotion thresholds agreed before the block begins, so that the verdict, whichever way it falls, was the data's and not an argument.