15 August 2026
If success was a job we could quote for, I wonder how many people would still go ahead once they saw the full price.
We all like the finished product. In judo it might be winning a medal, becoming a national champion, earning a black belt or simply becoming the best judoka you are capable of being. Outside sport it could be building a successful business, getting through university, progressing in a career, having a strong family or achieving something else that really matters to you.
What we don't tend to see is the quotation that came before it.
We see the result, but not necessarily the price that was paid to produce it.
The Ultimate Judo Quotation for Success
Success in judo isn't guaranteed by talent or hard work alone. It requires consistency, discipline, quality training, appropriate recovery, good nutrition, humility, resilience, openness to feedback and ownership of performance.
Coaches can provide the environment, knowledge, opportunities and programme, but ultimately the athlete has to do the work.
And for a competitive judoka, once you've entered the competition, you've already made the decision to prepare for it.
After years of coaching, I've become increasingly interested in the gap between talent and achievement. There are plenty of talented people who never fulfil their potential, while others with perhaps less obvious natural ability go much further than expected.
I can say that from personal experience.
I don't think anyone who knew me as a young judoka would describe me as particularly talented. I certainly wouldn't.
There were people around me who were more naturally athletic, technically gifted and probably had considerably more potential on paper.
What I did have was a good work ethic.
I turned up. I trained. I listened to the people coaching me and, importantly, I followed their instructions. If I was told something needed improving, I worked on it. If there was a training session, I was there. I didn't need to understand or agree with every part of the programme before doing it.
I trusted the system I was in and the people who were guiding me.
Looking back, I think that shaped a lot of how I now view both judo and coaching.
Talent is fantastic to have, but talent can also give you an early advantage that disguises weaknesses elsewhere. Eventually, everybody reaches a level where talent on its own isn't enough.
At that point, habits matter.
Can you turn up consistently? Can you listen? Can you accept that somebody knows more than you? Can you follow a programme long enough to allow it to work? Can you take feedback without immediately defending yourself? Can you keep working when somebody more talented than you is standing beside you?
And perhaps most importantly, can you trust a process before you have proof that it's going to produce the result you want?
That doesn't mean blindly following bad coaching. Athletes should ask questions and understand what they're doing, and coaches should be able to explain their decisions. But once you've chosen a coach and a programme you believe in, constantly second-guessing the process makes it very difficult to find out whether it actually works.
My own experience taught me that you don't have to be the most talented person in the room to make progress.
You can make up an enormous amount through consistency, work ethic, being coachable and trusting the process.
I wasn't paying the quotation with talent. I was paying it by doing the work.
So imagine for a moment that success was a project and you came to Ultimate Judo asking us to quote for the job.
Project: Build Success.
Before you signed anything, we'd have to be pretty clear about what was included in the price.
Before worrying about training programmes, competitions or results, I'd want to know why you're doing it.
Your reason doesn't need to sound profound. In fact, I'd rather someone gave me an honest answer than one they thought a coach wanted to hear.
But there needs to be a reason.
Why do you want to compete? Why do you want that grade? Why are you prepared to invest hours of your life pursuing this particular goal?
When everything is going well, your why isn't especially important. If you're winning, improving and enjoying every session, motivation largely takes care of itself.
Your why becomes valuable when you're not.
It matters after you've lost again, when somebody has overtaken you, when progress seems to have stopped or when you've been given feedback you didn't particularly enjoy hearing. It matters when the initial excitement surrounding a new goal has disappeared and what remains is the fairly repetitive business of doing the work.
Your why doesn't make difficult things easy. It gives you a reason for accepting the difficulty.
The quotation tells you what success costs. Your why tells you why you're prepared to pay it.
People often imagine success being created by exceptional moments. In reality, much of it is built on fairly unremarkable days.
You turn up, train, listen, recover and come back to do it again.
There isn't always a breakthrough. Nobody necessarily congratulates you. Some sessions are fantastic and others are completely forgettable.
But they accumulate.
That's why consistency would be one of the biggest items on our quotation.
Commitment sits alongside it. There's a big difference between being interested in achieving something and actually committing to it. Interest works brilliantly while everything is convenient. Commitment becomes visible when it isn't.
For a competitive judoka, I think there is a particularly important point here.
Once you've put your name down to compete, I don't think whether you train should continue to be a decision you make every day.
You've already made it.
By entering the competition, you've effectively said: I'm going to prepare myself properly for this.
Of course there will be evenings when you don't particularly feel like training. You'll be tired sometimes. There will be other things you'd rather be doing and motivation will naturally rise and fall.
But the question shouldn't continually be, “Do I fancy training tonight?”
You decided that when you entered.
The question now is whether you're going to honour the commitment you made to yourself.
There are obvious exceptions. If you're ill, injured, need recovery or your coach changes the training plan, then the sensible decision may be not to train. That's completely different from simply not feeling like going.
In fact, I'd argue that real discipline often means removing the decision entirely.
You entered. You committed to preparing.
Training is part of that commitment.
This is where I think the traditional idea of toughness can sometimes become unhelpful.
If we're going to quote properly for success, we can't just include the things that look hard. Training sessions, extra rounds, strength work and conditioning all look like commitment. Going home, eating properly and getting enough sleep doesn't look quite as impressive.
But recovery is still part of the job.
If your programme says train, then train. If it says recover, take the recovery seriously. Sleep properly, eat properly, hydrate and respect the recovery periods between hard sessions.
Doing more isn't automatically the same as getting better.
This is also why, particularly with our competitive judoka, we need to know how much judo and other physical training you are doing during the week.
A coach can only manage training load properly if they know what that load actually is.
If we believe an athlete has completed three judo sessions that week when they have actually done five or six because they've added sessions elsewhere, the programme we're managing is no longer the programme they're actually following.
That affects decisions about intensity, randori volume, strength and conditioning, technical sessions and, importantly, recovery.
It's also why we insist that our competitive judoka don't simply add training sessions at other judo clubs without discussing it with us and getting permission first.
That isn't about claiming ownership of an athlete or suggesting there is anything wrong with training with other clubs.
Quite the opposite.
Training outside of the club can be extremely valuable. Different partners, different styles and different environments can all contribute to someone's development, and there will absolutely be occasions when we encourage it.
The issue is that it has to form part of the overall plan rather than interfere with it.
If Wednesday is supposed to be a recovery day after two hard sessions and an athlete decides to go somewhere else for 90 minutes of hard randori, they've changed the programme. If they then arrive at Thursday's planned high-intensity session already fatigued, that affects the quality of Thursday's work as well.
One additional session doesn't exist in isolation. It changes what comes before and after it.
As coaches, if we're being asked to take responsibility for preparing an athlete, we also need visibility of the training they're doing.
That includes judo with us, judo elsewhere, strength and conditioning and other significant physical activity.
It isn't about doing as much judo as possible.
It's about doing the right amount of the right work at the right time, then recovering sufficiently to benefit from it.
The objective isn't to prove how tired you can make yourself. It's to improve your performance.
So recovery isn't a discount on the quotation.
It's part of the price.
Trusting the programme also means not quietly adding extra work because you think more must automatically be better.
If you've committed to a coaching programme, communicate with your coaches, let them see the whole picture and allow them to manage the balance between training, adaptation and recovery.
That's part of being coachable too.
Nobody particularly likes this part.
If you're genuinely trying to improve, you're going to fail.
In judo that's impossible to avoid. You'll try techniques that don't work. You'll get thrown. You'll lose contests you expected to win. You'll have days when your timing disappears and performances where you walk away knowing you were nowhere near your best.
Failure isn't evidence that the project has gone wrong.
It's part of the project.
What matters is what happens afterwards.
Can you look at a poor performance without allowing it to define you? Can you work out what went wrong? Can you make changes and come back?
That's resilience in a much more useful form than simply telling someone to “be resilient”.
You develop resilience by encountering things that require it.
Ego might be one of the most expensive parts of the whole job.
Improvement requires confidence, but it also requires enough humility to accept that you don't know everything.
Someone younger than you may know something you don't. Someone smaller may throw you. Someone you expected to beat may beat you comfortably.
A coach might tell you that something you've practised for years needs changing.
At that point you can protect your ego or you can investigate whether the feedback might make you better.
It's surprisingly difficult to do both.
That's why I like the phrase “leave your ego at the door.”
Ego destroys progress when protecting how we see ourselves becomes more important than actually improving.
That leads directly into feedback.
A good coach isn't there simply to tell an athlete how well they're doing. Sometimes the most useful thing a coach can tell you is something you really don't want to hear.
Your preparation wasn't good enough. Your effort has dropped. Your technique needs changing. Your attitude wasn't right. You made a poor tactical decision.
The athlete who can hear that, think about it and use it has an enormous advantage.
That doesn't mean coaches are automatically right about everything. Athletes should ask questions and good coaching should involve discussion.
But if every piece of uncomfortable feedback immediately produces a defensive response, development becomes very difficult.
Being coachable doesn't mean blindly agreeing with everything you're told.
It means being willing to listen, think and learn.
After a competition, I think it's important to understand why something happened. Simply saying “no excuses” can sometimes shut down exactly the analysis we need if we're serious about improving.
There are reasons for performances.
Maybe preparation wasn't good enough. Perhaps recovery was poor. Maybe the tactical plan was wrong, an opponent exposed a technical weakness or you simply didn't perform well on the day. Occasionally a referee's decision genuinely will affect the outcome.
We shouldn't ignore those things.
We should investigate them.
But there is a difference between finding a reason and finding something that simply makes us feel better about the result.
One of the classics in judo is:
“If I'd been in the category below, I'd have won.”
Maybe you would have. Maybe you wouldn't.
But you weren't in the category below.
You competed in the category you were in, against the opponents who were standing in front of you. Imagining a different category doesn't tell us anything useful about how to improve your performance.
The same applies to “I got a terrible draw”, “the referee cost me the fight”, “he was much stronger than me” or “I would have beaten the other side of the draw.”
The difficult thing is that some of those statements might even be true.
That's what makes excuses so attractive.
The question is whether that information gives us anything useful to work with.
If your opponent was considerably stronger, why was that a problem? Do we need to improve physical preparation, gripping, movement or tactics?
If you were exhausted, why? Was it conditioning, pacing, nutrition, recovery or the way you fought?
If you repeatedly got caught with the same technique, we've identified a technical problem we can work on.
If preparation wasn't good enough, why wasn't it good enough?
Even if there was a questionable refereeing decision, we can acknowledge that while still asking whether there were opportunities earlier in the contest that could have changed the outcome.
That's the difference between a reason and an excuse.
A reason gives us information. An excuse gives us somewhere to hide.
The purpose of reviewing a performance isn't to decide who we can blame. It's to identify what happened, understand why it happened and work out what we can influence next time.
The questions after competition should therefore be: Why did that happen? What was within my control? What can I learn from it? What am I going to change?
That's ownership.
Find the reasons. Lose the excuses. Use the information and get better.
That's another part of the quotation.
Obviously physical preparation matters in judo. Strength, conditioning, nutrition and technical training are all part of performing well.
But some of the harder things we're asking athletes to develop aren't physical at all.
It takes strength to walk back into training after a terrible competition. It takes strength to admit that you're struggling or ask for help. It takes strength to receive criticism without immediately defending yourself.
It takes strength to keep working when progress isn't obvious.
And it takes strength to accept that somebody else might currently be better than you without deciding that means they always will be.
This is where vulnerability and mental toughness aren't opposites.
Often they're connected.
I'd also put your environment on the quotation.
Who are you spending your time with? What behaviours are normal in your training group? What happens when somebody starts making excuses? What happens when standards slip?
Spend enough time around people who constantly find reasons why they can't do something and those reasons eventually begin to sound reasonable.
Spend time around people who quietly get on with what needs to be done and your own standards tend to rise.
That doesn't mean creating a miserable environment where everyone is constantly judging each other. Good training environments should be enjoyable and supportive.
But supportive doesn't mean accepting low standards.
The best people around you should want you to succeed while also being willing to tell you when you're getting in your own way.
If we put all of this onto paper, perhaps it would look something like this:
Client: You
Project: Whatever success means to you
Project Manager: You
Start Date: Today
Completion Date: Unknown
The scope of work includes consistency, knowing your why, commitment, respect, discipline and honouring the commitments you've already made.
Physical and mental strength will be required, alongside vulnerability, good nutrition and hydration, proper sleep and serious attention to recovery.
The client should expect periods of discomfort, failure, frustration and slow progress. Mental toughness will therefore be required throughout the project.
The client agrees to choose their environment carefully, make reasonable sacrifices, control their ego, remain open to feedback and continue trusting the process when results aren't immediately visible.
The client also accepts responsibility for their own performance. Reasons will be investigated because they provide valuable information. Excuses will not be accepted as a substitute for learning.
Total investment required: 100%. Payment frequency: daily. Payment method: your choices and your actions.
There is no guaranteed completion date.
As coaches, we have responsibilities too.
At Ultimate Judo, we can provide knowledge, technical coaching, planning, challenge, feedback, encouragement, opportunity and a training environment where people can develop.
Parents can provide support. Training partners can push each other. A club can create opportunities that an individual could never create alone.
Those things matter enormously.
But there is one exclusion we'd have to put clearly at the bottom of the quotation:
We cannot do the work for you.
A coach can't supply your consistency. A parent can't provide your discipline. A teammate can't control your attitude and talent can't replace your work ethic.
Eventually you have to take ownership of the project.
Ultimately, that's the question.
The purpose of this isn't to make success sound miserable or to suggest that achieving something worthwhile requires your life to revolve around it.
It's about understanding what you've chosen to pursue and being honest about what that requires from you.
For a competitive judoka, entering a competition is effectively accepting that quotation. You've chosen to test yourself, and with that comes a responsibility to prepare properly. Training, recovery, nutrition, listening to your coaches and taking ownership of the eventual performance are all part of the same commitment.
That doesn't guarantee you'll win.
You can prepare brilliantly and still lose. That's sport.
But you should be able to walk away knowing that you prepared properly, gave yourself the best opportunity you could and, whatever the result, are willing to understand the reasons, learn from them and get better.
There isn't a secret ingredient.
The individual items on the quotation aren't particularly remarkable on their own. Consistency, work ethic, discipline, recovery, humility, being coachable, accepting failure and taking responsibility are all fairly simple concepts.
The difficult part is doing them consistently.
Success isn't something you're entitled to because you've worked hard. The work doesn't guarantee the outcome.
It gives you the best possible chance of achieving it.
So if you've decided something matters enough to pursue, understand what it requires, accept the quotation and get on with the work.
And if you've already entered the competition?
You've signed it. Honour it.
Gordon McCathie
Ultimate Judo
Always Forward.
There isn't one correct number for every athlete. Training frequency should depend on age, experience, competition level, physical development, intensity, recovery and the athlete's total training load.
This is why a coach needs to know about all significant training being completed during the week rather than looking only at the sessions an athlete completes at their own club.
Training provides the stimulus for improvement, while recovery gives the body an opportunity to adapt to that training.
Sleep, nutrition, hydration, rest and sensible management of training loads are therefore part of an athlete's preparation rather than something separate from it.
More training isn't automatically better training.
Being coachable means being willing to listen, ask questions, accept constructive feedback and make changes when necessary.
It doesn't mean blindly agreeing with everything a coach says. Good coaching should allow questions and discussion.
The important thing is being open enough to consider feedback rather than automatically becoming defensive when you hear something you don't like.
Start by looking for reasons rather than excuses.
Analyse what happened, identify what was within your control and decide what you can improve. The aim isn't to find someone to blame or to beat yourself up over the result.
A loss can provide useful information about technical weaknesses, tactics, physical preparation, recovery, decision-making or other areas that can then be improved.
3 July 2026
