The Second Before the Throw

Editor's note: This was originally published as an email on March 15, 2026.

There's a moment in judo that most people struggle with:

The second before the throw.

It's that place in time when you've been gripped, off-balanced, and feel yourself going. Your brain screams to fight it, and most people stiffen up and grab for anything. In judo, we work to initiate kuzushi, the breaking of balance, to set up throws.

Without the breaking of balance, it will be difficult to accomplish your goal.

Therefore, your opponent's job is to take your balance. Yet, your job isn't to be immovable. It's to recover. Quickly, calmly, without wasting energy by panicking.

Sometimes this even reverses the whole situation because you didn't panic.

The thing is, calm is closer to a decision than a feeling. It’s a trained response that creates enough space between what's happening and how you react to it. That space changes everything about what happens next.

Life works the same way. You're going to get off-balanced. Probably this week or even today. The question is whether you've trained yourself to find your feet again without burning everything down in the process.

And as I’ve talked about in previous emails, the “Pause” is the way to train it.

You don’t fight it and immediately react. You pause, then make the best decision you can.  Here's what I'm sitting with this week, and I encourage you to do the same: Where in your life are you fighting to stay standing instead of learning how to fall and bounce back quickly?

Not everything requires resistance. Sometimes the calmest move is letting yourself get off-balanced, and trusting that you know how to find your feet again. That trust doesn't come from thinking about it. It comes from practice.