Grappling is my obsession and has been for the last few years. I’m also very interested in software, especially in how software can be used to improve human performance .

I am convinced that there are numerous ways that software can improve human performance in combat sports, since my focus is grappling sports such as wrestling, submission grappling and Judo I’ll focus my scope on these rule-sets.

All software can be condensed as processing and presenting information, what information can we process and present to help athletes improve faster and train smarter? Here are some examples of projects I know of and projects that I would like to see.

Current projects that i know of

Learning management platforms

There are countless examples of these, I feel at the moment submeta is leagues above everyone else with its roadmaps and super crisp front-end.

Move databases

Outlier Database

Projects like this are tedious to create but I could see them providing a ton of value. Some things to improve would be accessibility and consistent UI and labeling.

Graphical

code
Try it here

Cool graphical tool to experiment with different move combinations. Not sure how useful this is but its super cool to play around with

Digital (smart journals)

Kenku was built by me. It offers a digital training journal. Digital journals have the benefit of being far more indexable than traditional paper journals. Is still a work in progress but is available for anyone to try. If you want to learn more read this

Elo ranking systems

People have scraped BJJ heroes and other sites that store match results and then used some math to create an elo rating to objectively rank the top BJJ practitioners. I think that projects like this have a lot of potential.

Good use cases I can think of are in sports like Judo were qualifying points are very important. Projects like this could be used to calculate the average elo at certain competitions and then optimize for the competition that has the highest amount of qualifying points with the lowest elo competitors.

code

Projects that I would love to see

AI referees for Judo

Simple, train a model on a ton of Judo throws. Get the model to a point where it can classify a throw as no-score, wazari or Ippon. There is way too much subjectivity at high-level judo competition for an aspect of the rule set which I believe has some of the most objective criteria. (1-shoulder = wazari, 2 shoulders = ippon, no shoulders = no score )