Safe ways to do tani-otoshi

Tani-otoshi means “valley drop” and it’s an appropriate name because when you get thrown by this technique, it sure can feel like you’ve fallen down a valley.

The throw basically involves positioning yourself behind uke and taking them straight back down.

It’s a very big throw and potentially a dangerous one too as you can easily end up injuring your opponent’s near leg.

If you crumble on top of uke’s near leg, with the full brunt of your weight on it, uke’s leg will get injured. But there are ways to do tani-otoshi safely. Shintaro shows you three of them.

First option: The Twitch

The first option involves doing a big feint towards the front, which causes uke to bring her near leg forward in order to block the throw.

This allows you to get behind her legs and take her down with tani-otoshi safely.

Second option: Inch behind

Here, you are in a classic kenka-yotsu (opposite stance) situation. Your attacking leg is very close to uke’s near leg.

To make sure that you can attack safely with tani-otoshi, you work your way towards uke’s back so that both your feet are behind her feet. Now, her near leg is no longer in danger of getting injured.

Third option: Back-step

This is an alternative to inching your way behind uke. Instead of taking many steps to get behind uke, all you do is take a back-step with your left leg and this brings you sufficiently behind her that you can attack with tani-otoshi without endangering her near leg.

Now, let’s have a look at Shintaro doing tani-otoshi in the video below.