Note: this tutorial assumes you are already a competent replay maker and are wishing to learn this particular skill. New players should work on mastering more basic types of replays than manips before trying them out.


Manips are a type of replay that involves using multiple non-dismembering hits to move uke to the replaymaker's will. Single-hit manipulations are generally referred to as "lifts", and are not really considered to be manipulations. The reason you would want to do a manipulation? Manipulations are a particularly impressive type of technique to pull off because it showcases that you are able to not only move your tori exactly how you wish to, that you can use your tori's motion to move another body. They also look really cool.

First off, you're gonna need to be in classic gravity for this. There's almost no way you're going to get uke doing any kind of spinning in the air in sambo.
Now, let's assume you've done your usual setup shtick and have approached uke. Your goal is to get uke in the air, so you should look for parts that you can hit upwards. In my experience, the best places for this are uke's armpit and uke's crotch. I personally prefer to use the armpit because that usually starts off uke with a little bit of spin right away, whereas if you use the crotch you have you start spinning him once he's is in the air. A common problem many people face when they start up manips is they accidentally dismember uke. The way I usually avoid this is to either not hit the joints (i.e. the crotchblock or upper arm piece) or relax/hold the power giving joints just before impact. For punches, these joints are likely the pecs/shoulders, for kicks it's almost always the knees.

If you want to get really fancy with your setup, you can do a sort of scissor-kick setup where you use one leg to "push" uke over your other leg. This kind of start is probably the best at getting uke spinning, but it also is the worst in terms of lift.

This is usually the hardest part for people when first starting manipulations. When you are aiming to continue your manip after you start it up, you should have a few goals in mind with each hit:

1. Keep uke spinning in the same direction (speed up the rotation)
2. Make sure you do not move away from uke

The first one of these goals is hard for me to give general advice on, as its mostly situational. You should be able to see what direction uke is spinning in and be able to find what bodypart of yours is in the best position to hit uke in that direction. Your targets will generally be uke's arms and legs, because according to physics the further away from the center of mass you apply your force, the greater rotational acceleration.

The second goal is what I think trips a lot of people up. The simplest solution to this problem is to PLANT YOURSELF when you're hitting uke. He is heavy. If you're not firmly planted on the ground when you're doing anything significant to him, you're going to fly away. Usually in replays, this is remedied by using grab. (FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT USE GRAB. Seriously grab is one of the worst things you can do while making a manipulation (unless its a grab manip, but that's for another day). Grabbing breaks the idea that you are skilled enough to manipulate uke how you wish, because using grab looks like a crutch in most situations.) But instead of grabbing, just make sure you have a hand or foot or something on the ground instead of going through the air.

Also, when doing your manipulating hits, your hits should generally be going sideways or upwards, or somewhere in between. Doing this ensures that uke stays in the air.

Also also, you should shoot for the ballpark of 3-4 hits when doing a manipulation. Any less and it seems lazy, and any more would be incredibly difficult, at least for me. I've seen people do a crazy amount of hits, but those people are generally the best of the best (largekilla comes to mind).

This is the part that you've been holding back from this entire time, so you've probably bottled up enough violence that you'll have no problem with this.

But in case you're having trouble, here are some tips:

Hit against the direction of uke's rotation when you do your first dismembering hit. Not only will this look very intentional as all your previous hits have been with the rotation, but it also will make your hit more forceful, because you have the added speed of uke going into your foot/fist/knee/whatever in conjunction of its speed going into him.

Don't grab before you make your first hit, same reason as why you don't grab during your manip.

I would recommend doing an arm/leg/neck dm as your first, as a split would likely send at least one of uke's halves flying away, and if you want to do more with it you're out of luck. There are obviously many exceptions to this, but don't say I didn't warn you if it happens.



And that just about covers it. I have a few example replays here (all from myself, because I'm a great role model ) that will be a pretty good supplement to my tips above. Remember that there are so many more possibilities than what I've given in the text, and I encourage you to experiment as much as possible with manips. They're very versatile, so you can probably do something I've never even thought up before. Have fun!

Replay 1: Armpit setup
Replay 2: Crotch setup (also an example of a split messing up further dm's)
Replay 3: Scissor-kick setup
Replay 4: Weird armpit/scissor hybrid setup

Awesome tutorial, thanks a lot

someone add this to the replaymaker's encyclopedia

Fontastic tutorial mate!

What dismembermentthreshold do you set for manips?

A tutorial from the manip god himself.

Very helpful man, I'll go make one right now actiually

Dismember threshold should always be set to 100 when making replays

Great job!

You might wanna add the thing about the dm threshold in there.

Thanks. Great tutorial but just a question. When you are making a manip and you grab, does that mean that it's not a manip or..?

No, when you grab it is still definitely considered to be a manip. It's just that in my opinion using grab before you make a dismembering hit greatly reduces the quality of the manip. I would advise against it, and I, personally, almost never use the grab function during a manip.

However, if you are clever and use it right, it can be used to benefit the manip, as in this replay:

Added to tutorials index.

Thanks for this information.I will try to do something like those replays but i think it will be hard without using grab.