FORGET ABOUT TECHNIQUES. FOCUS ON LEARNING SKILLS.
If you’re truly dedicated to improving at a specific physical activity, focusing on skill acquisition is the name of the game. Training for skill acquisition has been a long-established practice in many sports. Unfortunately, modern fighting arts are behind the times when it comes to adopting this approach to learning.
What is the difference between learning a “technique” and learning a “skill”? A skill is an ability to achieve some goal within a given context(s). A technique is a pattern performed absent of any particular context.
Technique is Overrated
If you are like most students, when you are taught a technique in a class setting, it is scripted and offers no context or resistance. And then you drill it for some amount of time in the same scripted fashion, void of any context or meaningful resistance. Learning this way ignores the most fundamental fact of fighting — there is an opponent in front of you with their own agenda that has no intention of letting you impose your will upon them. So, while seeing a training specific technique might help you with understanding how a technique works mechanically, in a vacuum, it does next to nothing to prepare you for executing in a fighting context.
Imagine spending hours upon hours trying to hone your straight punches on a bag, or maybe with a partner holding a pad. Then suddenly you’re dropped into a situation where you’re instructed to try that same punch to a live opponent that is not only trying to avoid getting hit but also punching back. How well do you think the skill of hitting bag transfers to the skill needed to punch an opponent that is playing both defense and offense? If you guessed “not well,” you’d be correct.
Have you ever been in a BJJ class where you drilled a certain technique for a significant portion of the class and then tried to perform that technique in a live environment? If you’re like the millions of other jiu-jitsu athletes out there, it probably didn’t go great. You probably felt like you had to “start over” in a sense; that’s because you have to turn that technique into a skill now that you’ve been presented with a context.
You can save a lot of time if you start learning the skill in the first place.
The Myth of the “One Correct Technique”
Another way we, as students, get led astray is by being taught techniques as the “one correct technique.” You don’t have to look far to find an instructor presenting a technique as the “very best” way. In fact, oftentimes what you are being presented is one of two things: either it is the exact way that they were taught to perform the technique, or it is a variation that the instructor has found works that best for them, so they assume it will work best for everyone. You might be amused to find out that you can frequently observe that same instructor performing said technique in a live environment in a manner completely different from how they teach it, and sometimes the instructor isn’t even aware of the discrepancy.
The fact that there are multiple variations of a given technique should be evidence enough to disprove the “one correct technique” mindset. The very best way to apply a technique is one that works in that exact moment given the totality of the circumstances. That very likely will not be the exact same from moment to moment.
Still not convinced? Let’s look at this idea in a different setting: carpentry. How many nails does a carpenter hammer into the wood over a lifetime? Did they get good at hammering nails by sitting down early in their career and perfecting hitting a nail with a hammer the exact same way every single time? No, of course not. So how did they master the hammering of nails? They understood the goal and learned through repetition and trial and error how to hit a nail effectively given different hammers, nails, wood, angles, lighting conditions, etc. And rest assured, that carpenter becomes quite adept at putting nails in the wood, but never hits a nail with a hammer exactly the same way every time.
Technique makes learning more complicated than it needs to be.
Let’s take a basic submission, the armbar. How many different armbars are there? If you ask that question to anyone that’s been training in a submission grappling sport, they’re likely to start naming off variation after variation of the armbar. Guess what? There’s only 1. The goal of the armbar is to hyperextend the elbow joint. Everything else is just application details based on the constraints in the environment. You need to achieve a few goals on the way: get control of center mass, isolate the arm, and then apply breaking mechanics — those don’t change. So there’s no reason to think about its slight variation as a different technique when your goals are essentially the same. If you focus on being able to hyperextend the elbow in virtually any given environment where it’s physically possible based on your understanding of the goals and the constraints, you have developed an infinitely variable skill that allows you to generate creative solutions, rather than relying on hitting armbars that only fit in certain defined spaces.
Teach Fighting like a Sport, not a Martial Art
If as coaches and students, we are working towards gaining proficiency in executing physical feats in live environments, then sitting in a room a few hours a night, repeating certain behaviors that resemble said physical feat inside a compliant environment is one of the least efficient methods this author could conjure. It would be like learning to ride a bike by sitting on a stationary bike and pedaling for 1 hour a night, a few nights a week. No real learning can occur in this environment if your goal is to be able to execute this feat in a live environment. Instead, we hop on that bike, starting on a flat, “soft” surface, we point the wheel in the direction we want to go, and we start to pedal.
