Ideas come in waves
There’s a particular practice called Deliberate Practice, that helps you improve yourself, and your ability to apply focus and effort and coaching and feedback.
Regular practice is great.
But practicing a bad golf swing forever is not.
Deliberate Practice, with feedback and the effort to keep improving our lives, that’s where we are now.
The individual can do that with anything, and the individual does it based on what they see.
Our ancestors saw somebody stick a stick down an ant hole and eat all the ants. Eventually they all learned to do it.
When we use the same terminology we saw Joe Rogan use, we can’t help but use it sometimes. Joe’s the best, and we’ve been listening to him forever.
We end up emulating what we’ve seen. The goal isn’t to do that, but sometimes fighters and coaches do it. It’s natural, it’s going to happen.
And that’s how waves of ideas happen.
Suddenly everybody has a turning kick.
Years ago before Edson Barbosa got Terry Etim, no one used a spinning kick. Then all of a sudden, a spinning kick is real again.
You hear, “the front kick doesn’t work in fighting.” 10 years ago or less, Anderson Silva finds the route and now the front kick works in fighting. But sometimes we need to see it to believe it.
So that happens, and then the living, breathing organism that is fighting itself moves and changes, as does technology, as does music.
Music changes that way. I mean, why does every song that you hear on basic radio, it has similar beats, it has a similar rhythm, they treat the vocals the same? It’s shit like that just moves in waves.
Take George St. Pierre. GSP was a very ultra-fit, well-rounded-fighter, all of a sudden everybody kind of started to look like George: the double leg takedown, the overhand right, a heavy focus on strength and conditioning.
Once it works, everybody goes “Oh man, I got to be able to make that work” and they all train it. And that makes sense.
But the pendulum will swing very, very hard, and so Chad Mendes — a prototype of a fantastic power wrestler, with striking and strength and conditioning. He’s like a little GSP.
The same with Ben Henderson during that period, and even Frankie Edgar while he was the champ, although much more mobile, it was all the same principle.
Then when McGregor started to see: “Oh, he’s stiff. There’s no mobility, there’s no movement…”
Everybody was muscled up, strong, linear, explosive, McGregor started being about fluidity, instead of just smashing through the the wall, we’ll let it go by, we won’t use as much power, we’ll be less powerful.
There are many ways to generate power but less raw power and more fluid — power through movement, power through physics, power through fluidity.
That’s a natural thing, now a lot of people are doing that.
Before all this, we became very arrogant in what some see as the golden era of fighting, where it was: boxing, wrestling, bjj, and Muay Thai. That’s it.
That is the biggest load of shit. It’s also arrogant. It is literally exactly the thing that Mixed Martial Arts was supposed to be counteracting: the doctrines of martial arts.
You have to do this, and you have to do this, and you have to do this.
And mixed martial artists and no holds barred fighters are like, “Are you crazy? If you think you have to do this, now you have all of these openings as you’re stuck in a world where that only exists. I am gonna smash your face in.”
There were these doctrines, these outlines, these overly structured things that martial arts all became… and there’s many reasons, some of them are political, some of them are financial, it’s easier to give belts to kids as you get older, whatever.
But they became these overly structured things, and MMA was like, “Oh my God, all this stuff is overly structured, so we can work outside of it.” And then somehow we all just did exactly the same thing with, “This is how we throw these punches, a low kick must be this way, the front kick doesn’t work, you can’t spin kick something, never do this, always do this, you must have an under hook.”
There are huge advantages to an under hook, but if the guy that I’m under hooking has spent all his time training an over hook and training to manipulate me with the over hook and I always think this wins, I’m in trouble.
There are fundamentals. There are truths. If I hit you it hurts, if I grab you this happens, gravity works this way, time is real, blood is in your veins.
There are truths, and then there are these rules, structures and constructs, and doctrines. And MMA is just as guilty as anybody else or maybe more, because they had this open field where we could have all done whatever we wanted, and by 2012 there were books written as “if this is it.”
And as soon as you think that Din Thomas is over there doing nothing and Greg Jackson has been playing in the lab for a long time and he’s thrilled you’d think it’s only this way. And you must counter this, and always put your foot on the outside…
He’s thrilled because even if that was true, that there was an advantage of putting my foot on the outside when fighting a southpaw or when fighting as a southpaw against an orthodox, that is not true forever because you behave a certain way, the martial arts is about finding the advantage.
If you think: You got a straight line, I’m southpaw you’re orthodox, I got a straight line for my fist, great. Now he knows that that is one of the things. Within the reality what he knows that I believe to be advantages, he’s now gonna penalize me for those because that’s how martial arts work.
So if there are doctrines being trained, overly structured training methodologies happening in any gym, you’re gonna beat that gym by thinking outside of those lines.