SW Portland Martial Arts Blog

Train long enough at a gym and you’ve inevitably sparred everyone dozens, if not hundreds of times. You know how they play, you know the techniques their good at, and they know your game too. This can be great because as you continually shut down each other’s games, things get pushed ahead. They figure out a way to stop your leg kicks, so you have to add in body kicks. You figure out how to defeat their armbar, so they have to move to chokes. It’s like race between predator and prey – except both partners are chasing and being chased.

In these continually evolving conversations with sparring partners, one thing that can really mess them up is to play in a completely different way. If you have one way you like to move and they’ve figured that out, do you have another way? Can you switch between your favorite way of moving and that alternate way? Do you have a third way? Can you weave them in and out, adapting them to what your partner is doing as they are doing it? If you can switch between these three games right before your partner figures out what you’re doing, your sparring and movement become incredibly difficult to predict.

Be unpredictable. Make your partner predictable. Use their “good” reactions to set up your counters. Learn new techniques and expand your repertoire. Watch videos of stylistically different fighters.

As a side note, unpredictability doesn’t mean random. There is a place for random (and even weird) moves, for sure, but don’t mistake twitching spasmodically like a malfunctioning octopus for being an unpredictable fighter.

To Gi, or not to Gi: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler with the grips to suffer
The collars and lapels of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arm drags against a rash guard of troubles,
And by opposing choke them? To tap: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The rib-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That bottom side control is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.

Needs work but hey, if you’re following the generalist path, you should probably play both Gi and no-Gi. If not, do whichever one you like more.

For most of us, it’s difficult to take criticism. We’re wired to take it personally. Clear pointers about technique get garbled inside our heads and we turn them into moral judgements. It makes the already challenging task of trying something new even more difficult, maybe impossible.

How do we solve this dilemma? As usual, there’s no perfect answer, and there’s not even a single answer, but there are some ideas that over the long haul appear to work for most people. As coaches, we try and deliver corrections in technique as just that – about the technique and not about you as a person. We’re trying to point out a more effective way, not to deliver a moral judgement. As a student, try and take corrections as steps to efficiency, rather than personally.

Yeah. Great don’t take things personally. So easy, right? Wrong. After all, it is you making the mistake, right? And since it is you doing the thing wrong then the responsibility falls on you and therefore you are wrong. Maybe. Even if it your brain convinces you that this is the true chain of consequences, it doesn’t mean you are wrong in some grandiose sense. It means you’re wrong about this one technique and (more importantly) you can fix it and be right.

Troublingly, even if you correct something in practice, you’ll almost certainly find you keep doing it wrong when the pressure increases. So it goes. It takes a long time to ingrain good (or bad) habits. Be patient with yourself as a student and we promise to be patient as coaches. Together, we’ll improve your technique and heck, maybe it’ll get easier to be wrong (and correct the problem) in the future.