Theme of the week: Five Primary Techniques

What are your five favorite ways to kick the heavy bag? What are the five techniques that you score most with in tournament sparring? What are the five submissions that you most frequently use in sport grappling? What are your five goto techniques in self defense drills? What are your five favorite chess openings?

All these questions should begin to help you formulate what the fighting principle five primary techniques is all about: knowing what you are good at. If you know the five sparring techniques that score the majority of your points, that’s great. If you don’t, simply film yourself sparring and then take a tally when you watch the film.

Now if you don’t have five techniques to any of the above questions, that’s okay. You might only have one submission that ever works for you in grappling (or none). That is simply an indication that you haven’t played enough in that particular area of martial arts.

Know yourself. Know what you’re good at. Understand where you are deficient in the art and take action to shore up that weakness.