Knowing what to Train in a Sea of Technique
Knowing what to Train in a Sea of Technique
A Sports Science, Continuous Improvement, and Sambo based approach to martial arts training.
Other posts on this topic you may find useful:
The 'Go and See' Coach
Athlete's and Coaches Fitness Guide
Ten Tips to Accelerate Your Black Belt
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'Coaches Only Practice' New England Combat 2013, A time and place to share our best techniques
We are training for real: either for competition or for self-defense, so we must train with the proper attitude and mindset: we must remain determined and focused and we must train the way we want to perform!.
Most athletes and coaches put average effort into too many things. To achieve the most you must ruthlessly eliminate: time, technique and protocol waste from your training. What's left, when when properly developed, will be unbeatable. In this post we'll look at a few ways to narrow our technique focus.
“The less moves you use the more variations of the move you’ll develop”
When discussing grappling performance & development, there are no better examples than Roger Gracie, George St-Pierre, Marcelo Garcia and Khabib Nurmagomedov. All of these men are dominant grappling athletes with limited technical arsenals which they employ during competition. Everyone of their opponents know exactly what techniques and tactics they will use and in most cases have prepared specifically to counter them. Yet despite this preparation these masters are all able to dominate the competition.
Why? It's because they have developed themselves both physically and mentally AND they have developed their arsenal of "advanced basics" to the fullest "world-class" potential.
None of the athletes named above use a technically advanced or fancy set of techniques: all of them get it done with simple "Meat and Potatoes" skills. So clearly it’s not about how many moves or how fancy the moves: it’s about how the moves and athletes are developed.
As athletes and coaches we must be aware of all our technical options (and those of our opponents), but we must also limit our game to what works best for us and develop it in a systematic and thorough way.
Let's look at how we can narrow our focus and hone in on what we should be training.
Grappling is a very complex sport; so lets first break it down into subcategories or "Core Skill Sets" to make it a bit more manageable.
I have found 8 to be the magic number and I've listed what I believe are the key attributes in parenthesis after each category.
- Fundamental Movements (creating flow and mechanically correct habits)
- Stand-up Wrestling (grip and grit /posture/building reaction time)
- Guard Skills (defensive thinking and off-balancing skills)
- Passing Skills (management of control/distance and pressure skills)
- Ground Wrestling Skills (scramble skills)
- Escapes and Reversals (worst case scenario training, deep submission escapes)
- Top Control & Pressure (keeping a step ahead and creating dilemmas)
- Submission Skills: Entry & Finishing (Technical mastery and anticipating/defeating defenses)
Within each skill-set there are countless moves and it’s important to understand that development does not happen equally. For example you may have a beginner student with natural ability elite, say black belt level, ability to perform a singular technique within a skill set while other techniques of the skill set may be at a rudimentary level. This sort of uneven performance is to be expected: while all students need to have acceptable and reliable performance of the fundamental techniques of your system, every student will display better or worse performance across the entire spectrum of techniques taught. That is why it is important that our athletes have the tools to recognize their strengths and weaknesses and the proper tools to develop each is focused and productive way.
A simple place to start is, was a coach, identify the fundamental techniques for each skill set. Reinforce that basic techniques can be and should be developed to a world class level. This is why we must look at HOW and WHAT we practice. Working on the most advanced technique won’t make us better if we do not develop it properly or have an underlying foundation of skill and technique to build upon. The Sila Voli System is a Sambo system that focuses on technique that score frequently across multiple competitive arts: Judo, Freestyle and Greco Roman wrestling, Jiu-Jitsu and MMA. It is a good rule of thumb that if the technique commonly scores under multiple rulesets that that technique should be added to the curriculum. This is what's known as a "Unification of Techniques".
A great example is a snap-down/sprawl to go-behind. This simple technique is the number one scoring technique in all of high school folkstyle wrestling and is seen scoring frequently is all of the sports listed above. It is simple, effective and versatile. Using this criteria we can see that this is a fundamental technique and should be added into the curriculum under the Core Skill-Set of stand up wrestling.
Make a study of competitive arts and find the trends, the universal techniques: these should form about fifty percent of your curriculum and be the anchor point for your students.
The Pareto Principle: the 80/20 rule a simple tool for athletes
The Parero Prinicple states that eighty percent of our successes come from just twenty percent of our efforts. I like to call this approach "First things first...second things never", meaning: once we identify the most important thing to work on, the one that gives us the greatest results for our effort, we work on it until ideal results are achieved; before moving on to the next task.
Again: do not lose focus by putting average effort into too many things! We must remain determined and clear-cut in our mission.
Athletes can use the 80/20 rule to prioritize their training. Utilizing the 80/20 to focus on their most successful attacks, movements and positions. Doing the same with weaknesses allows athletes to always address the largest problems first.
Lastly we'll look at a tool that directly ties back to Focus Based Training discussed in the "Go and See" Coaching post. Here we see that we can take our frustrations as a coach or athlete and easily translate them into a skill development focus. Although this this does not drill down to the specific technique level, it will help us identify which core skill sets we should be focused on and hence which fundamental techniques.
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Future posts will cover the HOW to maximize training through a seven step systematic drilling process and performance rubric. Until then I hope you enjoyed the read and are ready to train. Greg
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