Are you a technical fighter?

No, really, are you? What makes you think so? Even when I first started my involvement with
martial arts and related training issues, there was a typical situation that had me confused.
Occasionally there would be a sparring session or a match between practitioners where one
would be quite clearly dominant, but the other participant would be praised as the better
technician. While I could see the value of such a description (to a degree) in the cases of the later
being a much smaller fighter, it just did not make sense with more or less equal opponents. The
same thing had me baffled about the value of formal exercises (kata and similar), as more often
than not, the people very good at forms would be lost in sparring or fighting.

It took me a while to see where the roots of the problem were…and still often are, unfortunately.
Namely, the technical standard of movements, as practiced in so many traditional martial art
schools, is essentially based and evaluated solely on the perceived mechanical
performance/correctness of the technical arsenal in a given system. To make things even worse,
these norms are frequently based on the visual representation of the performance once chosen as
optimal as done by the founder or a particularly revered representative of the style. Naturally, the
standards of that sort rarely take into consideration the varying body types, clothing concerns or
terrain where the moves may be performed.

Yet, the worst omission is completely disregarding the effectiveness of the techniques IN USE. If
the point of one’s martial/combative training is its effectiveness, then the solo performance is
utterly unreliable as the measure of somebody’s technical competency. If we look back to
western fighting disciplines, like boxing or fencing, what are the marks of a good fighter? Well,
it usually entails being able to deliver a lot of punishment to the opponent while receiving
minimum in return. It means that the best exponent are at the same time effective (delivering)
and efficient (making it look easy).

So, it guides us toward a more complete paradigm in evaluating one’s technical prowess. You
see, in order to characterize a technique as good or bad, we need to include at least two other
aspects, besides the mechanical display (which is pertinent as well, by the way), and those are
the distance and timing. The two are obviously closely related, but they also lead the analysis to
a bigger issue.

Do you see what it is? While the mechanical performance is commonly evaluated as a function
of a specific practitioner him/herself, the other two building blocks are only evaluated in the
relation to the adversary. Without getting into the deeper philosophical issues of the Self possibly
only being what it is in encountering the Other, the take home lesson here is that the technical
skill of any given combatant is always assessed by way of its effect/outcome. Let me be clear
here, I sincerely believe that training is more about process than the product (or the voyage over
destination), but technique, however, has to be seen through its results.
Another significant implication here is that in the dynamic and fluctuating environment such as
any act of combat, we have to acknowledge the role of the opponent(s) as the living, moving,
acting being(s), and not just some imagined facsimile for our heavy bag or wooden dummy,
paper target or a pell… Consequentially, it allows us to adopt a sliding scale in measuring the
quality of the trainee’s technique, depending on the totality circumstances, whatever they may
be.

If you introduce this attitude into your training, but manage to not use it is an excuse for sloppy
work, it could save you a lot of frustration and offer better diagnostic procedures and training
feedback.