3 Things You Need to Win Fights!

 

How does someone learn to fight? What attributes do they need? What do they need to focus on? There's this persistent myth amongst the general public that being able to fight is about perfecting the right moves. By drilling a few simple techniques to perfection, you'll suddenly be able to fight. This is absolute nonsense and couldn't be further from the truth.

There's three things that you need to be able to fight. If you're missing any of these three things, it is a certainty that you will suck. If you have all three of these things, I guarantee you that you can fight.

These things are skill, experience, and athleticism, and they are the three pillars of fighting. Each one of these pillars can teach us a different lesson about martial arts and help us pinpoint what it means to be a good fighter. Let's explore.

First up, skill. Now you may be thinking, of course your form and technique matters. Without throwing 10,000 punches from horse stance, knocking someone out is impossible.

Well, no, you're extremely wrong. Skill is not about how perfect your moves are. It's about having an interconnected web of moves and positions that all link to each other, and this can take a lot of time to learn.

A lot of self-defense videos like to sell you on the idea that you can win a fight with a few simple moves, but that's not usually how fights work. Self-defense videos are lying to you. If you have a good move to use from a certain position, great, but how do you get to that position from other positions? And how do you chain other moves off that first one? Whether you can answer questions like these determines whether you have actual skill or just a neat party trick.

Each move is like a puzzle piece. Having a bunch of pieces isn't helpful unless you're able to link them together into an actual picture. But without this depth of knowledge, you don't have real skill.

You just have a handful of party tricks that might work on idiots. So the first pillar, skill, teaches us that there are no shortcuts to fighting, only genuine skill. The second pillar is experience, and it is absolutely not about how long you've been practicing a martial art.

Experience is about practicing under pressure. Doing things in a safe, supportive environment with no time pressure and no opponent is easy. Doing things while rushed, under stress, and in a competitive zero-sum game is significantly harder.

If you've never practiced fighting under pressure against live resistance, then you've never practiced fighting. Imagine someone telling you that they can definitely win a stock car race. They've read all the manuals, memorized all the strategies, and know everything there is to know about race car driving.

They've never actually won a race, or been in a race, or driven a car, or been in a car, but they can definitely win a stock car race. This person is clearly delusional. If you've never performed an action under pressure or active resistance, then there's no reason to believe that you can do it under pressure and active resistance.

There's an old saying in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, how do you turn a black belt into a brown belt? You punch them. How do you turn them into a purple belt? You punch them again. This is a surprisingly true statement, and the reason it's true is because getting punched in the face adds a lot of stress and urgency that pure grapplers aren't used to.

If you aren't accustomed to that stress, or experienced in working through it, then you will very quickly forget everything you know. Without sparring, stress, and active resistance, you will not be able to perform under pressure. Now, obviously, nothing you do in a martial arts class should feel like a life or death encounter.

Quibbling each other on a daily basis kind of defeats the purpose of learning self-defense. Your class is hurting you more than criminals could ever hope to. The best thing you could do for your safety is to stop coming to class.

But we at least need to try and simulate some of that mental stress in order to build good instincts. Because you don't know who you are until you've been punched in the face. I've known people that are very ready to learn martial arts, until they get punched in the face and then they cry and leave and I never see them again.

An actual self-defense scenario is a bad time to find out how you react to being punched in the face. You need to know that going in. If someone's been racing cars in local competition, they're going to handle the stress of a world championship race much better than someone that's never raced cars at all.

Now, a world championship or life and death fight is going to be much harder than sparring in class. If all you've ever done is sparred, then you might fold under the new amount of pressure. But if you've never even sparred, then you will fold under the pressure because you have no experience recalling and executing moves under stress.

And when I talk about pressure testing, I'm not talking about doing a move really fast or doing a move in a scary environment or doing a move after you've been surprised or any of that. Most of the time people do these things, it's not good training because there's no competitive resistance. It's just an elaborate power fantasy.

Good pressure testing is when both people are genuinely trying to win and the outcome is not predetermined. This is how sparring is supposed to work. However, gaining experience doesn't mean that you disregard safety.

Light sparring is good experience. Hard sparring is also good experience, but it gives you brain damage. Experience does not help you if you destroy your body and mind in the process.

Find a happy medium. The pillar of experience teaches us that practicing under pressure is imperative to performance, and the arts that lack sparring or competition will fundamentally be worse preparation than arts that do have those elements. And the closer your pressure testing is to the real thing, the better you'll likely perform, as long as you're not damaging your health in the process.

The third pillar, and possibly the most important, is athleticism. There's a lot of martial artists out there that'll tell you size, strength, and fitness don't matter. That you can defeat any opponent with precise technique and leverage.

We have a word for these people. Dumb. Go use your perfectly honed techniques on an angry gorilla and let me know how that goes for you.

If you're smaller, weaker, slower, fatter, and have worse stamina, you're going to lose pretty much every time. Your best chance of winning the fight is if they slip and hit their head on a rock. There's a reason that professional fighters work out.

It's because athleticism can be the difference between a world champion and a hobbyist. Unfortunately, people don't like this fact. They don't like to admit that the only way to be a great fighter is with years of hard work and sweat.

People want to believe that they can just learn a secret technique from a wise master and they won't have to work hard. But guess what? There is no secret technique. Bigger, stronger people usually win fights.

If you don't like that, good luck arguing with physics. But just because there's no secret technique doesn't mean people won't try and sell you one. Everyone wants to believe that you can win a fight with pure skill.

So unscrupulous and or stupid martial artists will tell you that their martial art totally lets you do that. You don't have to be big or strong or able to do a sit-up. You can just use your opponent's weight against them.

And a powerful body doesn't matter because your mind is the greatest weapon. Great. I'm gonna have an elephant charge at you and you think real hard.

Good luck. Fighting is something that you do with your body. It's a competition.

If your body sucks, your performance will suck. World champion marksman Bruce Piatt once had a shooting competition with Chris Kyle's wife, who is a novice shooter. Piatt used common military-issue rifles and Kyle used a very expensive precision-guided designated marksman's rifle.

She absolutely smoked Piatt. It was not close. Piatt is a hundred times more skilled, but none of that mattered because Kyle had better equipment.

Skill is great, but good equipment is mandatory. Sending soldiers into war with no training is pretty dumb, but sending them into war with no weapons is way worse. You're not going to win a shooting competition with a crappy gun.

You're not going to win a race with a slow car. And you're not going to win a fight with a soft, flabby body. Now, obviously, some people are older, smaller, or have disabilities.

Am I saying that these people fundamentally can't fight? Of course not. But I am saying that gaining athleticism is the only way that they'll reach their potential. However, if one fighter is a disabled 90-year-old and the other is a healthy 20-year-old, one of them does obviously have an advantage.

It doesn't matter how cool your moves are if your body isn't in good enough condition to actually do them. Violence is hard. You have to be harder.

Go to the gym. Skill, experience, and athleticism are all necessary to learn fighting. Each attribute is a pillar that supports your ability to fight.

If any of these pillars are absent, your structure will collapse immediately. You don't necessarily have to be world-class in any of these areas, but you need at least a little bit in each of them. If you have skill and experience, but no athleticism, you will quickly get tired and be overwhelmed.

If you have experience and athleticism, but no skill, you'll just be a bull in a china shop. Destructive, but not in any precise way that has a hope of leading you towards victory. And if you have skill and athleticism, but no experience, all of your strategies and abilities will go out the window when the shock of being punched in the face makes your brain go into panic mode.

Knowledge of the three pillars can also be used to help you win a fight. Remember that the three pillars are responsible for holding up someone's ability to fight. If one of the pillars is particularly thin and poorly built, you can shift all of your weight onto it to make the structure collapse.

If you know that your opponent has no real skills, you can take them into more complex or esoteric positions that they really don't have a good answer for. Anyone that's done jiu-jitsu and rolled with a beginner has done this to them. If you know they have no experience, you can push the initiative and put pressure on them until they lose their composure and start to panic.

And if you know they have bad athleticism, you can purposely push the pace to test their cardio. Wait, controlling the position? Initiative? Pace? See how three pillars also feeds back into the kypis model? It's all connected. While the three pillars theory has applications for strategy and personal development, its main focus is figuring out whether a given system is effective for fighting.

If a system promises to teach you tactical street lethal special forces fighting method, but they don't even spar, they're selling you lies. You need live resistance to truly learn the moves. The art isn't giving you experience.

If an art promises you that working out can make you a worse fighter and the technique can overcome any physical disparity, they're living in a fantasy world. Tell them to go punch an elephant. And if someone promises you that they can teach you a few simple moves to fight off any attacker, they're either dumb or trying to scam you.

Their system lacks the web of interconnected knowledge that characterizes actual skill. However, if you find an art that encourages sparring and competition, offers a deep well of interconnected knowledge, and emphasizes the importance of fitness and strength in a fight, that system might actually teach you something. The world is littered with con artists trying to convince you that you don't need this, you don't need that, and you can still be a great fighter.

The reality is that you need to train, you need to work out, and you need to practice with live resistance. If you neglect to build any one of the three pillars, your house will inevitably fall.