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As you may know I co-host the Heretics podcast with my old XingYi teacher Damon Smith. (Our last episode was pretty rad, so check it out. It’s on Heraclitus, the pre-Socrates Greek philosopher who was as Taoist as Chang Tzu – but we manage to cover Mongolian metal music and martial arts amongst other things).

It’s almost impossible to explain what a high level martial artists Damon is, so I’m not even going to try. He does a particularly good job of hiding it as well, so you’d never know unless you saw him perform some sort of martial technique just how good he is.

One of Damon’s favorite sayings is “there’s no correct technique, there’s only appropriate technique”. The first time I heard this it kind of annoyed me. I mean, a technique either works or it doesn’t, right? So in a way there is a ‘correct’ technique… however, the deeper meaning is that if you apply a ‘correct’ technique at time that is inappropriate then it’s as useless as an incorrectly performed technique.

If you watch martial art competitions you see this all the time. The perfectly executed jab/cross combo gets completely nullified by the opponent changing level and going for a body lock and takedown; the beautiful double leg that goes straight into a waiting knee to the face or the perfect hook punch counter that leaves the fighter open to the straight cross. The list goes on.

Another way I’ve been thinking about this recently is to do with styles. In BJJ everybody talks about their ‘game’. My game is this, my game is that. “I’m a butterfly guard player”, “I’m a top player”, “I like half guard”.

In Chinese martial art whole styles are dedicated to a particular type of fighting. Tae Kwan Do is kicking; Wing Chun is close range and Choy Lee Fut is long range, etc..

That’s great, but what if this thinking is holding us back? Perhaps a better way of thinking about martial arts is that you need to build up a variety of skills in different situations or positions. The more skill sets you have the easier you will be able to respond to what the opponent is doing in an appropriate way.

If, for instance, you’re in a self defense situation and the attacker is grabbing you, then you need to have some grappling skills. If you lack those skills then sure, you can fall back on your striking skills, but there might be a much easier solution you are completely missing. And equally, if you are in a situation where somebody is attacking you with a knife and you have to fight back, grappling them can be quite counter productive, if not fatal. If you knew how to use a short weapon, like a stick, and one was available then that might be a much better solution.

In the end, it’s appropriate technique that is required, but (and here’s the clincher) you can only access appropriate technique if you are already skilled in a variety of different positions and situations.

If you haven’t thought about this before then now might be the time to get out there and expand the limits of your training.