In Defense of Suboptimal Martial Arts Techniques

This video was originally going to be a piece of another technique-focused video that I'm also working on and should be coming out soon, but this section just kept on ballooning and eventually I had to concede to myself that it probably deserved a whole slice of time unto itself, so here it is. I feel like my coming to the defense of quote-unquote suboptimal techniques or martial arts might be misconstrued as being contrarian just for the sake of it. The reality, though, is that there are a whole bunch of really good, tangible, and even practical reasons why we shouldn't write these things off. Now, in the name of clarity, I'm not talking about no-touch nonsense or Jedi live-action roleplay. I'm specifically referring to techniques that mechanically make sense, but for one reason or another tend to be rare in actual bouts. Before I dive into it, though, I think it's worth making a few general remarks about the state of modern martial arts because it seems to me people have a lot of strange and sometimes irreconcilable beliefs. I'll focus on two just for the sake of time. If you look up or were old enough to be there for some of the original UFC promotional material, you'll recall that it leaned heavily into being real. Even in fan interviews from that time, words like real and raw came up a lot. The legacy of this today is that martial arts fans and even some historians cite the advent of MMA being this watershed moment that dispelled all the fakes and frauds, leaving only the best techniques and styles. This is an attractive narrative, to be sure, but it has about as much nuance to it as a first-grader's essay on what his parents do for a living. I'll take a look at this a bit later in the video, but for now I want to focus on the aforementioned terminology. The martial arts community today is almost hyper-skeptical. Now, skepticism can be a healthy thing, but I tend to fall into the camp that believes it takes skepticism way too far. What the word real has degenerated into in online discourse appears to be a synonym for something that I happen to understand. People don't argue the legitimacy of a single-leg takedown not only because it's been highly tested, but also because most toddlers even, with their underdeveloped fine motor skills, demonstrate an unconscious awareness that having only one foot on the ground is a recipe for falling over. At the same time, the word fake has grown to encompass the meaning anything that I happen to not like. Again, I'm not arguing against healthy scrutiny here. I'm arguing against being a moron who tries to present himself as understanding way more than he actually does. There is a bit of a drunk uncle effect in the community in general in this regard. Most American families probably have that one family member who shouts and raves at the television screen about what his sports team should be doing. Then, when his team wins said game, suddenly he acts like he knew exactly what was going on all along. That he was always privy to the big picture and had complete faith in the plan. The harsh reality is that there are way more people giving their opinions on martial arts than there are good opinions on martial arts. The other issue I've seen about is this idea that someone is just a hobbyist but, paradoxically, also wants to be as good as humanly possible as quickly as possible. This results in a kind of cult of optimization. To make my point about this, I want to tell a brief story because I don't think people really understand what optimization really looks like. In college, I knew a guy who wanted to get into international law, specifically dealing with Chinese business law. I was never super close with the guy, but I saw him everywhere since I often hung around the Asian Studies department to do my own work. When he would eat lunch, he'd read out of a Mandarin to English dictionary. When he was walking to campus or to class, he was flipping through note cards. He'd take Mandarin classes every single semester, even if it was a repeat class and even if it overloaded his schedule. He didn't drink, he didn't smoke, he didn't even party. He even rejected the advances of a Japanese exchange student there. Not because he didn't like her or that she wasn't attractive, but because he didn't want her to falsely believe that Japan was ever in the cards for him. Plus, frankly, he didn't have the time for a girlfriend. He wanted to go into business law. He knew what he wanted and every waking moment that he could reasonably muster was optimized toward that end. I don't know how many cumulative hours that dude dropped into Mandarin in a given year, but I'd wager well over a thousand at least. Coming back to martial arts, if you are hitting a class three hours a week, you can optimize all you want. Three hours is still just three hours. Unless you are a freak phenom, you won't be any good in six months. You probably won't be any good in a year. It just isn't happening. And I know the argument that optimizing time over, say, a decade or two will make a difference, and sure, sure it will, but do you know how many martial artists train for a decade? Almost zero. Most people come in, train for a year or two, and are gone. I'm not saying don't spend your time wisely. This isn't a video exalting goofing off. I'm saying that if your reason for optimizing is this ambiguous vision of yourself where you're some kind of badass, then you'd best be eating, sleeping, and shitting martial arts. Yes, I know that isn't feasible for everyone, which brings me, finally, to reason number one for why you That reason being that you need to learn to love the process. Now, this can, of course, be done with any technique, not just suboptimal ones, but I do find the suboptimal ones are the real test of someone's seriousness. The reason that a suboptimal technique is suboptimal usually has much to do with how much has to go into making it work. So many things have to go right. It takes substantially more investment to get the same result with that technique than something that's a little more mainstream. If you are only thinking about outcomes, though, these techniques will frustrate you and feel like a waste of time. The reason loving the process is important, however, is that it is ultimately what separates the people from those who quit and those who don't. I've met many martial artists who have hung it up one or two years into learning, and they always say that they really do love it, but it's just not plausible for them anymore, for this or that reason, and I get it. That's fine. Life happens. But as much as they loved it, they clearly weren't in love with it, because they'd sacrifice for it if they were. There are very few schedules out there that truly have zero free time that can be squeezed out of them. They'd find a way if it was important enough. The people who stay lifetimes, the people who the optimization approach actually tends to help, are in love with martial arts. They don't just love them. The response I get to this is a lot of the time something along the lines of, but I'm just a hobbyist, bro. Which fascinates me, because a lot of people walk around as Schrodinger's hobbyist, don't they? Everyone wants the results of champions, but when they get a straight answer on how to reach those lofty summits, they're just hobbyists. If you're just a hobbyist, then embrace it as a hobby. Hobbyists should not hate the suboptimal technique, because they're just hobbyists. They're just there to get what they can get. And professionals shouldn't hate the suboptimal technique, because they're in love with all of it. To end this point, I will quote George Mallory, who, so the story goes, was asked why he had to climb Mount Everest back in 1924. Famously, he remarked, because it's there. For Mallory, it wasn't glory so much that motivated him. It was passion. He adored being an explorer. He was curious. Everest needed to be conquered simply because it existed. Mallory, of course, died for his passion. He never made it off Everest's callous slopes. And I'm not saying you need to die for martial arts, but again, this is what innovation costs. But that is all more so about mindset, not the martial practicality that I mentioned earlier. The practicality comes from the ability to problem solve, which is a skill few people actually seem to have in martial arts. It seems to me like a lot of martial artists, probably reinforced by the aforementioned cult of optimization, forget that a sizable portion of what we do is, well, art. And I'm not really even referring to aesthetics or something like that here. I'm saying that I know a lot of ostensibly advanced martial artists who don't really know how to think outside the box. The whole space has kind of been hijacked by this road most traveled and quickest way to medals type of mentality, something I often hear about is people wanting to imitate what quote unquote works at the highest level. I always have to have a little chuckle about this because a lot of these guys aren't even getting first place at local tournaments. I understand where the sentiment comes from, I do, but maybe worry about the highest level when you're actually approaching that level. Most people, most of the time, would benefit far more from choosing a handful of basics and grinding them out mercilessly, even advanced people, but nobody wants to optimize that way, that's boring. I would posit, though, that everyone needs at least one or two white whale techniques, at least that's how I call them, one suboptimal technique that they are always working on in the background. Why? Because the technical demands are usually really high. There is usually a reason why a given technique is rare, and typically it's because it's hard to do and harder to make consistent. But these are fantastic challenges for the genuine martial artist. If you can problem solve your way to making something suboptimal even remotely consistent, then you can take those analytical and technical skills and apply them across all your training. I honestly think most people just want this part of the work to be done for them. I've seen a lot of people hand wave my argument when I discuss it with them, and they just tell me that's what they're paying teachers for. But that strikes me as just lazy and self-defeating. Even worse, it's almost anti-intellectual in a way. The underpinning sentiment of such a statement appears to be that they don't want to be weighed down with things like thoughts and ideas and originality, they just want to beat people up. Rare and less optimal techniques offer problems to martial artists that tend to be off the beaten path. Using them as a way to teach oneself to think creatively and technically about application is almost a lost art within martial arts, in my experience. Of course, the practical benefits don't just end there, either. Earlier, I mentioned that understanding MMA as this grand filter for what we quote-unquote think of as real is a massive oversimplification. What martial artists and martial arts fans seem to almost willfully ignore is the existence of the anti-meta, the off-meta. For those not familiar with the term, a meta is a term that refers to the most common techniques and tactics which are proven in bouts. The anti-meta, then, are those techniques and tactics that actively exploit gaps in the meta. This is often where we find so many supposedly suboptimal techniques. The fascinating part of this, at least to me, is how the existence of anti-meta is simultaneously celebrated and denied in popular martial arts culture. I hear all the time that with the advent of MMA and modern combat sports more generally, that we are now in this era where martial arts are all figured out, that this is the summit. Yet, I also hear about how MMA or sports like BJJ are constantly evolving. If those statements come out of the same mouth, you should be scratching your head because either martial arts are changing or they aren't. There is this trend for very short memories in the martial arts space. I vividly remember when karate was laughed at in MMA circles. The karate front kick does not work, or you can't fight with your hands down ever, or the in-and-out blitz style is never ever a good thing to do. Now you actually see everything I just mentioned in some measure in modern MMA, and people act like it was always there. Yet, once upon a time, before the right ambassador showed up, these were all locked in the shadow realm of the anti- or off-metas. People celebrate it when these things are shown to work, but will literally be demeaning and laughing about how ---- they are just the day prior. It's really kind of strange because it demonstrates that people just don't know where innovation actually comes from. Sure, sometimes it just sort of organically happens in a sparring match or a fight, but most of the time, it comes from a very smart coach or athlete or combination thereof taking a hard look at the competitive landscape and thinking, no, this thing no one does could definitely work out. It definitely has a space to carve out for itself. Remember, this is what Donahuer did with leg locks just as a really recent example. People thought they were low percentile and kind of scummy, even, when they did manage to work, but Donahuer realized that they lacked a clear system that was built around them to actually make them function. Not to take anything away from the leg locking itself, but a lot of the early success of this system came from how ignorant people were of the potential there. People who don't deal in the dark arts of off-meta and anti-meta things are always susceptible to getting caught with their pants down. Again, it takes creativity and knowledge to pull off. I'm not saying this should be the dominion of beginners, but I think there is a strong argument for intermediate practitioners to be dabbling in one or two suboptimal techniques. If this video has adequately convinced you, here is what I would suggest. First, pick a technique that is suboptimal or rare or whatever. Just choose something that you actually like. How good it is or how you think it could be really good in the future is immaterial. Choose it because you think it's kind of cool. In fact, that might be the best reason to choose it because you'll be invested in successfully pulling it off. You won't get bored of it. Next, identify why it is so rare and try to build it into your system. And finally, give this whole process time to breathe. This might be a multi-year project that you have running in the background of everything else. This technique doesn't have to be some secret weapon at tournaments, either. The reality is that you might never be able to bring it up to speed with your A-game, and that's fine because it's not really the point. The point is teaching yourself how to troubleshoot, how to analyze techniques and the landscape they fit into, and how to love the process. I know a lot of practitioners out there who are very, very martial, but they are the furthest thing from being artists. They have spent their whole careers imitating or letting coaches design everything for them. I even know hobbyists who try to delude themselves into thinking that by sticking to the road most traveled and by optimizing it even more than it already has been, they can unlock the secret silver bullet that elevates their game in like half a year or whatever. To me, this state of affairs is a lot more laughable than martial artists working on more obscure techniques. I'm not saying this should overtake your primary training, but I am saying that we need to be more comfortable going off-road a bit in our training. We only stand to get better for doing it. There will absolutely be people who think it's a waste of time or pointless or whatever else. Typically, that crowd, though, usually is super early into their own training or isn't really considering the big picture. Personally, I think the most important part of any martial art is getting to the point where you can make it your own. I've made that statement a few times on the channel, and I'm sometimes met with a bit of confusion about what I mean. What I mean is this. That you get to a point where you aren't just imitating your teacher or some champion or a senior student you happen to respect. Whether you're developing a popular technique in a direction that is very specific to you and your body type and your needs and your interests, or you're going out into the weeds to play with stuff that no one else is willing to, there comes a time when you have to come stylistically into your own. And I think this is where modern martial arts today are really suffering. At the very top, sure, people still manage this just fine, but on average across the entire population of practitioners, I see mostly people crowding into this well-paved, highly documented road. The issue, of course, is that you aren't your coach, nor are you that champion. Even if you one day stand next to them as a peer, you still won't be them. When we define what works or what's real by the metrics of popularity or visibility or even current successes, we are actually taking a stance against innovation, against the realism of change. They say that most geniuses were considered insane or heretics in their own time. I can think of no other field where this is quite so obvious as in martial arts today. For all the anti-traditionalist sentiments, for all the hyper-rationalist skepticism, the martial arts community at large seems to genuinely misunderstand where innovative ideas come from and how they grow. People genuinely seem to forget that it is often the very body of techniques that they say suck and don't work that produces major paradigm shifts. In a way, the martial arts community is that drunk uncle sports fan, screaming that you're making all the wrong decisions except when you actually managed to pull it off, he knew exactly what you were doing all along and was definitely on your side. And that is my spiel on training suboptimal techniques. I want to stress again that I'm advocating you go completely nuts and let all this stuff take over your normal training schedule. I'm just saying pick a couple things and play with them. Film yourself. Take some notes. Constantly try to improve techniques from different angles and try different solutions, even if they might be shots in the dark on paper. Approach this as a no-stress exercise in experimentation and personal growth. There are no deadlines and no real parameters for what counts as success. Just play, enjoy, and embrace a little unorthodox martial artistry. All right, that is all from me for now. I'll get back to that technique video and hopefully pump it out in a few hours, actually. Maybe 24. But for now, I want to thank you all for watching and listening. The growth on the channel has been phenomenal, and at the time of posting, we are inching ever closer to 5k. Which is, you know, about 5k more subscribers than I ever expected to get, so I'm very grateful for that. If you want to see the idea I put forth in this video a little bit more, and maybe in a specific example, I will be posting that technique video soon, and I'm going to go through step-by-step how I tend to think about techniques as I'm training them. Because I do think I have some pretty particular takes that are very specific to me about the technique in question. I will probably link that video at the end of this one when it's out, and maybe down in the comments so it's easy to get to. Anyway, I will catch you all in that one. For now, peace.