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If you’re anything like me, you watch with a careful eye the pre-fight workouts of MMA fighter, boxers, etc. I watch for obvious technical errors while they shadow box, hit the pads, and/or grapple.

Have you ever been fooled by this?

Last night I was watching a young kid who the announcers were bragging on his exceptional boxing skills. As I watched his pre-fight warm-up, I noticed 3 things that caught my attention.

1. When he threw fast combinations, his hands were down.
2. Every time he threw a shot, he exhaled making a “HAH” sound with his mouth open.
3. When he threw his right cross, he curved it down after hitting the pad.

Now the first thing I thought was if someone were fast enough, they may be able to take advantage of these mistakes. The kid was fast, so that may be why he was able to get away with these errors.

When the match started, I saw none of these errors in his performance. Well, maybe the first one a little bit, but nothing as pronounced as in the pre-fight warm-up.

What happened? Was he purposefully performing these mistakes to mislead? I don’t think so. He may have been playing to the camera a bit, though.

But his performance was exceptional. So the question that begs to be asked is:

Does technical perfection equal exceptional performance?

Obviously not…

So why spend so much time on technical mastery?

I’m sure we’ve all seen the guy who throws wild punches and is technically unsound both during his pre-fight warm-up AND during his fight. This same guy ends up knocking out most of his opponents through sheer agression and punching power. This is not what I’m talking about, though. This guy will eventually get owned by someone with technical skill and power.

What I’m talking about is the guy who only shows a few flaws in his training performance, but his fighting performance turns out to be exceptional.

Where do you find the balance between technical expertise and fighting performance? Or is there a difference in your mind?

Interesting questions, to say the least.

_{Copyright 2008
Kip Brockett
All Rights Reserved}

Tags: mastery, performance, pre-fight, technical

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Articles, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.