What if you just train one technique for the next 2 years?

Assume you just train one technique for the next 2 years such as "a kick to the knee followed by a punch to the face". If you repeat this combo 2,000 times daily with your partner (about 2 hours), in 2 years you have repeated this 2 x 365 x 2000 = 1,460,000 times.

After you have drilled this move almost 1.5 million times, when you use it against your opponent, your successful rate should be high. IMO, it's worthwhile to spend 2 years of your life time to develop some dependable MA skill so you can use it for the rest of your life.

What's your opinion on this?
My opinion is that it's counter productive. I'm of the mindset that having a good balance is more beneficial than training just one combination like that. Sometimes an opponent will get a good read on your strategy and techniques. When this happens a person has to be able to switch things up.
 
Assume you just train one technique for the next 2 years such as "a kick to the knee followed by a punch to the face". If you repeat this combo 2,000 times daily with your partner (about 2 hours), in 2 years you have repeated this 2 x 365 x 2000 = 1,460,000 times.

After you have drilled this move almost 1.5 million times, when you use it against your opponent, your successful rate should be high. IMO, it's worthwhile to spend 2 years of your life time to develop some dependable MA skill so you can use it for the rest of your life.

What's your opinion on this?
If a frog had a clutch, it wouldn't jump.
 
Maybe he key is in finding the right balance.

Enough.
Not too much.
Not too little.

Practicing only one thing for two years is too little. It will become boring. There is no point.

Practicing Everything is too much. It is counter-productive because you become stretched too thin.

Maybe suggesting something that is extreme in either direction is kinda pointless.
 
If you can develop 1 bread and butter move (door guarding skill) within 2 years time, in 10 years, you can develop 5 bread and butter moves. How many bread and butter moves will you need through your life time?

If you have only used your "cross" to knock down your opponent, but you have never used "hook" or "uppercut" to knock down your opponent, that means the cross is your bread and butter move but hook and uppercut are not. It will be worthwhile to spend those 4 years to develop your hook and uppercut.

The MA skill development can be as simple as to add 1 tool into your toolbox at any particular time.
 
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I think honing a set of techniques is a great idea. So getting really good at entering and exiting is great. Getting really good at pulling someone in your guard and submitting them is great. Getting really good at keeping someone from closing distance is great.

The issue comes when you start teaching others your system, and they train against one another. Using a fictional 'bill wallace twin' as an example. Let's say I, as Wallaces twin, am incredibly skillful at fighting people by keeping them in kicking range. And I can beat most people by keeping them at that range. I open up a school, and teach my students that skill. Now they practice against each other, and develop the habit of fighting long range, against someone who also wants to fight long range.

Then one day they go against a boxer, or a wrestler, who doesn't have a need to fight at long range. While clearly there are skills to keep them at long range (I as Bills twin used it for that), these students have never learned that skill, so they don't know how to react to this guy trying to clinch or throw them. So they lose.

The point I'm trying to make is: You can practice a technique once, or you can practice it a thousand times. But if you don't have experience using it against opponents that try a thousand different techniques, you won't know how to use it effectively.
 
My opinion is that it's counter productive. I'm of the mindset that having a good balance is more beneficial than training just one combination like that. Sometimes an opponent will get a good read on your strategy and techniques. When this happens a person has to be able to switch things up.
And I always wonder, what if you run into someone who trained just as well to counter that one thing, because he hates losing to it?
 
If you can develop 1 bread and butter move (door guarding skill) within 2 years time, in 10 years, you can develop 5 bread and butter moves. How many bread and butter moves will you need through your life time?

I'll probably never need any of them again, realistically. But I have about 5 right now, without ever spending a whole 2 years focused on any of them. I focus part of my training on what I want to really depend on - one or two techniques or strategies at a time for a while - and let the rest of my training be more general, to ensure I don't get bored and don't have big holes in my overall ability. If someone with experience wanted to focus most of their training for a while (I'd say 6 months, maximum, is more reasonable for best returns on effort) on one technique, that would make sense.

If you have only used your "cross" to knock down your opponent, but you have never used "hook" or "uppercut" to knock down your opponent, that means the cross is your bread and butter move but hook and uppercut are not. It will be worthwhile to spend those 4 years to develop your hook and uppercut.

The MA skill development can be as simple as to add 1 tool into your toolbox at any particular time.
Okay, that's more like what I was saying above, though, again, it shouldn't take 2 years of complete focus to develop a technique to that level. I think a lot of us actually take that approach in concept. We find something new (or something old we haven't developed the way we want) and we work on it until it gets to where we want it to be - whether that's making it our bread-and-butter move (what I call a "pocket technique"), or just building some functional skill in it.
 
My opinion is that it's counter productive. I'm of the mindset that having a good balance is more beneficial than training just one combination like that. Sometimes an opponent will get a good read on your strategy and techniques. When this happens a person has to be able to switch things up.
But how good of a read is someone you never met actually going to get?

Example:
Guy tries to attack me in the bar because he thinks I’m trying to take his girlfriend home. I use Kung Fu Wang’s example of kick to the knee - high punch. By the time he gets a read on me, I’ve alread blown out his knee. Am I going to need to do that combo more than once against him?
 
But how good of a read is someone you never met actually going to get?

Example:
Guy tries to attack me in the bar because he thinks I’m trying to take his girlfriend home. I use Kung Fu Wang’s example of kick to the knee - high punch. By the time he gets a read on me, I’ve alread blown out his knee. Am I going to need to do that combo more than once against him?

Maybe. Lots of people get kicked in the knee and punched in the head without being destroyed.
 
If you can develop 1 bread and butter move (door guarding skill) within 2 years time, in 10 years, you can develop 5 bread and butter moves. How many bread and butter moves will you need through your life time?

If you have only used your "cross" to knock down your opponent, but you have never used "hook" or "uppercut" to knock down your opponent, that means the cross is your bread and butter move but hook and uppercut are not. It will be worthwhile to spend those 4 years to develop your hook and uppercut.

The MA skill development can be as simple as to add 1 tool into your toolbox at any particular time.
It is entirely reasonable to develop more than one bread and butter move at the same time, in two years.

You are still presenting this extreme scenario where only one thing is possible. That does not sit with reality. We don’t need to be limited by a choice of just one thing or just one other thing.
 
Only training one thing for years sounds like training to be a one legged man in an **** kicking contest.....gonna be a little limited.

What if the person you are fighting spent 3 years training the counter to your one move?
 
There are many good points above. But the thing that worries me the most is in today's teaching environment, where in the sequence of sweeps, or whatever move you decide to use in your school, do you place belt promotions, including higher belts? :D
 
There are many good points above. But the thing that worries me the most is in today's teaching environment, where in the sequence of sweeps, or whatever move you decide to use in your school, do you place belt promotions, including higher belts? :D
I don't understand the question, OTH.
 
Assume you just train one technique for the next 2 years such as "a kick to the knee followed by a punch to the face". If you repeat this combo 2,000 times daily with your partner (about 2 hours), in 2 years you have repeated this 2 x 365 x 2000 = 1,460,000 times.

After you have drilled this move almost 1.5 million times, when you use it against your opponent, your successful rate should be high. IMO, it's worthwhile to spend 2 years of your life time to develop some dependable MA skill so you can use it for the rest of your life.

What's your opinion on this?
I feel like I would lose my flow. Good technique isn't just crisp execution, but the ability to flow from one to the next. I feel that negecting the latter would invalidate the former.
 
I feel like I would lose my flow. Good technique isn't just crisp execution, but the ability to flow from one to the next. I feel that negecting the latter would invalidate the former.
I guess that depends how we look at the concept KFW has in the OP. I'm starting to think maybe he has a different idea in mind than I originally read in it (since he's clarified he's talking also about doing this repeatedly). So, if I spent a concentrated period of time (okay, maybe not 2 years, but let's keep that for discussion) working on my hip throw, I'd want to also work on how to set it up. That would be part of training it extensively. So, I'd have to work on the flow from other techniques into a hip throw. Then I'd want to train recoveries - the better I can recover if the throw fails, the more confidently I can commit to it. So, I'd train working from various points of failure in a hip throw into other techniques.

So, if we broaden the concept from only training one technique to training AROUND one technique (the set-ups, the entrances, the recoveries, the exits, etc.), then maybe it makes more sense.
 
Ever have one of those moments when the whole picture suddenly gets really clear for a moment? Happened to me last week. I became kind of overwhelmed with the realization of how all the different techniques I'd been training were just reflections of exactly the same concept, applied in different situations ....like the same wine in different shaped bottles.

Maybe if you look at it that way, one technique or many ...what difference does it make? If you get the big picture, they come down to the same thing.

Or was I under the influence of too much Dr. Pepper? :p
 
I don't understand the question, OTH.
I interpreted it as if you’re teaching one technique for years, what criteria do you use to rank/promote your student. Not a bad question at all if you’re a teacher who has a ranking system and students are hung up on rank.
 
Ever have one of those moments when the whole picture suddenly gets really clear for a moment? Happened to me last week. I became kind of overwhelmed with the realization of how all the different techniques I'd been training were just reflections of exactly the same concept, applied in different situations ....like the same wine in different shaped bottles.

Maybe if you look at it that way, one technique or many ...what difference does it make? If you get the big picture, they come down to the same thing.

Or was I under the influence of too much Dr. Pepper? :p
That's kind of what I was getting at with all those words I used earlier. This is a shorter - probably clearer - statement of it. And there is no such thing as "too much Dr. Pepper".
 
I guess that depends how we look at the concept KFW has in the OP. I'm starting to think maybe he has a different idea in mind than I originally read in it (since he's clarified he's talking also about doing this repeatedly). So, if I spent a concentrated period of time (okay, maybe not 2 years, but let's keep that for discussion) working on my hip throw, I'd want to also work on how to set it up. That would be part of training it extensively. So, I'd have to work on the flow from other techniques into a hip throw. Then I'd want to train recoveries - the better I can recover if the throw fails, the more confidently I can commit to it. So, I'd train working from various points of failure in a hip throw into other techniques.

So, if we broaden the concept from only training one technique to training AROUND one technique (the set-ups, the entrances, the recoveries, the exits, etc.), then maybe it makes more sense.
Well yes, but even then you'd have to neglect the rest of your game.

Let's take your hip throw example; there's a lot of ways to get there. Maybe you off balance him with some sort of strike and step in, or maybe you fake a double and go high, maybe you get it from an over under clinch, maybe you catch him on an over extension or he tried some spinning **** from too close. Etcetera etcetera...

Sure, you can train for all these variables and more, but are you really training around one technique at that point?
 

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