Hey guys I was having a conversation about self defence material with someone who teaches it and has a good reputation for doing so a few days ago , and something interested was said. I have always been of the mind that anything can work in a self defence situation if it is trained the right way and enough. And since everyone is different and fights differently then this would be okay. We all have our favorite stuff that we think we can do well and to some extent enjoy doing and training. The guy then said something that really spoke to me. He said "learning your favorite stuff for self defence is like taking your favorite number to a maths exam" At first I took this at face value, but then after further conversation I realised that he was not saying the " forget what you think you know its useless, only what i say works, works, and anything else will get you killed bit ". I discovered that what he meant was, ( at least as far as I saw it) Essentially yea, you can have a favorite number, theres no harm in that, and hey, if you go into an exam there is a chance that your favorite number may come into play and end up as part of the equasion. But If you dont know other numbers and how they react with one another and which numbers go where, its not going to do you any good. So you dont go into a maths exam having memorised 1000 answers and you know your favorite answers really well. What you do is you learn a few formulas that can be applied in every exam you take, then you can work out what you have to answer with. So put simply learning the math is the most important thing. You can specialize in a particular technique or set of them , be it kicks , wrestling ,elbows or whatever, and you may end up using these in a real situation, but just dont learn the stuff you want to, learn the important stuff as the core and then build up from there. This has lead me to my new motto in these cases "The low percentage stuff is there IF you need it, the high percentage stuff will be there WHEN you need it" Sorry , im sure this was probably already common knowledge to many, and many will think duh but it reall helped me with the way I think of things.
First you develop your favor "finish strategy". You then develop you favor "entering strategy" to lead to it. You now understand you lifetime training path. this way, you will spend your training time more effecency for the rest of your life. If you just learn a skill here and there, you will be like a headless chicken that will get to nowhere.
