Having the right tools

When we think of any job that needs to be done, among the first steps is to get the tools together that will be needed. Think of any household project you've done in the past and you get the sense of the routine, you form a basic, or exact (depending on your nature), checklist of must-haves to complete the task. When we think of it, many times it plays out this way: you have the tools you needed to finish, you improvised with what tools you had in order to finish (ever used a wrench as a hammer?), or you were completely stumped when you didn't have the right set of tools (I'll do it tomorrow when I can borrow my buddy's power drill, etc).


In MMA it's much the same way. Each day you come to training you should be thinking of it as shopping at the hardware store. You think of what tools you want, what tools you've seen people use, what tools you were lacking before, and what tools you use constantly and simply want to upgrade. In any given position or situation you should be able to reach into that toolbox and pull out what you need (or can improvise with if it comes to it). Think it through, in many cases fighters will use the SAME technique over and over again all the way through to the highest levels of competition (find video of George St. Pierre's guard pass and you'll note how he's been using the same "simple" techniques successfully for years). Not to give away too much information, but I'm actually in the same mold as I've been using the same 3/4 guard passes for YEARS now--tailor made to opponents in my weightclass which therefore have mixed results with much larger opponents (for them I keep a few other tricks).

Another thing to factor in is that cluttering your garage is a viable extension of that metaphor. Literally, you can have too much junk. This makes it difficult to find what you need, leaves much technique around getting 'rusty', and let's not forget wasted efforts as you consider all of the tools you picked up that you never used--no matter how cool you thought they were. Keep it simple, keep it orderly, and in that way keep it efficient.

Try to work on that part of preparation and you too will have the ability to reach into your box and pull out a handful of trusty tools.