What was good?

How many sessions have you had where 60 things have gone right, and three things have gone… not so well? Yet, all you focus on the way home is the mistakes. Is this how our brains are wired? Or are we just suckers for punishment?

Part of me thinks this might be hardwired in our brains for the sake of survival. Which, most likely, is a remnant of our cave-man days. If we were walking around and found some berries that were tasty and didn’t make us sick then cool, have a little feed. Whereas, if we find some berries that make us so sick that we end up curled in a little ball and couldn’t get back to the cave, leaving us to spend the night outside the cave, in the cold. That could mean death and as you can imagine, we would focus on those three berries we ate that made us sick rather than the tasty ones. The same goes for animals; our lives depended on us avoiding dangerous animals, leading us to feel fear and get a shot of adrenaline to run away as fast as we can. Even though we have big brains, in a straight up fight, a lot of animals are beating us as, relatively speaking, we are not strong or fast.

So, what does this matter since we don’t live in caves anymore? When we are training, the survival part of our brains does not know the difference between sport, business and a fight to the death. The brain releases the same chemicals in stressful situations. So, relating this to survival, we are programmed to remember bad situations to avoid that danger in the future. We have all had those sessions (BJJ) where you have a senior rank on their back for 5:30sec then in the last 30 seconds, they reverse the position and tap you out. To people that grapple, that is a loss as you got tapped out, however on reflection that is a win. You have managed to maintain a position for most of that round that at the very end you got caught. Considering who you are against, that showing may be classed a victory. This is not avoiding the fact that you got tapped out – what should matter is developing different measuring requirements against different opponents. If you are grappling with that person you just do not want to lose to, you keep position then catch them twice – victory. Against that person just that bit better, holding your own and getting caught once – victory. Then against the top dog, just maintaining position regardless what else happens that is a victory. In different fight sports that are different measures of victory but focusing on the positives is one of the hardest things to do.

When fighting in MMA/ Kickboxing, you can have a second-round stoppage and feel really damn good about the fight. In your head, you were fast, technical and did things right to get that finish. Then you watch the replay and it’s like they have put the fight in slow motion and all you can see are things you did wrong. Think of it like a group photo, where you think you look bad, your legs look chubby, your belly looks fat, ears stick out, weird expression on your face – we have all been there. So why do we think we look bad but everyone else in that photo looks good? Then to make it even more fun, everyone else has the same thought process, so why are we negative about ourselves but positive about others? You’d think if anything, it should be the other way around. So, what I did with people that fought out of Lockdown was to get them to watch the video of their fight and tell me the things that they did well and what they are happy about. Anyone can watch a fight and say what was wrong. As I am writing this, UFC 242 is on and there will be millions of armchair critics telling the best fighters in the world what they are doing wrong through their TV’s.

On the flip-side of this though, in order to improve, we do need to learn from our mistakes. When you get caught by the same move from the same person week after week, you do need to look at what you are doing and change to avoid that mistake. From my perspective, I always found it hard against the top people as sometimes you felt like you held your own, or even got the better of them, then other times you get your ass kicked. This always confused me as I was unsure if they were trying things or taking it easy against me when I was going well. Then every now and then, they just wanted to show who was boss and kick my ass. If I knew they were giving 100% each time, then I could gauge how I was going. I still don’t know to this day what level they were going. It bugs me as this is still an issue in my training. This got me to tell one of my students who’s goal it was to avoid any and all chokes during a round against me. He defended all my attacks, even my best submission 4 times, then due to fatigue I caught him at the very end of the round. He was pissed off, so I made sure to go over to him and told him to think about the 14 chokes that he defended well, including 4 from my best attack. He was also told that I was giving it 100% and that the defence was damn good. Truth be told, I was happy to see him pissed off as at the end of the day you should be a bit grumpy when you make a mistake as that means you want to improve. It’s just that the sole focus shouldn’t be on the one mistake. 

We are on the knifes’ edge of improvement. One thing you can be sure of is when you start focusing on the things you are doing wrong the session tends to go down hill from there. If you manage to remember the good things you are doing then you can keep mentally balanced and have a balanced session. We all lose this balance, both in the good and bad ways, when you do have a shocker, try to keep it in perspective and think about some of the good you did in that session.  

 Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor