Simplify Rather Than Decompose
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Someone recently asked me whether mixed martial arts (MMA) was Thai-boxing plus wrestling. Theoretically, MMA is a mix of various martial arts. In practice, it's an open-rules dynamical system. Within the open rules system (game) and judging criteria emerge solutions for scoring and scoring negations resembling various martial art techniques.
The optimal path to doing well in MMA isn't trying to learn various martial arts but instead learning to score effectively under the criteria. Things emerge that look like a Thai-boxing teep, a boxing jab, or a wrestling tackle, because they are effective under the criteria. Our bodies are attracted to those movements based on the objectives. Movement solutions our bodies are naturally attracted to are called attractors.
The game isn't a combination of games. The game is MMA. Since the game is always MMA, you're not fully embodying the game if you treat it as turn-based martial arts, where you get turns in each art. That adds needless complexity. You're playing karate, boxing, Thai-boxing, wrestling, and BJJ while also playing MMA.
It's like taking an orange and turning it into 50 different vitamin pills. It's not an orderly linear system, it's a hot mess.
Just as you can't go from game to game, hockey to tennis, you can't go from offense to defense. In combat sports, you're judged on all of it at once.
Decomposing any task is appealing because then you at least know the parts. However, that assumes knowing the parts is significant, but it's not.
The movements involved in reaching for a book on a bookshelf are nearly identical to that of a jab. Is it necessary to decompose that movement into various steps as you would for a jab? No. The movement to place something on a very high shelf is nearly identical to that of a basketball jump shot. The basketball jump shot, however, is broken down into five to eight parts. Do you need to know all that to do that movement effectively? No. Breaking it up and doing it step by step makes it rigid and impractical, yet people keep insisting.
The step-by-step decomposed theory of learning assumes that all our movements have different sets of instructions, and we learned them all by memorizing all the steps. Nope. If this were the case, babies would never learn to walk. In fact, we'd be stressed out and confused by the simplest movements. We would disable ourselves.
How would we ever learn to drive this way if you broke down every movement of your arms and legs step by step? We don't need different instructions for reaching, and we definitely don't need separate ones for reaching up vs. reaching down, yet we do this for up jabs and body jabs. We don't need thousands of hours of repetition to do this accurately.
Every variation in grappling is a brand new rodeo. We already know how to hug, yet we learn that all over again and overcomplicate it in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
Decomposition is always coupled with lots of replication, trying to identically replicate the steps for countless hours until so-called mastery. Repetition has to come hand in hand with decomposition; otherwise, decomposition wouldn't even make sense. This tandem is highly inefficient and therefore highly ineffective.
Decomposing works in theory but not in practice. What works better than decomposition in practice? Simplification. Rather than think, see, remember, step, step, step, step, and step, it's look and do. Look and see what's open, then shape your body to access that opening. When you see a shot coming, reshape your body to eliminate that opening.
Open your eyes, feel with your senses, and go for what's open while eliminating your opponent's access to your body. How you access and block access doesn't need to be decomposed. How it looks is not important. Whether it went through the correct steps is not important. What is important is how effectively you are accessing and blocking access. You don't access and block access one at a time, you do them simultaneously.
If you do everything step by step and art by art, then you can't do two simultaneous 12-step processes at once. You also can't go through all the various steps in each phase of each martial art at once. But if you don't think about it as multiple arts, steps, or turns, you can just think about what is allowed while stopping your opponent from doing the same. If the task is so simple, you can actually do multiple things at once. If the task is noisy, meaning it has a lot of irrelevant information, you have to concentrate on each step one at a time. You have to because there's too much noise with no signal.
If you only train in Thai-boxing, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or a much more constrained game than MMA where you don't have to think about multiple arts, it makes even less sense to decompose and overcomplicate. However, capitalism likes complications because it makes knowledge seem sacred and only attainable by sages.
That's the psychological effect. The practical economic effect is that this creates fictional scarcity and value. The more complicated the instructor makes it seem, the more they can break it into irrelevant parts. The more irrelevant information there is, the more valuable it appears to an indoctrinated and orientalist consumer. It's about the volume of information and attaining secret knowledge rather than what is useful or relevant.
Studies consistently show that explaining a task simply, like teaching a basketball shot as if you were placing a cookie on a shelf, works better than teaching several steps. If you asked people what they thought was more valuable, they would probably say all the irrelevant steps because they wouldn't know it's irrelevant. We start with the assumption that steps are always necessary. In the scenario above, people would wrongly assume the simple task explanation would be less effective because it has less information. They fail to realize that the simple task had more relevant information than the 12-step process.
If you were a magician, simplification vs. decomposition is the difference between learning how to cast a spell through a long, convoluted incantation or being able to cast it without saying anything at all. What's more practical? The speed of words is light years slower than game speed.
My four-year-old told me that people talking a lot about nothing is called a meeting. I'll add that's also what passes for teaching.
Decomposition doesn't actually simplify. Simplification simplifies and makes everything you do seamless and simultaneous. Water has no gaps and is every shape at once.
Being like water doesn't mean flowing linearly through a series of steps. It means accessing every gap. Once you abandon trying to do things that are authentic to an art for what is authentic to you and your affordances, the more you will actually be like water.
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