MMA Metagame: Prioritization
Photo by Mike Roach/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
In my previous MMA Metagame article, I analyzed the difficulty surrounding successful adjustments in MMA and how many different steps must be taken to ensure that those adjustments will stick. This time around, I will be extrapolating on some topics I’ve touched on previously with a focus on prioritization in a fighter’s development and how balanced prioritization might not necessarily be in the best interest of a competitor.
Introduction
If anybody reading is interested in testing the waters of combat sports analysis, one of the basic ground rules is to pick what you’ve seen from a fighter. Obviously, this is easier said than done. Sometimes, a fighter’s sample size is frustratingly limited to the point where any concrete assessment of their skills is hinged on some sort of presumption. For the sake of simplicity, however, just revisit the mainline lesson from the last metagame article I wrote: fighters tend to just be who they are.
Except when they’re not. The development of a fighter is as crucial to proper assessment as their skillset. Be it early or late in a career, how a fighter is coached and (more specifically) designed can bear enormous ramifications on their potential for success. The focal point of this article is to analyze prioritization in a fighter’s training, the difference between games and skills, what a well-rounded game can mean in the modern MMA sphere, and proper and improper examples of technical implementation.
Know Thyself
To crib from yet another analyst and friend of The Fight Site, Connor Ruebusch, the most important rule for any fighter is to know thyself.
Since I made hay with the Q&A approach in my last article, I’ll keep that train rolling here for brevity’s sake. Here are the two basic questions that every fighter should be able to answer at any given time:
Where do you want the fight to take place?
How do you actively take or keep the fight in said place?
It is a mark of inexperience and even disinterest when young fighters mix these questions up. Lando Vannata looked like a speedy, punch-rolling dervish upon his entry to the UFC, but now that his confidence and physicality have been beaten out of him, I’m not entirely sure he could give a concrete answer to these questions.
Conversely, the fighters who know exactly who they are and what they should be doing tend to be the most effective, even if their solutions aren’t always textbook. Colby Covington is a suffocating blend of pressure, clinching, and offensive wrestling. He combines all of these threats into an entertaining game that leverages pace and output. Sure, there are dozens of problems with his technique, but with enough initiative behind him, he is tough to deter. Beating Covington becomes a question of how to circumvent or punish Colby from playing his own game.
If you’ve been following along, then it should come as no surprise that the job of a fighter and a coach is to answer the previous two questions, then back them up with training. When Covington failed shot takedowns on the outside against Wagner Silva, it was a safe bet that his training needed to prioritize more pressure and activity to disguise his level-changing threats as well as to push opponents into being reactive. While that same eagerness got him submitted quickly by Warlley Alves in his very next fight, Colby and his team took that defeat as more of a ‘cost of doing business’ type of lesson, as opposed to a direct rebuke of his streamlined approach.
Covington became a very effective fighter from an early point in his career, because he understood exactly what it was that he was supposed to be doing in a fight at any given moment and he broadened his technical skillset to accompany those priorities. As a decorated collegiate wrestler, Colby was rarely ever in risk of being taken down for any extended period of time by his MMA opposition. He also learned how to weaponize his own pace, instead of simply controlling it. While sizable holes in his technical striking and mechanics remain, the sheer pace, volume, and forward-momentum that he puts on opponents is usually enough to paper over the holes. There are plenty of criticisms to be had with the individual pieces of Colby’s technical game, but he is a great example of a fighter who prioritized his training effectively and knew exactly how to own the initiative against his opponents from the word go. However, when contrasted against Kamaru Usman, plenty of Colby’s weaknesses became evident and it was clear which of the two had trained the more enduring improvements into their games. More on this later.
Training Priority
To properly prioritize a fighter’s training, a few things need to be made absolutely clear:
You must know your own context.
Ancillary skills are crucial, but you don’t have to be great at everything.
You must learn how to dictate a fight on your own terms.
Being well-rounded is crucial, but committing to a well-rounded approach has plenty of downsides.
I’m willing to bet that most people reading this have encountered a ‘Build the perfect fighter’ meme on Twitter or Reddit, with most of the pervading answers being some amalgam of Jon Jones’ fight IQ, Cody Garbrandt’s boxing, or Daniel Cormier’s wrestling. I like being thorough in these pieces, so I guess I should debunk why this sort of technical conformity is beyond idiotic, so here it goes. You can’t strip everything away from a fighter down to one singular element before fitting it into a broad mold of what you imagine a fighter should be. Plenty of these elements would be at odds with each other at best, and detrimental to each other at worst. This entire thought exercise is akin to the lowest common denominator of fight fans, and beyond that, it completely misses the point.
At the very least, though, it does illustrate the enormous misconception of what a balanced fighter looks like. If you are going to commit to being an offensive grappler who attacks from top position, your solution to rounding out your skillset shouldn’t be as reductive as training your boxing in isolation or learning how to throw a single body kick. These ancillary tools are not without merit for any fighter, including grapplers, but a large quantity of fighters in MMA train these skills because they are under the misguided pretense that having a better body kick will automatically make them more threatening on the feet. Thus, fighters will not want to strike with them as much if they have threats there, making the pursuit of grappling situations more viable. In actuality, it is rarely ever that cut-&-dry.
At a certain point, this can become an effective strategy. It is good to have a few reliable tools in an area where you aren’t normally comfortable, since they can back you up if employing your A-game becomes difficult. My criticism is with fighters who never learn how to weave these threats together to play into their A-games, meaning that their ancillary skills are developed entirely in isolation. MMA is a sport built on linking the disciplines of fighting in a way that contributes to an overall goal within a fight. A couple of sharpened tools won’t build structures on their own.
The best example I can give to highlight this problem is Ronda Rousey. Analyst and friend of The Fight Site, Phil Mackenzie put Ronda’s technical game into better terms than I could:
“She may not have pretty form when she's showing off her deadly drill-punches while shadow-boxing, but she hits very hard and when she does is then almost immediately locking up a collar tie or a bodylock. From there it's an impressively blended Thai Plumm, single collar punches or trip takedown game. In all of these phases Ronda is genuinely one of the most integrated, seamless fighters in the sport. The problem is the areas outside of this mini-ecosystem,” (UFC 207: Amanda Nunes vs. Ronda Rousey Toe to Toe Preview - A Complete Breakdown).
Effectively, Ronda trained her boxing (under the tutelage of now-infamous head coach, Edmund Tarverdyan) as a separate entity to her grappling ‘ecosystem.’ Unlike Georges St-Pierre, who figured out how to disguise his jab with level-changes and vice versa from the very beginning of his career, Rousey never garnered the same depth or utility in her boxing. For one, she flatly just wasn’t good at it, and to some extent, I can forgive this. Striking never came to her as easily as grappling, which is perfectly understandable for many career grapplers. I’m not knocking Ronda for never becoming particularly comfortable on the feet, but I am knocking her for committing to her boxing despite it lacking any direct application within her grappling. She insisted on (or was coached into) using an isolated, supplemental piece of her skillset that didn’t inform her main game at all.
Ronda never learned how to throw a left hook to the body to initiate the clinch. A Tri-Star illusory feinted jab to mask level changes was never there. Rousey’s pressuring footwork was always linear and plodding, meaning that she had no real ability to close distance other than just charging at girls. If she encountered the rare opponent capable of framing out of the clinch, Rousey never had the polish, skill, or intuition to punch on breaks. In essence, she was a clinch wrestler who also knew a little bit of boxing, and that is not the same thing as being well-rounded. Numerous other technical and personal problems existed within Rousey’s game, (including personal anxiety), but some of the blame of her crushing defeats can be attributed to a misguided prioritization of her training. Rousey is probably the best example I can give of a fighter who computed her training goals completely wrong, and had every one of the litany of holes in her game ripped wide open so badly that she never recovered.
So, how do you find a coach able and willing to prioritize your training correctly? MMA is still young, and therefore pretty homogenized. Even some of the best gyms in the world shortcut a lot of fighters when it comes to their specific, individualistic training and gameplanning. Some gyms incentivize fighters to learn skills by proxy and their training might not be centered around them, specifically, such as Dan Hooker at City Kickboxing. Some coaches attempt to paint all of their fighters with the same broad brush, which can lead to disastrous effects if a fighter doesn’t fit their mold, like Mirsad Bektic discovered in his middling move to Tri-Star.
It isn’t even purely the responsibilities of the coaches, either. Plenty of fighters have opted to make massive stylistic changes in response to a loss, often at the expense of their own games. After a legendarily violent fight with Dustin Poirier, Max Holloway seemed to make the concession to fight more defensively in his next bout with Frankie Edgar, but initiating exchanges less isn’t the same thing as limiting exchanges. This newfound defensively-minded, but not particularly defensively-robust approach was clunky and Max was a far less effective fighter, despite being an ostensibly safer one. The priority for Max changed, but it wasn’t adapted to match his core skillset, so I can safely call this an ineffective revamp. (To Max’s credit, he went to great lengths to rectify this approach in a phenomenal second bout with Alexander Volkanovski, which many people believe he won.)
Games & Skills
It shouldn’t have taken me five articles to approach this distinction, but here we are.
A technical game is the entirety of a fighter’s skillset. Games are comprised of who/what a fighter is, what a fighter wants to do within a fight, and the surrounding parentheticals of a fighter’s process. Fighters can, and often should, have more than one game within a fight. Analysts usually refer to these as a fighter’s A-game, B-game, C-game, etc.
Skills are the individual characteristics within a fighter’s game. They should inform whatever the game of a fighter is. The effectiveness and depth of a fighter’s game is determined by their skill proficiency. A fighter’s skill likely decreases relative to their corresponding game. For example, if pressure/cutting the ring is a fighter’s A-game and outside ringcraft is said fighter’s B-game, then it is safe to assume that they are less skilled on the outside than on the front foot.
Naturally, the skills should inform the game. If they do, there is a damn good chance that a fighter’s training has been prioritized correctly. On the flip side, what happens when a fighter’s skills don’t directly translate to their ability to play their game?
As I stated previously, these can be meaningless at the best of times and actively detrimental at the worst of times. Frankie Edgar’s multifaceted wrestle-boxing game was clearly established from fairly early on in his career. For the most part, he did a good job over the years of deepening his toolbox with improved chain wrestling, more deliberate movement, better wrestling entries and throwaways, and an ability to sit down on his punches. However, during his technical climb, he concurrently developed a spinning back kick, which has literally never amounted to any significant offense for Edgar whatsoever. It’s not an especially consistent technique he opts for, but it is still a completely superfluous addition to his skillset. If Edgar’s spinning kicks were subtracted from his game today, nothing of value would be lost and he would effectively remain the exact same fighter. This might seem like a harsh criticism, specifically for such a minimal technique, but Edgar’s game is deep enough that this random addition to his skillset sticks out like a sore thumb.
Bluntly, the skill didn’t inform the game at all, and I wish I could say this was an uncommon occurrence, but it is not. Take a close look at developing fighters, and try to pinpoint how many skills they develop alongside their core skillset, instead of within or surrounding their core skillset. Any good MMA game should flow together, because the pieces link in such a way that it allows a fighter to better dictate the shape of a fight on their terms. This is half the reason why priority of individual techniques means anything at all. The jab is a popular and effective tool, because it has a high-percentage chance of landing or at least creating some sort of reaction from an opponent, whilst also remaining at a fairly low-percentage chance of being punished consistently. Obviously, no technique in MMA is 100% effective all of the time against every type of opponent, but from a neutral starting point within a fight, these types of “high-percentage of effectiveness; low-percentage of risk” attacks are preferable. If Edgar were as diligent with his spinning kicks as he was with his jab, we probably would’ve seen him get knocked out quite a bit more often.
I would recommend finding a tool that mirrors or informs your core skillset to establish a threat (for instance, a level-changing jab), and a tool that doesn’t to maximize this setup. GSP’s wrestling and jabbing interplay is still revolutionary, and both threats worked in unison to defuse opponents. In isolation, both his wrestling and his jab were good tools. Synergistically, they became great. Then, the Canadian took it a step further with rounding out ancillary skills that could serve him in building off the jab. He improved his shot selection, became a decent kicker, and even strived towards improved combination punching. In contrast to Rousey, Georges was a wrestler who sported improved, capable striking, which functioned in concert with his primary game. He wasn’t the best kicker or combination puncher in the world, but he didn’t have to be, since the purpose of these tools wasn’t in isolation, nor were they ever meant to be GSP’s primary tools. Remove Georges’ wrestling from the equation, and he immediately becomes a demonstrably less effective fighter.
Since we’re discussing prioritization, it is worth pointing out how this can change a fighter’s training schedule. Assuming that a fighter spends most of their time in the gym honing their primary game, and subsequently develops everything surrounding that game, their training schedule should look something like a pyramid.
Top layer: Everything else.
Third layer: Secondary supplemental threat antithetical to your game.
Second layer: First supplemental threat mirroring or tangential to your game.
Bottom layer: Primary game and whatever skills directly and consistently inform your game.
Kamaru Usman is an example of a fighter who first developed his primary game, and then developed the ancillary skills surrounding his game to further employ his primary skillset. Usman was a pressure wrestler from the very beginning of his MMA career, and to this day, smashing opponents from top position is probably still his preferred operating space in a fight. (You can argue Usman is more determined as a clinch fighter than as a pure wrestler, but it’s all the same for the point I’m trying to make.) However, he continued trending the auxiliary pieces of his game in the exact way I described and it has turned him into one of the best fighters in the world.
His bottom layer was pressure wrestling, but he quickly learned that he would require more polish to compete with the best in the division. So, he developed a jab from the orthodox stance, and he used it similar to the way GSP did before him. He wasn’t nearly as comfortable with his jab as Georges became, but he made an effort to establish and employ his jab as a threat, which paired well with his A-game. The pressuring jab and the aggressive level changes succeeded in backing opponents up and making them wary of everything Usman had to offer.
Then, Usman rounded out the third layer of his game with a commitment to combination punching (particularly to the body) and kicking. This informed his jab nicely, simply because he improved out of sight as a striker. While criticism exists for Usman as a pure kickboxer, he slotted his third layer of priority into his developmental pyramid beautifully. Today, you can watch Usman jab and feint more regularly, throw body-head combinations to push opponents back and break down their cardio, and hit their body in brief neutral clinches in open space. Now, Usman is winning tactical battles with more regularity which always feed into the larger strategic battle he is fighting. The best part is that none of these improvements have come at the cost of Usman’s clinch, wrestling, or top control. He is as systematic a fighter as ever, but the skills have become more polished, which in turn, allows for a more fluid execution of every piece of his game. Kamaru Usman has turned himself into an extremely difficult fighter to beat.
The Pain of Rounding Well
Kamaru Usman is an example of a specialized fighter who prioritized his training to become increasingly well-rounded, so let’s look at an example of a fighter who was built from the ground up to be well-rounded in every phase.
Georges St-Pierre’s protégé, Rory MacDonald, represents the best and the worst of the well-rounded profile in MMA. His physical ceiling was decidedly lower than that of his predecessor, which meant that Georges’ explosive wrestling entries needed to be timed with even more precision. While Rory’s jab was extraordinarily dimensional in its own right, it lacked the same weight of Georges’, making it tougher for Rory to scare guys off from walking him down if they simply accepted being hit by it. There may have been different elements of fighting that Rory excelled at more than Georges did (specifically, his first-layer of defense), but Rory was a less polished fighter than Georges in many of their comparable areas and thus, a less effective fighter.
Considering who his predecessor is, this shouldn’t be taken as a massive insult to Rory MacDonald. On the contrary, he managed to configure ways to nab the initiative of a fight on his own accord. He learned how to dial up specific areas within his game to prepare different approaches for various opponents. Against Demian Maia, Rory leaned heavily on his sprawling, combination punching, and defensive guard from bottom position. Against Tyron Woodley, Rory utilized long kicks to cut off exits along the fence, feinted Woodley out of his pants with the jab, and even managed to utilize some offensive wrestling of his own. Across these two fights, nearly every facet of Rory MacDonald’s balanced game was on display. There was clearly a great deal of breadth in the Canadian’s toolbox, and that is a plus.
On the other hand, Rory represents plenty of the negatives in the well-rounded approach as well. The first of the two major questions was easy to answer for Rory, because the answer largely adapted to his opponent and where they were strongest. It was the ‘how’ question that MacDonald began to struggle with as time wore on. Rory wasn’t the enforcer that Georges was when it came to wrestling and the changeup between his threats wasn’t nearly as potent. So, beating Rory basically became a matter of locking him out of at least one area of comfort. Robbie Lawler didn’t possess the same breadth of skill that Rory did, but in a more singular sense, he had quite a bit more depth. Lawler possessed the defensive wrestling to shut down Rory’s takedown attempts and force the measured Canadian into an aggressive, layered striking war. To his credit, Rory performed quite well in this style of fight, but as the bout wore on, it was clear that a protracted firefight in the pocket just wasn’t going to favor him.
I’ve credited Lawler before as being a deceptively smart fighter, and UFC 189 might’ve been his finest hour in this regard. Robbie intrinsically understood that Tri-Star’s usual model of ‘shot for shot’ offense on the feet (as my friend and colleague Julian Lung put it) wasn’t sustainable if Rory’s auxiliary threats could be effectively shut off. Rory, like Georges, did his best work in fights when he managed to get every piece of his game rolling. Naturally, Lawler quickly and violently shut Rory’s proactive and reactive shots down, automatically eliminating a favorable portion of Rory’s gameplan. Then, extrapolating on his successes from the first fight, Lawler recognized that in the vast majority of neutral striking exchanges, he would stand as a more powerful, dangerous, and polished striker than Rory. One clean punch from Lawler was probably worth three from Rory, both to the eyes of the judges and to the physical state of both men.
The mindset was as simple as “Rory can’t outwrestle me. If I punish him enough times for trying, eventually, he’ll stop. I can take his shots much better than he can take mine, and I am just better than him in this kind of fight in moments and over 25 minutes. A largely equal exchange will tax him more than it taxes me. He has to work much harder than I do to make his advantages seen, whereas I have far more room for error. I am granted more time and space to develop an attack pattern.”
Let me reiterate: Rory fought one hell of a fight against Robbie Lawler, and got much closer to winning than the previous paragraphs might indicate. My intention was never to underplay the competitive nature of this acclaimed fight, but rather to highlight the disparity between these two men. In prioritizing a well-rounded approach, Rory left opportunities for opponents to challenge his lack of depth in certain areas while shutting off others. Playing an even hand in MMA is important, as many of Rory’s more limited victims can attest to, but there were times when determined specialists forced MacDonald to dig deeper into his toolbox beyond what he was capable of.
The balance between breadth and depth is a challenging one for a fighter to equate, because it is entirely a question of prioritizing a skillset versus prioritizing specific skills within a skillset. It is a testament to the breadth of Rory’s skillset that he was able to compete and often beat a large variety of opponents in MMA. For example, Rory largely diffused Douglas Lima with wrestling in a way that I wouldn’t trust Lawler to. However, even against Lima, it was still a risky gambit for Rory to gameplan almost exclusively around wrestling, as Lima became more anticipatory of the Canadian’s entries as the fight progressed. Despite his success as a fighter, there always existed that key to unlocking Rory as an opponent, which was to limit his breadth and force him out of his depth. To conclude this section, I must concede that I do not expect to see many generalists like MacDonald contending for titles in the upcoming years, unless they seriously commit to deepening their abilities in every discipline.
Successful & Unsuccessful Prioritization
Finally, I’d like to contrast two stylistically similar fighters who prioritized their training differently and wound up in dramatically different places by the end of their careers.
Respectively, Demian Maia and Jacare Souza exist on two opposing ends of the prioritization spectrum. At the heart of both men’s games, they want to back opponents up, shoot for some sort of wrestling entry, and initiate a grappling sequence which they are usually guaranteed to win. These two decorated Brazilian Jiu Jitsu champions have diverging tactical approaches on the mat and their potency as ground-&-pound threats differ, but if knowing thyself is a question about comfort and security, grappling on the mat is undoubtedly home base for both men.
All fights begin standing, so the most basic of questions follows suit: How do these two men actively take the fight where they want it?
Throughout the entirety of their careers, Maia and Jacare have both encountered similar issues against large, powerful wrestlers capable of either physically stonewalling them or technically shutting down their repeated wrestling entries. However, against a less specialized class of fighter, Maia went about addressing his offensive wrestling woes with a lot of tact and intuition. As a reactive takedown threat, Maia simply wasn’t explosive or powerful enough to follow through most of the time, so he improved his pressuring footwork. As such, opponents had a more difficult time backing Maia off and forcing his shots from the outside. The best adjustment Maia made was improving his chain wrestling, in which he became much better at diving on weak single-legs before grabbing hold of it and transitioning through into a variety of other takedown options. He became one of MMA’s preeminent ‘something from nothing’ grapplers, where one lazy clinch break could lead to an opponent giving up their back in scrambles. It has served him remarkably well in the later stages of his career.
Jacare’s development wasn’t nearly as smooth. He was always a better athlete than Maia and more natural striker, but arguably a worse-trained one than Maia. He wasn’t nearly the same kind of waddling, anxious mess that Ronda was on the feet, but if he was forced into protracted striking battles, Jacare was decidedly out of his comfort zone. However, he still leaned into his striking (usually pinching opponents between the overhand right and the left hook to the body) more than Maia, which in turn, eroded his ability to initiate wrestling sequences over time.
For such a prolific Jiu Jitsu practitioner, Jacare’s takedown entries are quite ugly. Even at his athletic peak in Strikeforce, virtually all of the takedowns Jacare hit were along the fence. In open space, Jacare’s takedown attempts were telegraphed and often attempted without any sort of setup at all. Luke Rockhold had the technical anti-wrestling and physicality to shrimp his hips back any time Jacare did manage to get him down, and it forced the Brazilian grappler into a five-round striking war. I’m willing to bet that most people reading this don’t remember how badly Francis Carmont of all people busted Jacare up on the feet in the second round of their fight. Jacare clearly understood how to pressure and if he managed to break an opponent’s posture in a tie-up, his sinuous grappling on the mat remained peerless. Nonetheless, in prioritizing the wrong elements of his training, Jacare’s ability to enforce grappling has almost completely disappeared in recent years. On some level, you could make the argument that Jacare Souza became a more well-rounded fighter in the later years of his career, but he became a far less effective one all the same.
Conclusion
As I’ve pointed out many times during this series, I am not a fighter, but I do understand how hard it can be to build a game. The best ones take a long time to fully develop, and this means experimenting with pieces that aren’t yet integrated, polished, or memorized. If being well-rounded means competency in every area, then the modern MMA meta requires everybody to be well-rounded to one degree or another. I’ve already spent a long time illustrating how challenging an ask that can be.
Expecting fighters to consistently make grand adjustments over the course of a career is silly, but so is the expectation that fighters possess the coaching and preparatory means to formalize their own training. To put it simply, not every fighter is a priority in every gym, as sad as it is to say. Plenty of MMA gyms zero their training in on a few lucky participants, but others can just as easily be relegated to sparring partner duties or to rote padwork. Hell, it’s remarkable that John Dodson is even still winning fights in 2020, as he is clearly the third most important fighter at JacksonWink at a generous guess (behind Jon Jones and Holly Holm, respectively).
This article was about technical side of prioritization, but I could’ve just as easily written an article about the acclimatization of specialized camps over big-name MMA training institutions. Eugene Bareman, head coach of City Kickboxing, likely spends most of his time with Alexander Volkanovski, Israel Adesanya, and Brad Riddell, but even the lower-ranked fighters on his roster, such as Kai Kara France, still exhibit a great deal of craft and thought within their games. It is clear how much Bareman values the prioritization of training within every single one of his fighters. Conversely, American Top Team still likely possesses the most prolific roster of fighters of any MMA gym in the world, but the synergy between their tactical and strategic developments has shown itself to be strangely imprecise in recent years. Plenty of analysts, such as myself, had to retroactively evaluate their status after a few lackluster showings.
This is the fifth metagame article I’ve written, and it is decidedly the most dubious of them all. Predicting and critiquing the trends of a fighter’s development might be the most problematic premise I have opted to explore thus far. If I am to be perfectly honest with the audience, I am still not entirely convinced that I have achieved my main goal with this article as a writer. Training situations change, as do fighters, and there may not be any rhyme or reason to their progression lines at all in some cases. Maybe in most cases. Still, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t bothered by the amount of superfluous tactics or incongruent strategies that fighters emphasize with exceeding regularity. There has to be some way to narrow down the problem.
I labeled this article as another addition to the MMA Metagame series, but perhaps it is better to look at this article as a case study. If MMA is a sport about harmonizing a variety of techniques into something greater, then you can understand why the prospect of prioritizing those techniques based on their fundamental value is imperative to a fighter’s success. For all of the examples I’ve listed, there is a reason why this sensibility exists in the first place. From where I’m sitting, I don’t have any sort of clear window into these training scenarios, so I can only hope that fighters begin to prioritize their training themselves and that coaches take part in this sort of reinvention when necessary. While a well-rounded approach has its benefits, the sport is only getting more and more competitive with each passing year. The breadth of being good at everything will never lose a certain degree of effectiveness, but if, in turn, you aren’t great at anything, it will likely only be a matter of time before your lack of depth is revealed.