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Mark Hatmaker
Man, do I love fight talk. I'm talking informed, cogent, on point analyses of the merits of this strategy or the minuses of that tactic. The more nuts and bolts to the fight conversation the better, you know, conversations long these lines:
"He needs to get that hip turned over on his kick, he's giving up his own power."
" He's got great posture, snap that head and you can set your underhook."
"He drops his rear heel when he's planning to shoot."
That sort of thing. The more concrete the better, not a fan of abstractions in these conversations. You know these sorts of things:
"He needs to be more offensive." (Sure, great advice but, exactly "how" in the given scenario?)
"What would you do if a guy..." (Can't even finish the sentence I'm so bored with this one.)
"Who would win between..." (The answer is always the same--we never know until the match is made.)
I cop to the fact that I love fight analysis so I can offer an observation on what might be a problem in regard to analysis, and that problem is the logical error of stopping short at analysis.
Let's look at it this way, take a guy like me and my knowledge of car maintenance. I can put gas in it, change the oil, change a tire, use jumper cables, but after that it's Triple A time. If I'm asked the question "What cylinder engine is that?" my answer always sound like a guess (which it is). Now, let's say I decide to rectify my motor vehicle ignorance in an analytical way, I decide to take my car apart-- part by part, nut by nut, car cylinder thingie by car cylinder thingie so, I can see what makes this vehicle tick. As I take my car apart I stay all methodical and learn the name of every part and lay it out lovingly and point to each part and recite its name and function. At the end of my car dismantling task what I have learned? I, my friends, have learned how to take a car apart and label its constituent pieces and nothing more. Unless, or until I successfully put this thing back together and hear that engine turn over I am a master of analysis, but I now have no way to get to Godfathers Pizza to pick up a deep-dish pie. Don't get me wrong, analysis is an ace skill to have, but it does us little good if we don't continue the process and apply its intended opposite which is synthesis. Analysis presumes, in pure quantitative terms, that a whole is no more than the sum of its parts which in a purely reductionist sense is true. That array of disassembled parts at my feet is all that constitutes my car and if weighed they would equal the weight of the assembled car, but, qualitatively, we all know I ain't getting anywhere by sitting on a stack of car parts. I've got nothing until I re-assemble this thing in the right order. Getting from cars to fighting, knowing that a jab is fired from the feet, that the weight settles onto the rear foot, the lead hip and shoulder advance, that the fist relaxes until impact are all great pieces of info to know, but try punching someone in the face by simply settling your weight or relaxing your fist. Can't be done. Analyzing combat tactics and strategics is a mighty useful way to start a learning process, but that's really only half the game (more like a third). I completely adhere to the idea that the devil is in the details but only if those details are understood in their aggregate form, how they coalesce as a single unit to make those details a unified whole. By all means we've got to tear things down to see what makes them tick but a car won't run, a watch won't tick, and a punch won't smash until we put it back together again. We should use analysis not to be all wonky and have the illusion of understanding but as the first step to synthesis. We should tear things apart not with the idea that by tearing things down and labeling them means we understand them, but with the idea that we tear them apart so we can then re-assemble them looking for superfluous features that can be discarded so we can streamline performance, or finding buggy aspects of a part that can be tweaked to improve our mileage. With the above in mind, by all means , analyze away and tear things apart, but realize it means nothing until you can put it back together again and understand how and why each constituent part relates to one another.
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