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Preparation vs. Application
Mark Hatmaker
Today's little essay walks a mighty fine line. I can see where the advice I am about to offer can be interpreted as a carte blanche excuse to give your training time short shrift, but that interpretation, I can assure you, is the furthest thing from my mind. On the contrary, I'm all for upping your training intensity what I am skeptical of is, well here goes.... As I get on in years I am beginning to wonder if a large contingent of athletes have made training for a sport (combat sports and reality combatives apply here) on par with, or even worse, more important than the targeted sport. In metaphor land, have we given more value to the tools we use to construct something than to the actual construction itself. Consider the following, combat athletes need strength, stamina, explosiveness, et cetera to prepare for the tasks that combat requires. To acquire such attributes it is wise to supplement with activities outside of the targeted sport. For example, to build ferocious punching power we need to work the heavy bag, we need to work the pads, but we also need to borrow from sports such as Olympic lifting and/or power lifting to aid our punching power goals with a little iron fortification. This marriage of sports is excellent. Here's where I start cocking an eyebrow. If and when the training becomes more about "What can you bench?" asked in that querulous John C. Reilly Boogie Nights tone and less about "How's your punching power developing?" things seem to start skewing in off-target directions in my opinion. Splitting hairs? Probably, but stay with me as a shred that hair even finer. As combat athletes we must never lose sight of what we are trying to better whether it be our combat sports game, our reality game which includes attention paid to flight tactics as well as fight tactics, or a combination of these three. Any training modality that comes down the pike should be road-tested for application to the targeted sport in question. If it seems a good fit for the fight game tee-riff! If not, bye-bye. I'd say we're all aboard for this paragraph. Let me lose a few of you now. When any training modality that is not your targeted sport, per se, becomes important in and of itself then we have a dilemma. We can either A) Remember where our true focus is (combat) or, B) Recognize that we are now a multi-sport athlete who might want to spend more time building our bench, tweaking our sprint times, upping our pull-up numbers, et cetera. We've all encountered the following broad examples, athletes with mighty good wind from one sport (marathoning let's say) who gas in 3 minutes on the mat. He of bulging biceps and rippling pecs who punches like a Little Leaguer, and so on and so forth. Specificity breeds specificity. In the last six months I've encountered folks of many different fitness stripes (diet affiliations, fitness levels and myriad approaches) in a variety of obstacle races I've been running. Some of these folks, admittedly quite fit to all appearances, lament their performances post-race and offer puzzled "I thought I'd do better because of [Insert random preparation exercise or dietary totem here]." It seems the number of thrusters you can do un-interrupted, or how heavy your bench is, or what your run time is on the treadmill at x degree of inclination hold little transfers beyond the ability to do that preparation exercise well. When we make the preparation for a sport the sport itself it seems to me we are like obsessively fit rodents on ever turning hamster-wheels. We place utmost importance on how fast or how long we run on the wheel while giving no thought to whether or not life outside the Habitrail is anything like this wheel we love so much. So, what am I saying? Am I anti-preparation? Anti-training? Anti-exercise? No, not all. I am exceedingly pro on all these points. I am simply pointing out a shift in attitude that may spell the difference in how well your training applies to what you intend it to do as opposed to your training merely making you better at training. | 
