Size Matters

Mark Hatmaker

Does size matter? Yep, afraid so and in case you're wondering in which direction we humans like our size-it's usually the bigger the better. Whether it's the hormonally drenched obvious size metaphor that most likely comes to mind when encountering the phrase "size matters" (and, let's face it, it does, seldom do you hear "Gee, I wish your [insert appendage(s) of choice] were smaller"), or the disparate sizes within weight classes where it's usually a safe bet to double down on the larger of two fighters, size, does indeed, matter.

            There's a less obvious area where size matters that I want to discuss today, that is sample size. I'm a numbers guy, I like stats, I love data, and I treasure empirically, observable, reproducible phenomena. In particular, I love fight metrics, so much so that I spent an entire book (The Essentials) arguing that fight metrics should form the basis of your strategic and tactical grounding as opposed to tradition, dogma, or best guesses. Fight metrics allows us to calibrate a fight numerically and then have quantified information that can lead us to qualitative results. Fight metrics allows us a quasi-mathematical certainty in our approach to training along these lines: "Hey, should we work on that head-kick or, the sprawl today?" "Let's crunch the numbers...and the winner is the sprawl far-and-away." Fight metrics allows us a bit more precision in a sport that is based on chaos. But, fight metrics can lead you astray.

            Fight metrics (just like any statistical information) is only useful in large quantities. And these large quantities must be culled from numerous occurrences of events, i.e. large sample sizes. As much as I love reading/hearing the punch stats at the end of a boxing match or the breakdown of takedown attempts or submission attempts in a single MMA match I must not lose sight of the fact that these numbers in isolation are, well, valueless. These figures in isolation may be useful in scoring that particular match or bout but they do zero to little to tell us how to structure our own approach to the same sport.

            We must always be cognizant of the fact that single event stats or small sample sizes in general may skew toward outliers (this is sometime called a "black swan" to numbers junkies)-events outside the bell curve. We want to bet house odds and base our strategies/tactics only on those concepts/techniques that are most likely to appear and we can only discover what is most likely by observing, not hand-picked single events, but hundreds of events (at a bare minimum) and then choose our menu from the cluster of events at the peak of the bell curve that occur more often than not.

            I admit that it is all too easy to get caught up in small number outliers that we allow to steal our focus. We can fixate on the one time a Superman punch landed with some authority and how cool that was as opposed to all of the other times that it appears to be a waste of energy at worst and needless flash at best when in fact the jab is the king of the bell curve and deserving of perhaps even more attention than it receives. We can look at this obsession with small numbers or outliers by imagining ourselves all living along a major fault line in tectonic plates (as some of us do).

            Devastating earthquakes are relatively infrequent occurrences and, yes, we should be mindful of what to do in their eventuality but, it might be unwise to live our lives as if one were always imminent. To live everyday as if "the big one" were just around the corner might mean a constant checking of our survival supplies, never allowing ourselves inside multi-storied buildings, spending most of our lives beneath door frames, and avoiding all over- and under-passes lengthening our travel times. These strategies, although safer in the extreme, give too much weight to outlier/small number events (major earthquakes) and completely ignore the much (much) larger number of days that see no earthquake activity.

            In the arena of fight metrics, we've got to observe large numbers of occurrences to prepare for what we are most likely to encounter or what will most likely lead to our own success. No, we don't need to ignore the outliers, we can prepare for them without the need of living our entire lives inside door frames just as our friends in California do. They live their lives according to the cluster on the bell curve and that is a completely intelligent manner to approach the numbers. Have a blast re-watching the highlight reels that show a Superman punch finding it's target or a spinning back kick sending someone airborne, by all means, play with these techniques but don't lose sight of the bigger picture, the bigger picture of larger numbers where size almost always matters.

RAW Subscription Update

For our current and considering RAW Subscribers, beginning with volume 123 (January 1st, 2013) we will begin unveiling The Combination Man Home Study Course in which we (finally) present in an ABC/1-2-3 manner the steps from, 0-120 MPH how to become the best Boxer-Pugilist, Shooter-Stuffer, Par Terre Wrester-Submission Technician you can be.

Each volume will tied-in to the inTENS PREMIUM CONDITIONING SERVICE (free to subscribers), will be accompanied by a printed syllabi of drills for gym use, and will then be keyed to a foundation text (The Combination Man) that will be released at a later date. In other words, some good methodical let's get better stuff coming your way.