The Strategy Merry-Go-Round

What do football and martial arts have in common? Football managers / coaches have their systems, which is their strategy of how their team will play in order to beat all other teams. Every now and then you see a team come up with a system that dominates their league for a season or two until the opposition works out how to neutralise it.

In the 1990’s a couple of guys from Brazil did something similar to the North American martial arts scene. In doing so they helped kick-start a branch in the arts that went mainstream over the next decade. Whether you like the outcome or not, I think martial arts owes some gratitude to anything that shows up weaknesses. There was an influx of acrobatics and performance art around that time, so that debt of gratitude might be bigger than we know.

The boys from Brazil had a pretty simple strategy, get the opposition to the ground as quickly as possible, where they knew they could dominate them. Fast forward to the present and you have exponents training up their skills to become well-rounded in striking, grappling and submission. As competitors become professional, they cannot afford to have an obvious weakness in their stand-up game or their ground game that an opponent can easily take advantage of.

And yet, well rounded does not mean equally proficient in all areas. Exponents still have a particular strength in one area and they tend to rely on it to win the bout. You now see fights where someone is particularly strong in stand-up and their opponent is a submissions expert but each is still skilled in the other areas. An exponent will have sufficient skills to hold off their opponent’s attack, while they look for the opportunity to attack their opponent with their own particular strength.

So even though the competitors are much more rounded in their skills, you could be forgiven for thinking that we haven’t moved very far from the adage that ‘attack means you want to damage and control your opponent, while defence means you want to hold off the attack long enough to attack again’. The result is that your attention is still split between attack and defence.

When you think about it, everyone is still on the merry-go-round of strategy; all that happened was that it got more refined. In some ways it is like a game of paper / scissors / rock where someone will have a thicker piece of paper and the opponent will have sharper scissors and someone else has a bigger rock, but everyone has all three components.

What does this have to do with fighting multiple opponents? Well firstly, multiple attackers will make you aware of any weaknesses or delusions you have in that space, especially if the group is any good. The important point for group attack however, is that you have to get off the merry-go-round of strategy, as all those strategies and techniques that you come up with to try and get advantage, will get dismantled very quickly, especially by higher functioning groups. Your attention cannot be split between attack and defence; there is no time for that.

If nothing else, just recognise that you will probably need to think differently when facing multiple opponents. Strategies that can work well against a single opponent will likely not translate.

As always with group work, train safely and under the supervision of a qualified instructor