That’s right…keep it simple stupid—one of my favorite acronym’s that I’m going to try to employ during tonight’s sparring session.

Perhaps it might be a principle you’d like to adopt too.

I’ll tell you why.

Know your Strengths and Weaknesses

Far too often I complicate things when I spar or grapple. Meaning I attempt to do things I’m not trained to do, but I do them anyways because I want to practice.

Except live sparring is the wrong time to practice something outside of your skill set.

The last article I posted entitled Seein’ the Blacklights illustrates exactly that point. I tried to fight in a manner I’m not accustomed to—and I paid for it.

It’s really about knowing your strengths and weaknesses. My strength is my jab. It’s the one punch I throw really well. Why? Because knowing that it’s the most important punch in boxing—maybe even the most important strike in mixed martial arts—I’ve trained it and it’s footwork more than anything else.

So tonight, instead of trying to fight on the inside like a dumbass I’m going to stay on the stick, and move. When I do that the fight stays pretty easy on me.

A perfect example of a guy keeping it simple was Josh Koscheck this past weekend. Josh’s standup is great, but his simplest route to victory was to take Paul Daley down and keep him there. Josh is a significantly better grappler so why even bother to stand. He kept it simple.

Same with GSP against Dan Hardy.

A poor example would be Frank Shamrock’s fight with Cung Lee. Frank being the significantly better grappler refused to take Cung to the ground because of his significantly large ego. He got his arm broken by the undefeated Shan Shou fighter. Way to go Frank.

When we as fighter’s decide to keep things simple and stay within our strengths—good things will happen. When we try to get fancy—bad things will definitely happen.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t be training our weaknesses into strengths in a controlled environment. Then when we are comfortable, apply them in a live scenerio to test, but by no means should we ever just go into a meaningful situation without at least being competent with that particular skill or skill-set.

I’ll be keeping it simple from now on…Stupid.