Today’s essay walks a fine line. I can see how the advice I’m about to offer can be interpreted as a carte blanche excuse to give your training time short shrift, but that interpretation is the furthest thing from my mind. On the contrary, I’m all for upping your training intensity. What I’m skeptical of is—well, here goes.

As I get on in years, I’m beginning to wonder if a large contingent of martial artists have put training (whether for combat sports or reality combatives) on a par with—or even worse, made it more important than—the targeted activity. In metaphor land, have we given more value to the tools we use to construct something than to the construction itself?

Consider the following: We need strength, stamina, and explosiveness to prepare for the tasks combat requires. To acquire such attributes, it’s wise to supplement our training with activities outside the arts. For example, to build ferocious punching power, we work the heavy bag and the pads, which we supplement with Olympic lifting or powerlifting. The 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 start skewing in off-target directions. Splitting hairs? Probably, but stay with me as I shred that hair even finer.

As combat athletes, we must never lose sight of what we’re trying to better—whether it’s our combat-sports game, our reality game, or a combination of them. Any training modality that comes down the pike should be road-tested for application to the sport in question. If it seems like a good fit for the fight game, terrific. If not, bye-bye. You’re probably on board for this paragraph; let me lose a few of you now with the next one.

When any training modality that’s not your targeted sport becomes important in and of itself, you have a dilemma. You can either remember where your true focus is—on combat—or recognize that you’re now a multi-sport athlete who might want to spend more time building your bench, tweaking your sprint times, and increasing your pull-up numbers.

We’ve all encountered such people—athletes with mighty good wind from one sport (marathon, let’s say) who gas in three minutes on the mat, those with bulging biceps and rippling pecs who punch like Little Leaguers, and so on and so forth. Specificity breeds specificity.

In the past six months, I’ve encountered folks of many different fitness stripes—diet affiliations, fitness levels, and training approaches—in a variety of obstacle races I’ve run. Some of them—admittedly, people who are quite fit to all appearances—lament their performances post-race and offer “I thought I would do better because of [insert random preparation exercise here]” comments. The number of thrusters you can do uninterrupted, how heavy your bench is, or what your run time is on the treadmill at X degrees of inclination doesn’t matter much when you’re not doing that specific exercise.

When we make the preparation for a sport the sport itself, it seems we’re 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 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? Not at all. I’m exceedingly pro on all these points. I’m simply pointing out a shift in attitude that may spell the difference between how well your training applies to what you intend it to do—which is perform your martial art—and how well your training merely makes you better at training.

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