Month: August 2026

There is a time and a place for training low-percentage techniques. Yes, you read that right. Low-percentage techniques.

This is where the “80/20 rule”—aka the law of diminishing returns—comes into play. Early on, the basic stuff accounts for most of your progress with relatively little effort, but the closer you get to your individual limit, the more time, energy, and complexity it takes to squeeze out ever smaller improvements.

Before we go any deeper, make sure you’ve read my article on the difference between learning a technique and developing technical proficiency here:

• By high-percentage techniques, I mean the basic, bog-standard stuff that works reliably under pressure: jabs, crosses, hooks, overhands, arm drags, hip tosses, simple foot sweeps, and so on.
• Low-percentage techniques are more conditional and complex—things like unarmed knife defenses or elaborate joint-locking flow drills that require several variables to line up just right. That does not mean they never work; it means they offer a poor return on training time until your fundamentals are already solid.

The fight data bears this out. A comprehensive analysis of UFC submission finishes from UFC 1 through UFC 294 found that the rear-naked choke—the most basic choke in the book—was the single most common submission, accounting for 32.7 percent of submission finishes.

The Limits of Progress

An asymptote is a line that a mathematical curve approaches infinitely closely but never actually touches.

Progress in nearly every human endeavor is asymptotic, and time and effort are inversely correlated with results. That means you improve toward a limit, but the closer you get to that limit, the harder each additional bit of progress becomes.

Everyone’s limit is different. Age, sex, body type, natural athleticism, training history, injuries, temperament, and God knows what else all influence where that ceiling might be.

As the graph shows, the blue line represents theoretical progress, while the wavy red line represents real-world progress. The red line rises unevenly because life is never perfect: we get sick, get divorced, get laid off, get transferred, get injured, or get blindsided by circumstances outside our control. Setbacks are inevitable, and sometimes they knock people off course long enough that they quit altogether.

Regardless, the general progression is the same.

A novice can make rapid progress with a relatively simple program. Almost anything works because everything is new. The beginner does not need more complexity. He needs more practice.

An intermediate trainee has already harvested the easy gains. Progress slows, and training has to become somewhat more deliberate. Weaknesses begin to matter. Timing, context, and variation become more important.

The advanced practitioner is approaching his individual limit. At that point, continued progress will always be found at the margins. Training becomes more complex because the low-hanging fruit has already been squeezed dry.

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“Training is the process of looking into your weakness.”

~GRANDMASTER SAM FS CHIN

No Shortcuts on The Journey To Mastery

This is where low-percentage techniques and subtle methods begin to earn their place.

But not before you’ve squeezed all the juice you can get from the basic, high-percentage stuff.

This is also why the so-called “internal” martial arts were never really meant for beginners—at least not unless the system has a curriculum, like I Liq Chuan (depending on who you’re training with), capable of establishing solid fighting fundamentals concurrently with, or preferably before, pursuing the deeper and more esoteric uses of the body and mind.

The legends surrounding the origins of Taijiquan, Xingyiquan, and Baguazhang are full of missing years, secret teachers, wandering sages, and immortals handing out secret fighting methods in dreams.

That ambiguity is part of the culture. The British didn’t refer to the Chinese as “inscrutable Celestials” for nothing.

But the strongest historical evidence points in the same direction: the founders and earliest students of the “big three” internal styles already possessed solid, practical fighting skills. They had mastered other methods first, then developed—or learned from someone who had developed—the subtler training we now call internal.

They were not helpless beginners learning to move slowly in the park. They were experienced fighters refining the margins.

Even Shaolin training traditionally follows a progression from hard, external physical development toward increasingly subtle, internal work. First you build the machine. Then you learn to operate it more efficiently.

Trying to reverse that order is like teaching advanced race-car driving to someone who still struggles to work a manual transmission in a 1980 Ford Fiat. They don’t have either the physical capacity or basic skills to make the advanced stuff effective with an uncooperative opponent.

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Unlock your full potential with our personalized in-person and remote coaching programs—join me and take the first step on your journey to mastery!

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Fundamentals First

If you stick with it long enough, there will definitely come a time when training all the cool-guy shit will become not just optional but mandatory; however, beginners—and most intermediate students—have no business spending the majority of their time on “high-level,” low-percentage techniques and methods.

They do not yet possess the structure, timing, distance, pressure tolerance, or technical proficiency necessary for those methods to work.

At best, it is a waste of training time.

At worst, it actively interferes with the development of the fundamentals they should have been practicing instead.

Advanced methods are advanced because they sit near the edge of what is possible. They are supplements to, not substitutes for, the basics.

Similar to creatine or protein powders, they can help us eke out the last few percent (or fractions of a percent) of our performance, as we trend upward towards an inevitable limit hidden in plain sight, just behind a glass ceiling; within sight, but forever out of reach.

Read More!

• 
  The Case For Training Low-Percentage Martial Arts Techniques
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  The Surprising Ways Dogs Protect Us
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  What Can Bees Teach Us About Nutrition?
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  You Should Be As Strong As Possible For Self-Defense (& Daily Life)