The 80/20 Rule and the Problem With Too Many MMA Techniques

MMA might have the biggest technical menu of any combat sport.

You can punch, kick, knee, elbow, wrestle, clinch, throw, trip, sweep, submit, scramble, fight against the cage, fight off the cage, attack from the bottom, attack from the top, strike on the ground and transition between all of those phases. And within each of those areas are hundreds of techniques, variations, counters, combinations and positions.

You could spend a lifetime learning MMA techniques and still have thousands of things you haven't trained. That's one of the reasons I think the Pareto principle is particularly useful when thinking about MMA development.

The Pareto principle is commonly summarized as the 80/20 rule: a relatively small number of inputs produce a disproportionately large amount of the results. It isn't a mathematical law that says exactly 20 percent of your techniques will produce exactly 80 percent of your success. I think of it more as a question we should constantly ask when designing training:

What are the things that matter most?

That question becomes extremely important when the goal isn't simply to learn martial arts, but to become a competitive MMA fighter.

If you have unlimited time, unlimited recovery and unlimited training partners, you can explore almost anything. But most athletes don't. They have jobs, families, school, limited training time and finite physical and mental resources. Even professional fighters have a limited number of hours they can train before recovery becomes the limiting factor. So every hour spent training one thing is an hour that isn't being spent training something else.

You can teach an athlete a hundred different techniques and make them feel like they're learning a tremendous amount. But if the majority of those techniques are rarely used, difficult to apply, or only relevant in very specific situations, that athlete may actually be spending less time developing the skills that matter most.

The question isn't whether those techniques work. Many of them do.

The question is whether they deserve the same amount of attention.

Look at the techniques that consistently show up in high-level MMA. A lot of it is made up of relatively simple tools that repeatedly appear because they solve important problems.

The jab helps control distance and creates opportunities for everything that follows. The double leg is a fundamental wrestling entry. The underhook and head position help determine what happens in the clinch. The rear naked choke appears again and again because controlling the back creates a tremendous finishing opportunity. The cross, hook and calf kick are simple striking weapons that can have enormous consequences when applied at the right time.

None of these techniques are particularly mysterious. And that's part of the point.

The competitive athlete doesn't necessarily need more techniques. They often need more ability with the techniques that matter most.

There is an enormous difference between knowing a technique and developing it into a weapon. I can show an athlete ten different takedowns in an afternoon. That doesn't mean they have ten takedowns. They have been introduced to ten techniques. To actually develop a takedown, they need repetitions. They need to understand the position that creates the opportunity. They need to recognize the reactions that make it available. They need to perform it against increasing resistance. They need to learn what happens when the opponent defends it. They need follow-ups when the first attempt fails.

That takes time. And now we're back to the 80/20 problem.

If I spread that same amount of training time across twenty takedowns, I may create an athlete who knows a lot about takedowns but isn't particularly dangerous with any of them. If instead I identify the takedowns that are most useful for that athlete and develop those deeply, I can create something much more valuable: a small number of reliable weapons connected to a larger system.

This doesn't mean ignoring everything else. A competitive MMA fighter still needs breadth. You can't simply master the double leg and expect to become a complete fighter. Your opponent is going to present problems that require other solutions.

That's why I don't think the 80/20 principle means "only train the top 20 percent." It means allocate your attention according to importance.

You need enough defensive wrestling to prevent your opponent from taking your game away from you. You need enough striking variety that an opponent can't simply solve everything with one defensive response. You need enough grappling knowledge to survive and escape bad positions. You need enough clinch skill to understand what happens when the fight gets close.

But within each of those areas, there should still be priorities. You might have twenty techniques available from a particular position, but three of them may account for most of what you actually need. Learn the other seventeen eventually if they are useful. But don't sacrifice mastery of the important three just so you can say you know twenty.

This is one of the reasons I've become increasingly skeptical of technique-collection as a measure of development. A student who knows 500 techniques isn't necessarily more developed than a student who knows 100. It depends on what those techniques are, how well they understand them, whether they can recognize when to use them, and whether they can actually apply them against someone who is trying to stop them.

Breadth gives you options. Depth gives you weapons. And MMA requires both.

This is also why a good curriculum shouldn't simply be a list of techniques arranged in an order that seems logical. The coach has to decide what deserves emphasis. Some skills should be introduced, revisited and repeatedly applied because they form the foundation of successful MMA. Others may only need to be introduced so the athlete understands that the option exists.

If a technique is responsible for a large percentage of the problems an athlete will encounter, I want them to spend a lot of time with it. I want them to understand it from multiple positions, apply it against resistance, recognize the reactions it creates and develop confidence in using it.

If another technique is useful but highly situational, I don't necessarily need to give it the same amount of training time. That's not saying the second technique is bad. It's saying training time has an opportunity cost.

This becomes even more important as an athlete becomes competitive. At some point, the question shouldn't simply be, "What else can I learn?"

It should be, "What will make me better?"

Those aren't always the same question.

Sometimes the answer is learning something completely new. Sometimes it's fixing a glaring weakness. Sometimes it's developing a strength into a genuine weapon. Sometimes it's spending another hundred repetitions on something the athlete already knows because they haven't developed the ability to reliably use it against resistance.

And sometimes the most productive training session is the least exciting one.

That's an important part of the Pareto principle that gets lost when people turn it into a slogan about efficiency. The high-value 20 percent isn't necessarily the newest, most complicated or most interesting material. In combat sports, it is often the boring stuff that keeps showing up.

• The jab.

• The double leg.

• The single leg.

• The ability to maintain position.

• The underhook.

• The ability to escape.

• The ability to get back to your feet.

• The ability to recognize an opening and actually take it.

The things that work over and over again are worth becoming exceptionally good at.

That's ultimately how I think about technique selection at BLAST. The goal isn't to expose an athlete to every technique that exists in MMA. That's impossible, and even if it weren't, I'm not sure it would be particularly useful.

The goal is to give athletes a broad understanding of the game while making sure that the most important skills receive disproportionate attention. We want them to learn the major problems of MMA, develop reliable solutions to those problems, and then learn how those solutions connect when the situation changes.

That's another reason our curriculum can't simply be judged by how many techniques we teach.

The measure of a curriculum isn't how much information we can put into an athlete. It's how much useful ability we can develop with the time we have.

MMA gives you thousands of possibilities.

You don't have thousands of hours to give all of them equal attention.

So choose carefully.

Learn broadly enough to understand the game. Develop deeply enough to have weapons you can rely on. Then spend your training time where it will actually make you better.

That's the real value of the 80/20 principle in MMA.

Not doing less. Doing more of what matters.