Changing The Battlefield

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“If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected .”

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I’m sure you’ve watched a UFC fight here or there on one occasion or another. You may have even caught a fight that was exciting enough to bring the energy from the arena surrounding the fight directly into the entertainment area of your home.

The thing is that if you follow UFC closely then you know that when it comes to the world of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) a fighter can look like he or she is about to lose until suddenly they’re able to gain some leverage and surprisingly turn the tables on the outcome.

In many of these instances I’ve witnessed a fighter that was literally on the edge of total defeat only to suddenly flip the entire fight around by pulling and forcing the winning fighter into a position where they are weaker in order to gain the upper hand and totally snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

To back up a little bit when I was growing up as a GenX kid, like all other GenX kids, I was raised on hard hitting action movies during the cultural era when the action hero was the dominating figure at the box office. The truth is that this involved being exposed to a lot of Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris movies which ultimately led to me training in the fight discipline of Muay Thai.

In addition to all of that it was back in the 1990s when both myself and a handful of my closest friends would get together to watch some of the first Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) tournaments. This was no doubt the wildest and most entertaining thing I’ve ever seen in my life and in those days the UFC was a completely different animal. In fact, it was recognized as the wild west of sports.

You see, the entire reason UFC started in the first place was to satisfy the age old question of which martial arts, or which fight discipline was the dominant discipline. In other words, if you put a Kung Fu master in the ring against a Karate master who would win? If you placed an American Wrestler in the ring to face off against a Kickboxer then who would come out on top?

The formation of the UFC was an objective attempt at answering this age old question regarding the most effective fight disciplines. Of course, as time went on it became clear that the most effective fighters were those who ended up possessing experience in a blend, or mix, of disciplines where they had training in both effective stand up striking abilities combined with a solid ability of being able to get on the ground to grapple, hence the name Mixed Martial Arts.

Despite all of this the reality is that these UFC fighters are like chess masters. They understand their strengths and they are very good at exploiting the weakness of an opponent. This is the entire strategy of a great fighter on top of being tough as nails and conditioned for the art of fighting.

Now having said all of that I pointed out how fighters are good at looking to exploit their opponent’s weakness. To add on to this I will also say that the best fighters are also great at frustrating their opponents which often forces their opponents to act hastily further causing their opponent to expose a vulnerability that they can take advantage of in a given moment.

In other words, if a great fighter isn’t seeing an opening