The Cost of Enough

The Cost of Enough

I studied law and was on the route towards becoming a corporate lawyer. On paper, it was the sensible path. But martial arts had become too important to remain a hobby, and eventually, circumstances and choice led me to step away from that career path to pursue fighting more seriously.

My long-term goal is to become a UFC fighter. Whether or not I ultimately achieve that is another question, but the commitment forced me to ask a deeper one: how do you actually become a better fighter when the ideal training environment is not always available? How do you attain the extensive experience and skills that professional fighters have in a shorter amount of time? Could this be done through deliberate practice? Could an athletic person achieve this goal if they were educated in the methodology of skill acquisition and skilful performance?

That question has shaped much of my life over the last several years. Martial arts has since taken me through Edinburgh, Morocco, Thailand, and Vietnam. Along the way, I trained at different gyms, with different coaches, under different philosophies, and within different financial constraints. Every place taught me something, but they also exposed the same recurring problem.

Wanting to become a better fighter and having enough opportunity to do so are not the same thing.

For someone pursuing fighting seriously, the amount of sparring, coaching, experimentation, and live exchange you want is often far greater than what circumstances allow. Money, work, travel, injuries, gym schedules, suitable training partners, and simple geography all place limits on development.

Take Jonathan Haggerty, for example, the ONE Bantamweight Kickboxing World Champion. He has had 29 professional fights and has beaten many Thai fighters. Thai fighters can grow up fighting frequently, accumulating an incredible amount of learning and refinement through experience. Haggerty himself would also have grown up with an enormous amount of time spent training and sparring.

In the beginning, I was unaware of the full extent of these structural limitations. Faced with the experiential gap, rather than passively accepting the limitations I did understand, I tried to compensate by becoming a better learner.

Long before I travelled, I had become fascinated by learning itself. I spent a great deal of time studying metacognition, skill acquisition, memory, and deliberate practice. When fighting became the central problem of my life, those interests became inseparable from what I thought of as Fight IQ.

I used Anki extensively as a spaced-repetition system, took detailed notes, read research papers, watched instructional videos, analysed fights, and eventually used ChatGPT as another tool for exploring ideas. But I was not simply trying to memorise more information or collect techniques. 

A human body can be thought of as a structure comprising concepts from range of movement, to center of mass, balance; an incredible amount of factors that have to be coordinated, both within and in relation to an opponent and what they're doing. Understood this way, the essence of fighting as a dance can be more fully enjoyed through perception and understanding. A mechanical, physical, psychological, biological dance. Some brawl, sure, but the most enjoyable fighters in my opinion are the fighters who give you the sense that they are working within and manipulating this system to some degree. 

There is an aspect I call movement cognition - a fighter’s choice regarding how to move. On a surface layer, it comprises movement as a response to your opponent as a stimulus. Think moves as counters or attacks. On the specific level, it can include the precise angle of the surface of your guard and whether its optimized to deflect a punch. And much more. A lot of my practice focuses on movement cognition. I focus on the orientation of my body, and how I can flow through movements using my limbs and joints, and the attacks that are enabled, available, and optimal. 

Additionally, certain viewpoints accommodated this technical viewpoint of a fight. Applying this view to your opponent, exposes what I see as your opponent as a system to be configured and deconstructed - the right height level, the available methods of power generation, the guard and defence structures to be used, strikes etc, even the speed and rhythm to be adopted. It is what makes watching fighters like Jonathan Haggery vs Yuki Yoza a captivating watch. Tracking the fighters movements and the adjustments, all with the understanding that these are two competing brains transforms fighting to something intellectual. Something that a law student with a ravenous intellectual curiosity can wish to study and master.

Both from within and outside, the ring is a field ripe of analysis, and it’s hard after a deeper look, to walk away. 

If I wanted to respond dynamically to situations I had never encountered before, I felt I could not be completely tethered to predetermined answers. At least, that was how I thought about it. I did not want robotic repetition. I wanted diverse practice, adaptable skills, and an understanding deep enough to improvise. So I tried to deconstruct fighting from first principles.

What exactly separated experienced fighters from beginners? How did perception influence decision-making? Why did timing emerge naturally for some athletes but remain elusive for others? What information mattered during an exchange, and what could safely be ignored? Why did techniques work, and what underlying structures made them work?

My legal education probably reinforced this tendency. Law had trained me to progress from one proposition to another and construct arguments from authority, reasoning, and understanding. Economics at A-level had encouraged something similar through chains of analysis.

But fighting allowed me to go much further.

I reached into mathematics to think about angles, distance and anything measurable. I developed, and now recommend, an appreciation for precision and specificity. I studied biology to understand anatomy, psychology and neuroscience to think about perception and attention, and skill-acquisition principles from music and dance to inform the way I trained movement and footwork. Subjects I had encountered years earlier resurfaced because they suddenly became relevant to my problem. The British education system is often disparaged by students, but I found it held up remarkably well. I started to question whether the difference between students based on their education was understated, especially when concepts like neuroplasticity and the rigorous, demanding study undertaken by children at elite schools are considered. When put in certain occupations, continuous learning is more likely, and this likely compounds. 

Distance, timing, perception, balance, mechanics, decision-making, pressure, and the relationships between them became part of one enormous intellectual project. My brain buzzed with insights constantly. I am certain this is one of the ingredients of a fulfilling life. At this point, I had intellectual curiosity, strengthened through studying law, but I hadn't yet been in the live and challenging environments that would transform my brain into an electrifying problem-solving machine, and where I could live out the consequences of my successes and failures.

I constructed and reconstructed theories of fighting, trying to identify the structures beneath the visible techniques and derive options and strategies from them.

Consider Superlek versus Nabil Anane and how each fighter showed up on the night, the angles and placement of their kicks, and the specific details of their stances, their emotional states. Perhaps it begins to make sense when I admit how much time I have spent analysing something as specific as stance orientation.

It is also why I prefer slower, more deliberate fighters. Watch Israel Adesanya and you might notice that he does not throw a high volume of strikes. Compare him with Nate Diaz or Max Holloway. These are different styles, but they also support and enable, I suspect, different cognitive processes.

I think of combinations as a form of decision compression. Try to throw multiple strikes in quick succession and you will notice that you often have to make a single decision at the beginning. Your ability to adjust and react then becomes limited to smaller windows between the strikes, the existence of which slows down the combination. It explains why I realised that I fought better and more naturally at certain speeds, but also why I felt limited in the actions available to me during training.

It is also what makes almost every field of knowledge attractive, to some degree, to a fighter like me. The potential answer to defeating your opponent could lie in their psychology or emotional state. Perhaps. Watch Muhammad Ali or the early Conor McGregor, and you might become convinced that a fighter requires some understanding of how to respond not only to an opponent’s movements, but also to their character.

This was what Fight IQ increasingly meant to me. Not a list of clever tactical observations, but an attempt to understand the game deeply enough to act intelligently within it. I had started by learning from YouTube videos, clipping fights, and noting insights, but the journey progressed into something much more intellectual.

I hoped that, through better methods of learning, deliberate practice, athletic development, and this cross-disciplinary reconstruction of fighting, I might accelerate a process that normally takes many years of experience. I was starting later than many of the fighters I wanted to compete with. I needed to know whether there was another route up the mountain. I needed to see the shot before I took it.

And I found a deep purpose in trying to discover one. Thrilling, exhilarating stuff.

In Vietnam, surrounded by the rolling mountains of Ha Giang, as travellers came and went, I single-mindedly and obsessively pored over the subject with renewed vigour. My first excursion in Thailand had made something increasingly apparent to me: lacking money, perhaps my best hope was to beat a recognisable fighter, make a name, or find some other way to accelerate the process.

Importantly, this was a period where I stopped training and disappeared into theory.

I had always trained physically. I called my training programme AchillesMode. I ran, lifted weights, worked on plyometrics, balance, coordination, footwork, eye training, shadowboxing, and conditioning.

A significant amount of my technical practice was deliberately slow and highly mindful. I borrowed principles from skill acquisition in music, dance, and other domains to inform the way I trained.

Since university, I have been interested in mind-muscle connection, posture, balance, and learning to feel movement rather than merely perform it. I wanted each repetition to be intentional rather than automatic.

Physical training was partly what had gotten me into fighting. But for the goal I had set myself, it was not enough.

I did not just need more drills. I still needed sparring, more live exchange, and more opportunities to test ideas, make mistakes, adapt, recover, and learn dynamically. I needed environments where the problem changed in front of me rather than exercises where I already knew the answer.

My first fight in Thailand meant I got to experience what could happen in a fight without that experiential learning to complement the knowledge.

I took the fight on the same day it was offered. By then, I had accumulated an enormous amount of knowledge about fighting, decision-making, and performance.

Yet the experience forced me to face an uncomfortable question: what is the value of knowing something if the relevant knowledge does not become available when you need it?

I understood cardio. I understood the importance of energy conservation. I had studied conditioning and thought extensively about the physical demands of fighting.

Yet, with all that work and understanding, why was I not able to think through the implications of a decision to conserve energy for cardio reasons, or properly consider the complexity of the performance demands in front of me?

I had built increasingly detailed models of fighting, but the fight exposed a different problem: accessing the relevant knowledge at the moment it was needed. I began calling my attempt to solve this problem theoretical mapping.

The problem was not simply remembering information. The problem was using it.

Due to the extreme kindness of people I met, I was thankfully able to access sparring after that fight at a traditional muay thai camp that looks straight from the golden age of Muay Thai. During sparring, I sometimes found myself searching internally for the correct answer instead of simply responding. The very process that had expanded my understanding now had to be transformed into an engine that aided performance.

Sparring was a welcomed opportunity to finally start testing my thinking, recognising cues, seeing how knowledge could be used, and understanding how the pace of combat could affect access to that knowledge. It was actually insane, the amount of knowledge I had on the subject meant I was streaming information about what I was seeing. I could get lost in philosophy themes and historical analysis, showcasing the extent of my study, but that was not necessarily useful.

I have always been athletic and recognised as such, but I still had to work out the balance between brawling and reading a situation without exposing myself. I was somewhat risk-averse and idealised technique, skill, and control. I could never rush an opponent and take shots to give shots. It was a limitation and I had to spend a long time calibrating thinking, waiting and acting.

Some of this, under deeper analysis, might sound stupid. In a way, perhaps it was. My goal and the limitations I faced had dragged me onto intellectual terrain quite unlike that encountered by most fighters. There was conceptual obfuscation, thinking and mental processes that had not been tailored to the actual demands of fighting or were not relevant at the moment of performance. I did not know that at the time. I had not accumulated enough experience stress-testing and refining the operating system.

The Thailand fight also highlighted the value of a good coach who could shortcut the thinking and its complexities.

As a fighter, the situation itself was, as I would come to learn, as much a part of the fight as the fight itself. The decisions surrounding performance mattered.

Preparation mattered. The circumstances in which the fight happened mattered.

The importance of experience was highlighted here. I didn’t have enough understanding to properly direct this operation. Preparation amounted to cramming. I even continued to learn, taking on board a new theory I suspect only served to sideline more suitable analysis.

Thinking itself remains one of the parts of fighting I do not fully understand how to harness.

Recognition, timing, perception, emotional regulation, physical execution, and whatever role conscious thought should play all have to come together somehow. The issue, I thought, was carving out enough time, thinking fast, recognising the formula and its elements and processing the situation. Another benefit of experience I suspect. Recognition plays a bigger role: you know what you need before executing, and how to find it.

That was probably one of the most valuable lessons I learned. But the moment when a concept you have studied becomes visible in material reality for the first time can be exhilarating.

However, theory only becomes reliable when it is repeatedly tested against reality. And the outcome of my own experiment still eludes me.

Looking back, I do not regret those years of obsessive study. Not entirely.

I would not necessarily recommend the same route to other aspiring fighters. There are quicker ways to learn to fight. But for the person I was, and the fighter I wanted to become, perhaps it was the right path. It was the path I took because of who I am.

Learning through books, tutorials, research papers, Anki, structured reflection, and countless hours of analysis allowed me to continue learning during periods when ideal training opportunities were limited. It also taught me humility.

Knowledge can organise a domain. It cannot replace experience. Not fully. I do not think so, anyway.

In life, as I traversed the world, I still made plenty of mistakes. In fighting, I still got caught out.

I returned home from Thailand. I have since had two more fights without sparring. They do not provide a definitive answer to the experiment I had been conducting on myself, but they have made the answer more interesting.

The first of those fights placed me in a situation that exposed the limitations of my preparation. The stage was bizarrely dark, and I was fighting without contact lenses. My perception was compromised in an environment where perception was already under pressure.

Yet I did not disintegrate. Psychological training has been part of my preparation - another regrettably large element. But as I navigated bizarre situations, it had become an active part of my training.

Watching the fight afterwards, one of the things that interested me was my ability to continue functioning when direct visual information was not always sufficient. Where perception was limited, prediction compensated, as I realised in the 3rd round when I went to throw a low kick, and realised I had no idea where my opponent's leg was.

I could still anticipate, respond, and continue fighting.

Whether that came from the specific Fight IQ work I had done, accumulated pattern recognition, physical preparation, or some combination of all of them is difficult to isolate. But the adaptability itself was there.

Interestingly enough, I came to understand what the experience actually was. Afterwards, I quietly whispered to a friend that I had not been wearing any contact lenses. It was only when I started to compare my warm up in the brightly lit backstage room for fighters to the ring that the issue of lighting became apparent. Only then did I begin thinking about other fights I had watched. However, in my own personal experience, the two fights I had at this point were all I knew.

This was out of my control. As a fighter, I stand on the shoulders of giants, not even just one singular coach. But this point also highlights the limitation of learning from other people’s experiences, something I relied on heavily. Even early in my journey, I was aware that learning from experience had to be sufficiently embodied. How far this can be achieved through mental visualisation, facing time constraints, and alternative methods of training is something to be conscious of when learning.

The second fight took place under different conditions. This time, I was wearing contact lenses.

At one point, I attempted a sweep that, to me, showed a degree of inventiveness. I was not simply retrieving a rehearsed sequence exactly as I had practised it. I appeared able to perceive the situation, work with the available structure, and produce a solution within the exchange.

That matters to me because improvisation had been one of the objectives of the entire project.

I had spent years trying to understand fighting beneath the level of individual techniques. My hope was that if I understood principles and structural thinking, developed a sufficiently broad repertoire of movement, and became confident in the physical skills I had acquired, I might be able to adapt rather than merely reproduce.

That is what happened. There is also another, more conservative explanation.

Perhaps competent performance is simply more attainable than I had come to believe.

For years, I had treated the experiential gap between myself and professional fighters as enormous. But it may be that once a person has acquired enough relevant skills, developed confidence in those skills, built sufficient physical capacity, and is willing to act, performance can emerge with less conscious integration than they expect.

That possibility interests me too, and in my next fight, I suspect my confidence may grow as a result.

Most likely, the answer involves both.

When I fight, I barely remember the fight or the act of fighting. It is as though my conscious mind largely shuts down, and afterwards only one or two memories remain.

To me, it sometimes feels like creating a robot and then having to step away and watch it fight with whatever weapons you gave it. You spend years constructing capabilities, but when the actual test begins, conscious analysis cannot control every decision.

Then the fight ends, and you inspect what emerged.

That is what I find so fascinating about these performances and why I can watch a fight again and again. I am observing a structure, utilising the understanding gained from countless nights watching UFC fights, trying to determine attribution and judge my decision-making, my navigation of possibilities, but also, my character.

They are not simply wins, losses, good moments, or mistakes. They are evidence, imperfect evidence, of what my preparation produced when conscious thought could no longer supervise the process.

They also demonstrate fluid intelligence. Without the drilling and experience, my fights are an example of reading the situation and applying crystallised intelligence in real time. Despite the losses, I have an overall very favourable view of my own work.

Vision control, which I had extensively trained through mental visualisation, was consciously and intelligently used in my second fight. It was a process requiring specific knowledge to be selected from the scene, and awareness to coordinate with strikes and action. The first UK fight suggested adaptability under degraded perception. The second contained moments that, to me, suggested invention.

I find myself facing the same barriers I did at the start, but the state of the world has changed and not for the better. The remote AI jobs I had anticipated have largely come and gone, and the barriers now exclude all but the most educated and specialised professionals. Support such as the Leeds Art Hostel, which had enabled me to live, train and learn for three months near the beginning of my journey, is no longer available. This leaves me in the heartbreaking position of confronting the possibility that the rate of progression I sought may no longer be achievable. 

I have grown a lot too during this journey.

But this is my story of the journey so far: the state of my skills, the results of my effort, and an ongoing experiment in what knowledge, physical training, deliberate practice, confidence, and limited experience can actually produce in a fighter.