Toughness

In competitive combat sports, people like to say they train to maximize "technique," "fitness," "spiritual development," and so on. But practitioners' actions tend to point towards one goal: toughness. They don't just want to be good, they want to be tough—so tough that if they walk down the street, all the untrained peasants will quake with fear, unable to meet the gaze of their superior.

Toughness on its own is wildly overrated, so the FCS does not emphasize it as a goal. On the one hand, it is good to possess mental toughness. It can keep you from quitting prematurely or crumbling under the pressure of a determined opponent. You need some degree of toughness just to show up day after day, so I would never say it's a useless trait.

But consider what toughness implies. What goes through your mind if, during a fight, one of the commentators says "Wow, that guy/gal is tough!" It usually means they're getting their face smashed in, but they keep coming anyway. In other words, they're not fighting very well.

Shift that example to a situation where the commentator says "That guy/gal is so skilled!" What's your first thought now? Chances are, you'll think they're winning the fight.

Now consider this: would you rather be described as "skilled" or "tough"? I'd take "skilled" ten times out of ten myself, although in reality the road to skill involves a natural buildup of toughness.

The Structure of Toughness Training

If you observe the competition sessions at most combat sports gyms, you'll find there is a strong focus on toughness. They may not say that's the focus, they may even say the emphasis is on skill, but if you observe how they operate, the truth comes out.

How can you tell just by watching? The answer is simple: you see how much time they spend beating the hell out of themselves and each other versus other activities. For example, many jiu-jitsu gyms structure their competition classes like this:

• Strenuous calisthenics, often for ridiculous periods of time.

• Sparring rounds for hours.

• Pose for pictures that can be posted on social media with captions like "iron sharpens iron."

Part of the problem here is that you can, if you're talented and you have a lot of time to kill, develop to a decent level by training this way. There's more than one way to skin a cat, as they say. But it's just not a structure that optimizes for skill development.

The equation here is: train hard + train often = skill. Toughness is the focus, and learning is the byproduct. That's a real meathead way to train, not to mention you will increase your injury rate significantly if you do it too much.

Toughness as a Byproduct

Rather than training specifically to make yourself tough, with learning as the byproduct, the best training methods develop your skills and treat toughness as a byproduct. The reason for this is more physiological than it is psychological: if you aren't challenged by your training sessions, you won't grow.

Think of it like lifting weights. When you lift a heavy weight, one that is difficult (but not too difficult) to move, you actually break down your muscle tissue (you build muscle during recovery, not lifting). If it's too light, it won't trigger that reaction and your body will remain roughly the same. So you do need to challenge yourself, but it becomes a question of how.

The way I think of it is like a scale. On the one side, there's physical challenge, and on the other there's mental challenge. High-quality training leans heavily on the mental challenge side, but it doesn't ignore the physical challenge side completely. And there are situations when conditioning should be considered as part of the equation, at which point you should lean more heavily on the physical side.

How Tough Do You Need to Be?

It's worth asking if you even need to be that tough to succeed. Training to be the toughest player strikes me as a form of premature optimization, where you're solving a problem that doesn't yet exist. You're better off putting your efforts into skill development and letting your toughness level rise to whatever it needs to be, rather than forcing yourself to build that capacity for no reason.

When you train primarily to be tough, you create a reservoir of something in you that may or may not be useful. On the other hand, you always want to be more skillful. There's no point at which you benefit from being less skilled, so that should always be the emphasis.