The Fight Club System

What I've built with my training partners in the Fight Club is a much different approach than the Traditional Method. It emphasizes different ideas and runs on assumptions that are in many cases opposed to those found in Traditional Method class structures.

The Fight Club System (FCS) is a new way to approach training that is the product of both experimentation on the mats and research related to what's often referred to as the ecological method or ecological dynamics. It facilitates skill development in ways that cater to the current scientific understanding of how the brain and body learn physical skills, rather than the personal preferences of a given coach or their inherited traditions.

Much of what follows will be familiar to those who utilize ecological dynamics in their learning processes, although it is not a one-to-one copy of any existing system. This is true not just because it mixes ideas from multiple sources, but because one of the core tenets of this system is flexibility. Practices should be tailored to whoever is in the room, with the coach and students providing each other with feedback to ensure everyone gets the most out of each session.

Overview of Fundamental Concepts

The Value of Live Resistance

One of the key components of the FCS system is the idea that resistance should always be live. This strikes many people in the martial arts world as absurd, given that they're conditioned to expect training to consist of passive drills and observation.

Martial arts is often referred to as a game of problem solving, which is largely true. However, the Traditional methods used to embody that idea tend to be flawed. Skill is not a matter of repeating a solution provided by a coach over and over again against a non-resisting opponent. You don't get better by drilling an exact movement without any pushback, since that's not what you face when you play the game at full speed.

This requires your opponent to try to stop you from solving the problems they put in front of you. Coaches can therefore provide a more constructive training environment by switching from a focus on technique optimization to a focus on solution searches.

Anything less than that is speculative: a coach can say "when you do this, your opponent will do that," but that doesn't match with how martial arts works. There are simply too many variables in most cases, even if coaches provide several versions or counters to the technique.

This is because what you do is determined by your size, strength, current skill level and your stylistic preferences. Each one of those factors means how you do things will always be in some ways unique. The same applies to your opponent when they try to impose their game on you. Each person's body and mind works differently, and that means each player will operate differently with every single opponent they face—a truly complex situation.

Knowing all this, it doesn't make sense to tell students they must do things a certain way. Not only does it present a dishonest picture of skill development, it robs the student of their individuality. By insisting on a "right" way to do something, students are not allowed to explore and find solutions that cater to their unique strengths and limitations.

Invariants

What matters more than anything is the physics behind a given solution—combat sports are just forms of applied physics, after all. As long as certain conditions are met, the problem can be solved. A simple example is an armlock: if the head and shoulders are controlled and the arm is extended, an armlock is possible. There are a nearly infinite number of ways to accomplish this, but if those two conditions are satisfied, the arm can be broken.

This is expressed through the idea of invariants, which in this context are the unchanging features of a given situation. Focusing on invariants rather than specific, step-by-step technical instructions means that students can often find surprising, effective solutions that the coach may be unaware of.

Having this framework in their heads allows students to not just come up with their own solutions, but problem solve much faster. Rather than trying to retrieve an algorithm for how to set up a specific armlock, they can instead use simple heuristics such as "control the head and shoulders."

Adaptation

The goal in all coaching of complex, physical sports like submission grappling should be to create not just skilled athletes, but adaptable athletes. Someone who knows a solution but doesn't know how to apply in the proper contexts might as well not know it at all.

The coach should then be training students so that, regardless of the conditions they face, they can quickly search for and find a solution. This is only possible when students are given many opportunities to work through the solution search process and fail. These failures are the data points their brain and body can use to discover what works in a given situation for their specific attributes.

There's a balance that needs to be struck here: while coaches must encourage students to search for their own solutions, it's possible to overwhelm them if the search space is too large. For example, if you throw a day-one student into a full-blown Judo match, they won't learn anything other than what it's like to get a concussion. The same can be said if the student is told to simply stand in place and hold grips on a static partner.

Games

There is a Goldilocks zone of exploration where students have enough room to explore and build adaptive solutions, but not so much they feel overwhelmed or their solutions get lost in the noise of complexity. The way to accomplish this is to set constraints, which are essentially methods for funneling behavior in a certain direction.

Rather than telling the student to either passively drill or dive head-first into a real match, you give them a game structure that incorporates these constraints. What those constraints are and how restrictive they should be depends on the students and the overall intention of the session. But in general, the most effective way to do this is through the use of games that include win-loss conditions (or at least very clear continuous goals).

Brand new students, for example, need to have their attention and intention focused in on the most important invariants. You can tell them to do things like "keep chest to chest contact," with the maintenance of that invariant as a single, continuous goal. They will naturally learn what does and doesn't work for that particular situation against an opponent who isn't just letting them win.

More advanced students need more complex problems to solve, so you could modify the same game to reflect that requirement: rather than just chest to chest contact, the student needs to control the head and shoulders and find a way to advance their position or get a submission. This is now a much more difficult, multi-faceted game that reflects their skill level.

Likewise, games can be used to break bad habits that have persisted for long periods of time, such as overoptimizing for a single type of submission. A coach do make a simple modification such as "you aren't allowed to use that submission," or they can put them in a position where that submission simply isn't possible.

For example, if a grappler loves to use triangle strangles, a game structure where only lower body submissions are possible can help them grow. Traditional methods of simply teaching new techniques rarely have the long-lasting effect on habit-breaking that this way does. It's too easy for the student to discard that knowledge and return to their normal behavior as soon as they find themselves in a familiar situation.

Enjoyment

Those of us who train in the FCS become borderline addicted to it. Once students have experienced constraints-based games, they rarely want to go back to the Traditional Method. The reason for this is simple: it's far more fun.

An idea that should be emphasized in training is that once you die, your style dies with you. If you don't express your unique style to the fullest while you can, it's a tragic waste of potential. That goes for everyone who trains, not just the top-tier professional competitors. The FCS is explicitly designed to allow for that expression, and when students catch on that they're free to be themselves, it's a gratifying experience.

Yes, there will (and should be) hard days, but that should not be how you feel on average after a session. There isn't any kind of learning benefit gained from suffering, despite what many coaches may tell you. You should feel like you've experienced a solid block of enjoyable self-expression with like-minded martial artists.

Sessions vs Classes

Rather than using the word class, you may have noticed that in the Fight Club System (FCS) we call our training blocks sessions. This is a reminder that the coach is not there to lecture you while you sit passively and absorb their knowledge. A session is a collaborative, fluid experience where a coach acts as a facilitator rather than a dictator. Feedback between students and coaches is encouraged, as is experimentation.

In general, a session is much less rigid even though it's far more efficient. You get far more skill development and enjoyment out of an hour-long FCS session than you do a two-hour long Traditional class or seminar. This is true even though it's a more flexible, unpredictable experience for everyone involved.

The structure outlined in the following sections caters to hobbyists who simply want to get better with the time they have available, not professional competitors. Structures more suited to dedicated competitors are covered in the Compete chapter.