It’s Not Supposed to Look Like a Fight
A drill earns its place by the skill it develops and what you can do with that skill when the conditions change.
Alan Baker with Guro Dan Inosanto
I just got back from a week in Los Angeles for the Inosanto Instructor Training Camp. This year, I went out several days early to take private lessons with other instructors before the camp began. I’m trying to do more of that: attach opportunities for my own development to travel that is already on the calendar.
Teaching matters to me. So does continuing to be a student.
I have been one of Guro Inosanto’s instructors for years, and getting in front of him to train is still an incredible opportunity. During the week, a point came up about drilling and how easily people misunderstand what they are looking at.
You have probably seen the comment underneath a martial arts video:
“That’s not what a fight looks like.”
Sometimes that is a legitimate criticism. If someone is presenting a cooperative demonstration as proof that a technique will work against an unwilling person, questions are appropriate.
But when the video is showing a drill, my first thought is usually much simpler.
Of course it doesn’t. What did you think we were doing?
Somewhere along the way, a portion of martial arts culture seems to have lost the ability to distinguish developing a skill from demonstrating the finished application. Before we decide that a drill is useless, we might want to understand what it is designed to teach.
Batting Practice Is Not a Baseball Game
Nobody walks past a batting cage and announces that baseball is fraudulent because there are no fielders and the batter isn’t running to first base.
We understand the purpose. The player is working on part of the game. The environment has been simplified so that something specific can receive attention and repetition.
Martial arts training deserves the same basic level of thought.
A drill may isolate balance, timing, distance, visual recognition, sensitivity to pressure, or the ability to maintain structure while moving. It may deliberately remove choices so a student can recognize one important relationship. It may slow an exchange down enough for the student to notice a mistake that disappears inside a faster scramble.
The absence of a full fight does not automatically make that practice meaningless.
Apparently, the batting cage gets more benefit of the doubt than a thirty-second martial arts clip.
Still, the comparison has a limit. Batting practice must eventually help the player hit in a game. A martial arts drill needs a connection to the job we claim it is preparing us to do. We cannot hide behind the word “drill” every time someone asks an intelligent question.
What Is This Drill Actually Developing?
That is the question I want students and instructors to ask.
If we are working on sensitivity, what information are we learning to recognize through contact? If we are developing timing, timing in relation to what? If we are practicing a defensive response, what tells us that the response is appropriate?
A good explanation should go beyond “this is how we have always done it.”
Consider a partner drill with a known entry. Keeping the entry predictable may give a student room to work on alignment, positioning, and the shape of the movement. That can be useful. It also means the student already knows something an opponent would not be required to provide.
At some point, we need to find out whether the student can recognize the opportunity rather than simply wait for the agreed signal.
We might vary the timing, offer a second entry, change the distance, or allow the partner to resist a particular part of the movement. We might limit the exercise to one position while giving both people a genuine objective.
Those changes give us different information. A student who can repeat the movement may still struggle to choose it. A student who recognizes the opening may lose position when resistance appears. Now the instructor has something useful to work on.
That is a better training conversation than arguing about whether the original drill looked enough like a fight.
The Drill Has to Go Somewhere
There is another mistake on the opposite side of this discussion: becoming excellent at a cooperative exercise and assuming that excellence automatically transfers everywhere else.
A partner who knows the pattern can help you learn. That same predictability can also hide things you have not learned yet.
Being smooth inside an agreed exchange does not establish that you can manage an unfamiliar person, an unexpected response, or an opponent actively trying to stop you. We need opportunities to test those differences.
Sport researchers use the term “representative learning design” to describe practice that preserves important relationships between the information an athlete perceives and the action it calls for. That is useful language for a practical question: are we teaching the person to respond to something meaningful, or merely to complete a familiar pattern?
That does not require every training round to contain everything. It requires us to understand what we have removed, why we removed it, and when the student needs to encounter it again.
An intelligent practice plan can include technical repetition, variable partner work, limited-choice exercises, positional sparring, and more open exchanges. The balance depends on the student, the task, and the purpose of the training. There is no need to turn that into a rigid ladder that everyone must climb in exactly the same order.
The important thing is that the instructor can explain the connection and check whether the training is producing it.
Faster and Harder Are Training Variables
The other comment that often travels with “that doesn’t look like a fight” is the assumption that faster and harder must be better.
I am not opposed to resistance. If another person never gets to disagree with your technique, you are missing important information. Students do not have to become advanced before they experience that disagreement. The task and the level of resistance need to be appropriate to what they can currently manage.
A beginner can work against a real objective inside a carefully limited exercise. An experienced practitioner may need a slower exchange to examine a mechanical problem. Both can be training intelligently.
Speed changes the time available to recognize and respond. Resistance changes the physical problem. Unpredictability changes the decisions. Fatigue changes what the person can sustain. We should know which of those we are adjusting and what we expect to learn from it.
When all of them increase at once, the person may become very busy without becoming very clear about anything.
Strength and athleticism are valuable. I would never tell a student to avoid developing them. But they can sometimes compensate for a technical problem well enough that the problem goes unnoticed. If the only answer available is to squeeze harder, move faster, or outlast the other person, I want to take a closer look at the mechanics underneath it.
Hard work matters. So does knowing what the hard work is accomplishing.
An exhausted student and a loud room are not, by themselves, evidence of good instruction.
Keep the Body You Are Trying to Develop
This is where the discussion becomes bigger than whether a drill looks convincing online.
I want training that improves my ability to operate as a human being. I want to become more capable, and I want to keep developing over the course of my life.
Injuries can happen in physical training. We cannot promise that any method will eliminate them. But regularly damaging people should not be treated as proof that a school is serious.
The International Olympic Committee’s consensus on training load and injury makes room for both demanding training and sensible management. Training can build capacity, while poorly managed demands and inadequate recovery can contribute to injury risk. The issue is more complicated than declaring all hard training harmful or assuming that more is always better.
There is a difference between accepting the demands of a chosen sport and refusing to examine an unnecessarily destructive training culture. A competitive athlete may make choices around a particular event or stage of a career. Someone training for long-term development may have a different set of priorities. A good instructor should be able to discuss those choices honestly.
What troubles me is the idea that being unable to train later is simply the price of having trained properly earlier.
I am not interested in building a practice that leaves me with nothing but stories about how tough I used to be.
Strength, speed, recovery, and physical capacity change over time. Technical understanding does not make us immune to aging, but a training system should help us adapt rather than pretend those changes will never arrive.
That means examining the quality of our movement, the demands we place on the body, and the habits we reward in the room. It also means having enough control over our ego to practice at the level that serves the lesson.
Sometimes that will be demanding. Sometimes it will look surprisingly quiet.
A Practical Drill Audit
Take one drill you already practice. Before the next round, answer five questions:
- What specific ability are we trying to improve?
- What information does the student have to notice to use it?
- What is the partner agreeing to do, and what difficulty does that remove?
- How could we change the exercise to check whether the skill survives a different response?
- What level of speed, resistance, and contact lets us learn while keeping the risk appropriate?
Then make one purposeful change. Give the partner another option. Vary the timing. Begin from a slightly different position. Keep enough of the task stable that you can understand what changed.
Watch the result. If the movement falls apart, you have found something worth teaching. If it holds up, you have a reason to explore the next challenge. Either result is more useful than protecting a drill from questions or dismissing it because it lacks the appearance of a fight.
Train for the Result
The point of drilling is to develop something you can use. A drill should have a purpose, an honest set of limitations, and a way to examine whether it is doing its job.
That takes thought. It takes observation. It takes an instructor who can do more than demand another hard round and a student willing to learn something beyond how to survive one.
The next time you see a drill, ask what it is developing. Then ask where that development leads.
It is not supposed to look like a fight every moment. It is supposed to help you become more capable when the moment requires it, while leaving you able to keep training and living afterward.
Shift Your Perspective, Take Action, And Create Change
Further Reading & Sources
- Representative Learning Design and Functionality of Research and Practice in Sport. Pinder, Davids, Renshaw & Araújo, 2011.
- How Much Is Too Much? (Part 1) International Olympic Committee Consensus Statement on Load in Sport and Risk of Injury. Soligard et al., 2016.
Alan Baker
Alan Baker is an internationally recognized educator, author, and founder of The Capable Academy. For more than 47 years, he has studied, tested, and taught martial arts, defensive tactics, self-protection, physical culture, and self-leadership. His work has reached students, instructors, martial artists, law enforcement personnel, and executive protection professionals around the world.
Alan is the author of five books addressing self-leadership, physical culture, and self-defense. He has also worked as a professional protection agent and has served on the faculty of the Executive Protection Institute for nearly 20 years, helping educate and prepare protection professionals for the demands of the field.
He created the C-Tac System to close the gap between traditional martial arts and the realities of modern civilian protection. C-Tac integrates awareness, preparedness, communication, defensive skills, and intelligent decision-making within one responsible, capability-based training system.
Learn more about Alan