Mapping MMA and Self-Defense (Patreon)

MMA analysts to fans often criticize fighters who consistently run onto the cage. They see this both as a tactical mistake and as a moral failing—that they're too obstinate to work on their footwork. This assumes a lot, first that they can afford more coaches. Second, that this is about footwork rather than talent. In basketball, there's something known as "mapping the court." It's the ability to spatially map the whole court in your mind. Some players are naturally better than others, which can be maximized or mitigated by position. For better or worse in MMA, you don't have teammates to make up for your shortcomings.

For one to use footwork to evade the cage, one must know when to use this footwork. There is an implicit precondition: that you know where you are in the cage. We're all naturally different in our spatial awareness. You can have someone who's world-class in jiu-jitsu still run into other people while sparring. You'll also have a partner who always knows when to stop rolling because you're about to run into something or someone. Which is to say, some people will walk onto the mats with this talent, some will get to the highest level and never develop it.

Part of this lack of development could be that in submission grappling, knowing where you are isn't all that important as you'll have a ref or teacher reset you if you're about to run out of bounds or run into a person or object. Though mapping the cage is essential in MMA, due to low financial incentives, something commonly discussed in high pay sports is entirely foreign in MMA because it doesn't attract the people who would bring this up. There's no money in MMA analytics, but analytics pays quite well in other sports.

To go back to basketball, it's quite common to do drills where you not only know how to get to the 3-point line without looking but also to know where you are in time without looking at the shot clock. Space and time are both drilled.

In pro wrestling, wrestlers go to the ring before their matches and walk the ring and run the ropes to map it. This is similar to stunt people blocking out their stunts to know how many steps before an object. This is a skill every blind person must develop. So it is both innate AND improvable.

But beyond just prizefighting, consider how vital mapping and spatial awareness is for self-defense. But much of what is "practical" is about tactics and techniques one uses when one stays and fights, and not much in the way of escaping. Or it's "do this then escape," but there's a lot to escaping that's left out—a lot of skills that could themselves be chunked into drills.

What's the point to these techniques if you don't first teach the student to tell if they're near a wall, chair, car, or other people. In sparring, you're often told to ignore objects or people around you—that people can move or we can reset you. All for the sake of intensity and "aliveness." So you never develop this radar, or inversely your inborn radar can be stunted, or you can believe your radar doesn't matter and willfully ignore it.

But isn't knowing how close you are to a wall or to other people deathly important in a "real" scenario? Isn't being aware of how close you are to your training partners a crucial skill to develop not just for safety but to have a healthy training space?

Yet if you train, especially in BJJ and other combat sports, what's the least important thing? The thing you're told to ignore?

How often have you been injured by someone you weren't even sparring? I remember a top prospect getting injured like this in TUF 1. The understanding was, getting injured by people you're not sparring with just happens in training. But surroundings not mattering makes sense to the attacker, not the defender. It makes sense to the bully, the bigger, stronger person—not the small and weak.

There's a glaring bias/blind spot created by both economics and the prevailing reactionary power structure in both martial arts prizefighting and martial arts self-defense. The reason it's never talked about is that we mistake this reactionary reality for reality or that reactionary culture is the way it's meant to be.