The example of Georges St Pierre: I have had the honor of coaching many truly outstanding athletes of more than two decades. None surpassed the incredible achievements of Mr St Pierre. Everyone knows his achievements – far fewer know what it was like to train with him in the gym – yet a brief discussion of this could be very beneficial to your own progress. The first thing to note was that Mr St Pierre was fully capable of beating the crap out of any of us any time he felt like it, but he came in to the gym only to play our game of grappling rather than fighting. He knew that grappling expertise was an important part of fighting expertise and would not try to use any of his great advantages in standing grappling and striking (or even mention them) but instead play our submission game. He would almost always pull guard and start of positions of disadvantage to remove his advantages and work on his weaknesses. His only goal was improvement in the area we were best suited to help it. If he wanted to he could have simply disengaged and stalled to avoid our strengths. He never did. He went directly into our strengths and tried to improve his performance in those areas. He did the same thing in every boxing, Muay Thai and wrestling workout i ever saw him do. Every workout must have seemed a nightmare as it was him playing against the best people in the world in their strongest area, on their terms. If someone followed him around for a year and watched his workouts they might see him struggling the whole time – until it was fight night. Then they would see the result of all that work against specialists in their domain. Now it was time to put it all together in HIS domain – the cage – under MMA rules – and you all know how that went! DON'T FOCUS IN WINNING IN THE GYM – FOCUS ON IMPROVEMENT AND skill ACQUISITION – worry about WINNING when it counts – when you learn to divide those two concerns your progress will be astounding
