John Danaher recently shared a key insight into how grapplers should evaluate their progress, emphasizing that the outcome of a match is only part of the story.
Here is what he had to say on the topic in a recent social media post:
It’s not just about your ability to win – the way in which you win expresses as much about your game as the outcome.
It’s a great feeling to win a match – even more so when your opponent is highly skilled – but one of the best ways to assess your game is not via the outcome, but rather the manner in which you won.
Instead, Danaher points toward efficiency and control as the true benchmarks of a high-level game:
The ideal is not just to win, but to win with the least effort and the most control.
It’s one thing to beat someone – it’s another to win effortlessly and control the match into a submission of your choice.
He encourages practitioners to start analyzing their training sessions beyond just wins and losses, and to pay closer attention to how much effort is required to achieve those results:
Start monitoring more than the outcome of your sparring matches. Start looking at the way in which you win and assessing how much effort was expended per win.
Ultimately, the goal is to continually refine your game so that success comes with greater ease and precision:
Start trying to reduce the effort needed to get your wins – that’s always the ideal towards which you want to aim.
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