THE IMPORTANCE OF “BORING”
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” - Aristotle
When you pick up a new hobby, most things about it are so exciting to learn. The first time someone teaches you a sweep in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, it blows your mind how effortlessly you could topple someone bigger and stronger than you. When you start to understand how to move your head in boxing, the rush of wind that whizzes past your head when you slip a punch can make you feel like you’re in the Matrix. All of these new techniques are like lightbulbs flashing on above our heads and these new experiences/understandings are part of what makes picking up a new hobby, such as a combat sport, so addicting. It’s just so fun learning new and exciting things!
Then, something happens after a year or so. You start to get the fundamental moves established and maybe you’ve even seen a handful of flashy moves now. Flipping someone over in BJJ becomes less of a cool, new technique and more of a repetitive drill that you’ve done a hundred times. How many times can you practice slipping a jab before it starts getting boring to practice? Maybe that’s part of why blue belts notoriously disappear once they get their promotion. The excitement starts to wane once you’ve been exposed to enough of your craft.
It’s this point in your combat sports journey - this “boring” part - that takes you to the next level. This applies to every combat sport, but we’ll use boxing as an example for now. Boxing, whether you consider this a pro or a con, has much less “moves” than other martial arts. It doesn’t take long for a boxing student to be exposed, more or less, to just about every technique there is in boxing. Aside from a few techniques here or there, it may take maybe a year before you’ve seen all of the moves boxing has.
It’s important to understand, especially for those students that are missing those lightbulb moments in their beginning sessions and feel like now they are doing the same training over and over again, that that “boring” drilling is where you become a better practitioner. Not every session is going to be a session where you learn something new.
Let’s take a one hour, small group class for example. At Fortify Fight Club, boxing classes are usually one hour long.
A general breakdown of this class time is as follows:
10 minutes for warmup at the start of class and 10 minutes for sparring at the end of class - 40 minutes of drill time remaining
Divide that 40 minutes by two, since we share our drilling time with a partner - 20 minutes of drill time remaining
Take out any small time-takers, such as instruction/demonstration time, water breaks, etc - 15 minutes of drill time remaining
Divide the remaining time up between 2-4 techniques taught in the class…
When you break it down this way, there really isn’t a lot of time for drilling each technique!
This means that in our unstructured drilling time, when your coach is telling you to hit the punching bag, shadowbox, or drill with a partner, we should be utilizing this time to go back and practice some of those techniques that need refining. At a certain point, a student needs more time to refine and sharpen the knives that they already have in their drawer, rather than just collecting more and more knives.
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” - Bruce Lee
Drills that a student might feel are boring are those unstructured bagwork times. Those sessions where it feels like you’ve already done five or six continuous rounds of shadowboxing and there are still more on the clock. When your coach tells you to practice parrying and countering the same jab in the same way a hundred times. It can feel repetitive. Boring. A chore.
There comes a certain point in your journey where the ability of your technique starts to slow down. As you spar with and train with better and more experienced partners, you will find that refined technique is what you need to keep up. Learning a new move can be helpful, but without the hundreds of repetitions required, you may find yourself overwhelmed by people that understand distance management better, have a more technical jab, or sit down on their punches better. Even the more minute details, such as better hand placement or better weight distribution can present themselves in big ways. Old school boxing coaches knew this well, and they would have their students in an entire session doing nothing but repeating a jab a thousand times. Parry-jab (100x), slip-jab (100x), pull-jab (100x), offline jab (100x), etc. and before they knew it, they were at over a thousand jabs per session. History and those that have reached technical heights that students dream of know that this is what is required to reach the top.
The next time your coach gives you unstructured drilling time, such as bagwork or shadowboxing, see it as not something to groan about, but an opportunity to sharpen the knives you already have. The next time that your coach gives you a single task to drill for hundreds of reps, like slipping a jab and returning with a cross-hook, don’t feel like you are wasting your time. Understand that you are training your mind to work quickly and automatically for when the time comes when you’ll need it.
Mastering any skill, especially in combat sports, isn’t about chasing the thrill of constant novelty—it’s about embracing the power of repetition and consistency. Those seemingly “boring” drills are the foundation on which great fighters are built, sharpening technique, building muscle memory, and preparing you for the unpredictable demands of competition. So the next time you find yourself in the middle of a repetitive exercise, remember: greatness isn’t in the flashy moments, but in the disciplined effort you put in day after day. Lean into the monotony, because it’s where champions are made and the foundation for success with our goals is made.
