Most people assume fighting IQ comes from coaching, sparring experience, or time spent training in gyms. Partially true. However, real fight IQ is built from repeated exposure to fighting situations.
Not abstract understanding. Action under pressure. Abstract understanding merely codifies it. Merely allows you to explain it to other people. Merely allows you to structure the domain and identify good and bad practices. That is important.
For a long period, I learnt to fight predominantly through online content. I watched youtube videos, read PDFs, and drilled the content extensively. I practiced footwork obsessively and lifted weights as a fighter would, shadowboxing in the gym between sets.
This was my experience as an independent fighter. These were the mistakes I made; hopefully, you can learn from them.
Why I initially moved into theory-heavy fight analysis
My starting point was not passive curiosity. It was my inability to pay for training, and the huge insurmountable goal I had set myself to become a professional fighter, travel and train around the world, and ..cough...cough...become the greatest fighter of all time.
I wasn't joking. On one fateful evening, after a week staying at a hostel, I took my clothes and left for London, leaving the office, where I was based, with no real plan, but the idea that I could forge a solution that would enable me more freedom to better manage my time and, consequently, allocate more of it towards training. I was a young trainee solicitor in a top international law firm, a good career ahead of me, but it would have been incomplete without martial arts as another strong component of my life. Youthful ignorance, maybe?
In Edinburgh, where I later found myself, convinced by a Ukrainian woman called Ania, a huge fan of the boxer Oleksandr Usyk, I accelerated my programme to understand fighting through non-physical learning.
I was primarily focused on physical training at the time, tracking my fitness training, learning movement principles, biomechanics, and decision-making. This was how it started. I was physically focused.
Thailand: when theory started to replace experience
Most YouTube tutorial videos are quite concrete. They tell you what to train, how to train, and how often to train it. That is good, but you have to understand and drill the material physically to reap the benefits of that knowledge, or else it is wasted. I drilled a lot, but as my journey into fight iq developed, sometimes this aspect was left behind. I started to rely more on the mental understanding rather than the physical experience of performance to confirm my understanding.
When I was in Thailand, my fight iq approach to improving as a fighter deepened significantly. I spent long periods analysing fighting from multiple conceptual angles, not just technical breakdowns, but philosophical and structural interpretations of exchanges.
But I realised I faced a cross-domain mapping problem — formulas or abstracted knowledge could not be quickly or easily applied to a fast-moving fight situation. The knowledge was not useful if it could not be intuitively grasped, and if deeper analysis was sought, it could be detrimental to performance.
This only became clear later, through further analysis and reflection after hours of investment.
I could not easily distinguish what separated me, with my in-depth understanding of fight theory, from a beginner, when fighting.
The core problem: the knowledge needed integration
I had recognised this some time earlier. Take, for example, the equation for speed. Speed is the time in which a certain amount of distance was crossed. Speed could be understood and represented as a formula or with physical action.
Now I had the task of recognising all these possible applications of the theoretical knowledge I had amassed, and there would inevitably be things missed, video where knowledge was obfuscated - understanding was an obvious prerequisite.
Additionally, there was a neurological basis to action and movement. Repetitions were needed, encoding, and practice to automaticity. I couldn't reliably push outside an area of competence, and perform moves I had never before performed confidently with only a theoretical understanding
The structural failure: too much abstraction during live processing
I am certain more sparring solves this. I think I was still in the process of running through and realising my knowledge in the real world, and when it did happen, it was an amazing experience.
But in sparring, if I choose to lean into conceptual models, I risk delaying action inside the exchange itself. Not fighting, but thinking or waiting for the right action to come to me, when simply doing, was often the right choice. After the fact, analysis could derive a theory, but that understanding often alluded me when executing.
Most tragically, it was not clear that I could not have come to these principles of good action without the time spent learning them via tutorials or videos, if I had simply sparred or rolled, or received them more directly from a coach.
Final reflection
Looking back, the use of ChatGPT, Anki, and structured learning systems was not useless. It increased awareness and created a large conceptual map of fighting. But it also highlighted a constraint: fighting knowledge only becomes useful when it is anchored in physical, repeated experience of timing and pressure. Without that, it remains abstract — and abstraction does not act under pressure.
When I couldn't afford lessons at a club, learning online was great; it was an amazing equalizer.
Around the world, millions of fighters choose their paths to success. Some have the freedom to choose; some have constraints and must act within those constraints. It is an inevitability.
Maximise sparring and doing. I have even developed a solo sparring tool for when you are unable to access regular sparring.
If and when you delve into fight IQ, in books and videos, control strictly. You could learn from a coach, or in my case, coaches. They can select and package the knowledge and direct your actions if you want to bypass self-exploration and a deeper understanding. Coaches can strip away waste, because take it from me, knowledge is very attractive, and before you blink, you could be learning engineering thinking it will make you a better fighter.
If I update my assessment, I will post an update here, but till then, this is my stance.
About the Author
The author is a fighter with several years of experience across Muay Thai and combat sports training environments.
A significant part of his development involved an extended phase of self-directed learning using structured memory systems (including Anki), AI-based research tools, and independent fight analysis.
This period focused on building a theoretical understanding of fighting mechanics, decision-making, and movement systems.
Over time, this approach revealed a consistent limitation: conceptual understanding did not automatically translate into live performance under pressure.
The current focus is on closing the gap between recognition, decision-making, and physical execution.