Also: yes, I think skipping is valuable. Not a valuable skill in itself, but a good way to train jumping mechanics, light-footedness– if this sounds non-technical, try fighting guys who skip and then ones who don’t – and, to some extent, coordination. You should learn it to do it, and preferably to a decent standard.

But, all of that said, I think practising double-unders is a bit of a waste of time.

You might be familiar with Dan Gable, one of the greatest wrestlers (and wrestling coaches) of all time, who once said:

‘If it’s important, do it every day. If it isn’t, don’t do it at all.’ 

This is where I am on a lot of technical movements that people practice for the gym. Are they fun? Yeah, maybe. Are they important? Not really. Are they more important than other physical skills you could be learning/improving/perfecting, given the same time and environment and commitment to improving your life? Absolutely not.

Here are six things that will absolutely offer more value to your life than constantly practising double-unders. In a way, they’re all a bit like double-unders: easy enough to learn in a couple of weeks’ serious practice, but the sorts of things that you could spend years practising without ever fully mastering. Things that you don’t need much more than a bit of empty space (and a bit of commitment) to work on. Things that will make you fitter, happier, and more competent at life.

1. Breakfalling
I’ve talked about this before, but learning to fall over is one of the most proactive things you can do to reduce your own chances of death by misadventure. Imagine you’re flying off a motorbike right now: are you instinctively forming the correct arm position to not break all the bones in your face? If not, that might be worth working on a bit more than skipping.

2. Punching 
Real talk: if you can do more than 10 double-unders in a row but you don’t know how to throw a decent jab and right cross, your priorities are simply wrong. Being able to punch properly is what sets us apart from animals (except kangaroos): a glorious expression of full-body coordination that, when done on a decent bag, feels really, really satisfying. Start with a jab and cross: clean, straight punches that boxers work on for years (and that can get you out of a lot of trouble). Even if you never move on from there, at least you won’t embarrass yourself on the gym’s heavy bag.

3. Climb-ups
This could have said ‘parkour’, but let’s keep things simple: climbing onto a thing is a fundamental human skill, and one that offers an enormous amount of gradation. If you’ve got a wall to hand, do them during training sessions. If not, improvise with a plyo box (your bare minimum: dips on the box). Also, for the love of all that is holy start doing strict muscle-ups on a bar.

4. Swimming
Full disclosure: I am terrible at swimming. I can move forward without drowning, but the intricacies of breathing properly and actually being efficient are (currently) lost on me. I’m working on it, though, since not dying if I fall off a boat is quite important to me.

5. Tumbling
Not the same as breakfalling. We’ll dance over the problems with having ‘handstand walk’ as a key metric of fitness (TL;DR: it encourages you to put unnecessary pressure on your cervical spine) and say, instead, that rather than focusing on getting more mileage on your hands, it’s probably a good idea to work on getting your body upside down in other ways. Learning to cartwheel, macaco, roundoff and otherwise move your body through space in non-common configurations will improve your proprioception, make you happy, and let you show off in front of children and romantic partners. Why would you NOT?

6. Dancing
Look, if you want to throw a CrossFit-themed wedding then all power to you, but just be aware that a) All the other CrossFitters will be judging your form and b) Everyone else will be wondering why you’re doing kettlebell swings instead of a first dance. To put it another way, being able to throw fucking down on a dancefloor is one of the most important, empowering skills a human being can acquire – one that will serve you well and bring you happiness at practically any age. Or to put it yet another way: stop laughing at those people doing the Zumba classes while you do your three sets of squats.

HOMEWORK: Pick one of these things and practise it for at least five minutes, three days this week.

A: The Republic, Plato

B: 1984, George Orwell

C: A Brief History Of Seven Killings

Easy, no? Assuming you agree with everyone else I’ve asked this question, you’re picking Plato to survive the longest, and I’m doing the same. The thinking is simple: Plato’s book has already survived for nearly two and a half millenia (it was published in 380BC), so it’s probably going to make it a bit longer. Orwell’s chances are decent (published in 1949, since you ask), but last year’s Booker Prize winner? Well, maybe you knew the name of it, but will you remember it by 2020? Will most people?

This is a simplified version of a theory called the Lindy Effect, developed by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot but named after a New York diner where standup comics used to hang out. The theory, as it relates to comedians, is pretty simple: “the future career expectations of a television comedian is proportional to the total amount of his past exposure on the medium” – and, anecdotally, it’s fairly true. But there’s an obvious objection to that version: comedians die.

Ideas and new technologies don’t, and that’s where things get interesting.

Nicolas Taleb, whose work revolves around the idea that predicting stuff is difficult, and that therefore making ourselves ‘antifragile’ to unforeseeable events is our best course of action, suggests that we can use the Lindy Effect to make an informed guess about which technologies will survive over future decades. Books, wine and chairs, for instance, have all survived for centuries, and so it’s fair to predict that they’ll survive for centuries to come. E-readers and alcopops are relatively new inventions, so it’s less clear if they’ll do as well. This, Taleb argues, is the best way of predicting the future: it’s very, very difficult to tell which ideas and technologies are going to arrive in the next few years (how come nobody foresaw wheels on suitcases being a thing?) but slightly easier to guess which ones will survive.

So: how does this relate to the constant search for the Next Big Thing?

Okay: like most people, I am a sucker for new stuff. At Oscar season I merrily watch turgid biopic after dreadful period drama, forgetting that this is the same stuff the Academy deems worthy of a nod every single year, and that most of it is awful. When it’s Booker prize season – well, I don’t actually read many of the books, but I always feel like I should. Video games, self-help books, museum exhibitions, burger places, Netflix-produced TV series: you can only keep cranking up the speed of the pop-culture treadmill for so long until it all gets too much and you fly off the back and land in a heap. You can’t keep up with everything: not with half of the world’s websites declaring new ‘Must’ watches every day.

Fortunately, you don’t have to.

Here’s my new mental shortcut for dealing with this stuff: the longer an idea/film/book/game has stuck around in the popular consciousness, the more value you’re probably going to get out of it, in the long run. Instead of scrambling to watch/read/try the latest hot thing, switch your default option to the old, well-established thing. It’s more likely to be worth your time.

Here’s how I’m doing this in practice:

Reading old self-help books, not new ones. If there’s one self-help book I’d recommend to anyone, it’s How To Make Friends And Influence People, published in 1936. New self-help books haven’t had their ideas put to the test yet: HTMFAIP because its advice is timeless, simple, and effective.

Old movie Sundays. Instead of dropping £30 at the cinema to see films that have about a 50/50 chance of being good, my wife and I have started this tradition: every Sunday, we take it in turns to pick a pre-1970s film that’s stood the test of time. Look at it this way: about three years ago, everyone was scrambling to see Lincoln – now, nobody gives a shit whether you’ve seen it or not. By contrast, you are always going to look like a philistine if you haven’t seen Casablanca.

Going to see stuff that’s been around for centuries. In London, where I live, you could go to a new gallery, museum or cafe every day, forever, and never run out. The catch? Loads of them are awful: but it’s hard to go wrong by checking out the classics at the National Gallery or the Darwin wing at the Natural History Museum.

Listening to old music. Again: you could spend your whole life worrying about new music: some people do, and if it makes them happy, that’s fine. But if you’re looking for a change of pace, there’s a lot to be said for chucking on some old stuff that you’ve never heard before (I’m listening to a lot of Sam Cooke at the moment, but that’s just me).

None of this is an exact science, but it’s actually gone a long way towards reducing my hipster anxiety about keeping up with the next big thing.

Now, a couple of questions that I get when I try to explain this to people:

1. Are you saying that all old stuff is automatically good?

No. Some things (fascism, creationism, Charlie Chaplin films that aren’t The Great Dictator) have managed to survive for quite a while despite being terrible ideas. The Lindy Effect just suggests that they’ll be around for a while yet. Sorry, Richard Dawkins.

2. Are you saying I should stop watching/reading/listening to/worrying about anything ‘new’?

Definitely not. If you like Will Ferrell films and experimental post-rock (and as my long-suffering wife knows, I love both), have at it. But if you don’t, then don’t worry if everyone else is telling you that you should be into them: chances are they’ll have forgotten about it soon.

3. How does this all work with lifting weights?

Really, really well. Look at it this way: fads in training come and go at astonishing speed, but what works is – at a basic level – very well established, and extremely unlikely to change. Yes, possibly the brand-new training modality you’re going to try (foam-rolling every day, tempo training, POSE running) will work: or possibly it won’t. Possibly it has side-effects that you haven’t anticipated, or problems that – because it’s relatively new and untested – haven’t become clear yet.

An example? Sure.

Look at boxers. For decades, boxers have done loads of roadwork, sometimes running up to 10k a day. Recently, there’s been a movement away from this in certain gyms, with S&C coaches (who often don’t actually box) reasoning that high-intensity interval training can achieve similar (or better!) physiological adaptations in much less time. But, it turns out, this isn’t entirely true: not only is the aerobic system much more ‘trainable’ than the anaerobic, but it also contributes to regenerating the two anaerobic systems so they can produce energy again, and is essential for phosphocreatine resynthesis during recovery from high-intensity exercise. Yes, that’s a lot of science (you can read the long version at Muay Thai scholar (or in the excellent work of Joel Jamieson), but most top-level boxers manage just fine without worrying about it: they do their much-derided long, low-intensity efforts, and then beat the crap out of the guys who do HIIT all the time and gas out halfway through the third round.

What does this mean? It means that if someone’s telling you to throw out something that’s worked for decades with the promise that whatever they’re doing works better, the burden of proof is very much on them. It means that if you’re unsure what to do, then doing the stuff that has worked, for everyone who has tried it, for centuries (picking up something heavy and carrying it has a lineage that goes back to Milo of Croton: Bosu balls do not), is unlikely to take you far wrong. And, of course, it means that if any endurance ‘coaches’ tell you your favourite marathon champion would be ‘even faster’ if they reduced their training volume or changed their running form, you can safely call them an asshat.

Here’s the TL;DR version of this, as it relates to training (but also everything else):

If you’re not sure what to spend your time on, the old thing is probably a sounder investment than the new thing.

And, look, if you’re after a standup comedian to watch, you aren’t going to go wrong with someone old-school. Richard Pryor kicks the ass off Russell Howard any day.

HOMEWORK: Watch a pre-70s film, listen to a pre-40s album, and start a pre-1900s book this week. And check out Richard Pryor talking about boxing. Dude knew how to take a punch.

As I mentioned in my previous post, much of my current striking practice is based on the works of Jack Slack, a striking coach and fight fan who’s been analysing how to hit people better since taking up karate at the age most people are still playing with stuffed animals. He’s a scholar of the fight game, an excellent technician, and I fully recommend checking out his books and blog –  even if you aren’t interested in improving your own striking, it’ll give you a huge understanding and appreciation of the fight game. I’ve lost count of how many boxing commentators can’t explain why Pacquiao (for instance) is so good, but thanks to reading Jack’s posts, I’ve developed a much better understanding of that, and other questions.

Anyway: after I read the Ferriss stuff, I decided to go straight for the source. I sent Jack the suggested questions almost word-for-word, and he responded with the wealth of information below. It’s a long read, but I’d recommend it even if you aren’t into striking – it’s a fantastic example of how to break down and learn almost any skill.

Oh, and fun fact: it turned out Jack’s reading The 4-Hour Chef as well. Autodidacts think alike.

I have always enjoyed watching men who don’t excel physically dominate their opponents technically – so I studied guys like Jersey Joe Walcott, Archie Moore, James Toney.  I think this is the best approach for anyone trying their hand at a new martial art or sport. I’m a novice in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu but in my time learning it I’ve looked more to what Caio Terra, Ryan Hall and other physically limited guys do rather than what the super explosive or strong guys can do.

The basic approach that I will always advocate is to take an angle. It’s always said but never much taught in the striking arts. I’ve been to so many boxing matches, kickboxing bouts and karate competitions where the two fighters simply attack each other head to head. This is what I refer to as fighting “on a line”. Obviously, if you’re constantly jumping out to the side to take an angle the opponent will try to catch you while you’re doing it, so fighting head to head is an important skill to learn, but it should always be engaged in with the idea of moving off line to land the real hurting shots later on. Even a bull when it fights another male of its own species will butt heads but be looking to move to the side of the opponent and gore their flank.

JS: Some of the best examples are the old timers of boxing whom I mentioned earlier. Jersey Joe Walcott wasn’t a huge puncher, was constantly overlooked for big opportunities, fought the best matches of his career around his late 30s and early 40s and never had the chance to train full time. He got by on developing a crafty style – he’d back up, change stances and turn his back just to get his opponents to chase – then he’d nail them with a hard right hand or left hook. In modern times Bernard Hopkins has shown true savvy in doing things at 40 that younger fighters are terrified to do such as leading with the right hand.

In MMA, Lyoto Machida is constantly given credit as being superhumanly fast but in truth he just has truly phenomenal timing and the ability to draw a predictable attack from his opponent which he can intercept. He’s a small guy for his weight class, and lacks the boxing and kickboxing versatility of many of his opponents. It’s almost entirely through elite timing, anticipation and drawing of the opponent that he wins his fights and those are skills which are far more simple to train than speed and combinations.

The belief that full contact sparring is the only way that you will learn is a bizarre one which lingers. Body exclusive sparring (only body punches, chest punches and kicks to the body and legs) is great for learning to use range as long as you keep it sensible. Substitute jabs to the head with jabs to the sternum etc. and you’ve got a fantastic training method. Brendan Ingle’s fighters (Prince Naseem, Herol Graham, Junior Witter) all trained extensively with this method.

Equally, non-contact sparring as is done in Karate dojos can be of great use when approached properly. Obviously full sparring is enormously important and integral to proper training, but it certainly can’t be done every day. This is why forms of light sparring can and should be investigated. Sparring exists to practice movement, combinations, set ups and footwork against an opponent – more importantly, ANY form of sparring sharpens the reflexes and improves the movement.

A second myth which I am always looking to disprove is that all leading should be done with the jab. Personally, I have found a 80:20 jab to more exotic lead ratio to be much more effective and unpredictable. So for every few leads made with a jab you could throw a right hand lead (preferably a straight) or even lead with a left hook if you’re feeling flashy. The right hand lead developed a reputation as a sucker punch some time in the 60s as it is slower to the target than the jab, but properly set up with footwork it is a wonderful weapon which very few fighters practice counters for nearly enough to make them effective.

JS: Obviously having a good coach (or multiple if you’re lucky enough to have multiple gyms or styles near you) is the most important thing, but a great deal of strategy must be self taught because most coaches only deal with the basics. Edwin Haislet’s ‘On Boxing‘ is a masterpiece, as is ‘Boxing Simplified‘ which was written by John Walsh, a friendly rival of Haislet who coached another top high school team. Both of those are available online for free and worth more than anything produced in the last 20 years on boxing.  Muay Thai Unleashed is a very good book, as is Fedor’s book. Anderson Silva’s book is pretty good but padded out with lots of gimmicky stuff.

Once you’ve got the basics of boxing from Haislet or Walsh, and have learned a few kicks it is time to start working on strategy. I’m sort of old school in this one; Sun Tzu, Miyamoto Musashi, even Machiavelli’s The Prince. Kazumi Tabata released a wonderful collection of excerpts from some strategic classics called ‘Secret Tactics’ which is a great entrance level book on strategy. The books to look at are the books that get you thinking about what you’re doing and don’t let you pretend that it is how fast you can throw the same 1-2-3 combo which everyone else is working on that determines your success.

The most important thing to do is to watch the best. Guys like Kid Chocolate learned to box by watching film – in fact Kid Chocolate used to have to go the library to watch grainy old footage of Jack Johnson on a terrible projector. Nowadays we have youtube! The best way to come up with new ideas is to watch what other top strikers have used to fluster their opponents. There’s a ridiculous number of fighters you could look at but it’s worth starting small. Think of 3 great boxers, 3 great kickboxers and 3 great MMA strikers, then sit down and watch some fights with a note pad.

JS: The most obvious one is a lack of discpline. Everyone loses the discipline eventually in a fight – dropping their hands for an instant or not angling out after an attack, or even attacking head on without a set up. To be honest adhering to correct striking principles is very tiring mentally and physically. The best guys in the world are the guys who can stay disciplined the longest – like Manny Pacquiao who can keep coming in and angling out even in the last round of a fight. It sucks to see a great technician or power puncher get caught in the last round of a fight because they couldn’t stay disciplined.

Another one is the complete absence of body work in most MMA matches and a seeming lack of respect for attrition work altogether. Jose Aldo and Jon Jones should have been enough to show the importance of targets that aren’t the head, but it’s still pretty rare to see a guy with good set ups for his low kicks or body shots. There is just far too much headhunting in MMA.

Another excellent strategy for BJJ guys, simply because a lot of them don’t train takedowns nearly as seriously as wrestlers and MMA fighters, is to get to work on the opponent’s lead leg. If you can get an opponent light on his lead leg, you bring his centre of gravity up and his ability to shuck off your attempts to clinch or take him down is going to be compromised. I personally will always sing the praises of inside low kicks and push kicks to the leg over the traditional low kick to the outside of the thigh. Nothing is as beautiful as a perfect outside low kick, but it’s also probably the easiest technique to get taken down off of.

JS: Develop a hard, jolting jab with the body weight behind it and work on landing it every time the opponent tries to punch.

If you have a technique which can make an opponent adjust the way they fight (say your jab keeps connecting as they step in, or your roundhouse kick is giving them a dead arm) they will be forced to adjust, and that is where openings for combinations come in.

If an opponent goes fully defensive or overly aggressive it is time to take an angle. If he’s covering, keep him busy and take an angle. If he’s chasing you, step off to the side and hit him as he turns to face you.

Never be afraid to tie up. The man who is willing to tie up and knows how has MASSIVE advantages over the man who doesn’t know how or refuses to. Tying up when something goes wrong (in boxing and kickboxing at least) is wiping the blackboard clean and saying ‘let’s try that again.’

HOMEWORK: Go and buy Jack’s books, or at least read his blog and work at Bloodyelbow.com, and support his training and studies. I get the feeling he’s going to become a big name over the next few years.