The Outliers

By JDtoronto

Outliers - Noun

1. A value far from most others in a set of data
2. A person, thing, or part situated away from a main or related body
3. An extreme deviation from the mean

In award winning journalist, Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 non-fiction book entitles Outliers, he examines those individuals in various professions that seem to find a great deal of unnatural success. Those that stand out in a given field, ahead of their peers, seemingly inhuman. One contributing factor to these individuals' success is what Gladwell has dubbed the 10,000 hour rule. This rule, simply enough, entails that any person wishing to become an expert (or Outlier, as he has dubbed it) in a given field must spend upwards of 10,000 hours of practice within said field.

To put this into perspective, the 10,000 hour rule translates to approximately 417 days or 1.14 years. That's 417 days if the individual were to spend every waking hour honing their skills.

Since this is an mixed martial arts site, I wanted to delve into the 10,000 hour rule as it applies to MMA. For the sake of this piece, I will estimate that a professional MMA fighter spends approximately 5 hours a day, 5 days a week on training. That amounts to 25 hours a week spent solely on MMA. That's 400 weeks to reach the perceived 10,000 hours. Or 7.70 years. Assuming the MMA fighter lives to be 70, this works out to be 10% of his or her life. 10% of their life devoted strictly to mixed martial arts.

What intrigues me about the 10,000 hour rule and MMA is that mixed martial arts is comprised of several disciplines. A fighter must spend countless hours on each of them; boxing, kick boxing, grappling (wrestling, jiu jitsu, etc.), muy thai, and so on. To assume that a fighter has the time to spend 10,000 hours on each of these disciplines is absurd. So, according to Malcolm Gladwell, no MMA fighter can become an expert. He can become really good, great even, but not as accomplished as someone (within a respective sport) who participates in a sport involving one discipline (such as more traditional sports like hockey, football, or boxing).

And to me, this is what makes mixed martial arts so great. There is no end to the training. There is always something new to learn, something new to tweak, and something new to teach. It is a sport (nay, an art) that simply has no boiling point. No matter how much time these athletes donate to their craft, they will never cease to learn something new. Although this can be said for any practice, I believe that it holds truer to a sport as diverse as mixed martial arts.

So what is it that makes guys such as GSP, Anderson Silva and Fedor Emelianenko the outliers of their sport? They don't spend more time on training than their peers, yet they stand heads above them. To me it comes down to God-given talent. These men were given the perfect tools to accel and become great in this sport that we all have grown to know and love. And it is because of the split from the 10,000 hour rule, at least for me, that has cultivated my love and respect for mixed martial arts.