Simple Leverage - Leveraging Laterally and Leveraging in another Sandbox

A bit on the art of leverage … as I see it.

Most people, martial artists included have a basic understanding of how simple leverage works. We move a lot with a little by applying force to the end of a lever. Simple leverage.

By ‘leveraging laterally’ I mean we can learn to apply an understanding of leverage we have learned with one technique to similar techniques or the same technique in a different situation. This is the way we deepen our understanding of leverage and begin to make habitual use of it.

Leveraging in another sandbox, in my view, is the very best kind of leverage. When we understand how something works and we peel back the obvious layers and get the the underlying principles that make that thing work, we can perhaps apply those things we have learned in completely different areas of our lives. Weirdly, to me, not everyone seems to naturally understand this.

An example: We might, over time, realise that we can better escape ‘side control’ by trying to improve our situation via a series of small/incremental gains rather than pinning our hopes on one ’big’ move.

Then, when we want to lose some weight, we attack the problem one kilo at a time; by making a lot of small changes in our lifestyle/habits, rather than pinning our hopes on a single ‘magical’ diet. Or perhaps we find ourselves in ‘bad’ debt; so we apply the same thinking again, and make a lot of small changes in our spending habits, save a little every week, invest those savings, and over time, acrue enough to make our debt disappear. 

I can think of dozens of other examples of how we can ‘leverage’ what we learn on the mat, into other aspects of our lives. To me, this is what understanding leverage, should be all about.