I’ve been a competitive judoka for years and during the heyday of MMA I decided to teach myself a striking art. I’ve been regularly competing in grappling tournaments so I wanted to see how would I fare when striking was involved.
In hindsight, I was young and dumb. I started training boxing at an excellent school. Everything was great until I began sparring. Light sparring was ok, but after a year or so I noticed that I was getting “dumber” so to speak and that I’ve lost my mental edge - I’d have to expand mental energy to perform simple tasks - “ok, I’m gonna tie my shoelaces now” type of things.
Soon after this realization I quit boxing, not least because my job at the time required pretty strong analytical skills. I have acquired the fundamentals of boxing but in any physical altercation I’m going to fall back to my grappling knowledge.