Interesting quote

I had a conversation with Dr. Marc yesterday when he came in for class. He and I have been working for almost a year on an article about carotid chokes, i.e. "sleeper holds". I have learned a lot about how the body works from this man, and he says he is amazed at what we, as martial artists, can do to other people with these techniques. He asked me some questions about the application of the hold and I showed him some variations and mentioned that the sleeper may be prefixed or suffixed. That information told him that there can be considerable complication to the situation surrounding the application of the hold. He came out with a quote that he had learned from the professor who taught him about surgery. "Do what you need to do, not everything you can do."
This triggered my response that there is a force progression that martial artists are supposed to be familiar with. Many Kenpo techniques are unsuitable for "everyday" street situations. You really can't justify doing Dance of Death on a guy who throws a simple right punch. You have to have a pretty unusual set of circumstances to justify its use.
Given the implications of a sleeper hold and how it is applied, etc., you have to be careful with how you use it. In other words, you "do what you need to do, not everything you can do." Sometimes a kick in the groin is all you need and sometimes you have to run the system on the guy.
Often enough we see demos of Kenpo in which the attacker takes everything in our Vocabulary of Motion. Fun to watch, and guilty as charged. Ed Parker said "Overskilled, not overkill".
But that gets obscured at times.
Anyway, I thought it was a pretty good quote and worth passing on.