I had to take a psychology class or two in college and like most things you learn in college you either use them or you lose them . But a couple of things stuck with me from psychology class. One of those was the Primacy and Recency Effect.
This basically means that when we are given a list of things we tend to remember the first few things on the list and the last few things on the list. Or, from a learning perspective, the first things we learned and the most recent things we learned.
OK, so how does this apply to WT? In a fighting or self defense situation we're not going to remember all the fancy techniques or lofty theories, those things will break down under pressure. What we will remember are the good ol' fashioned punching and kicking...the basics, the first things we learned. These things are taught first, not simply because they are easier, but because they are the most important. In fact, I would go as far to say that everything that comes after is isn't to teach us fancier, more complicated techniques, but to teach our bodies the simplest paths to punch and kick.
We should reinforce these fundamentals every training session so that our responses are automatic. When put into a sticky situation, we don't want our response to be sitting in some dusty old filing cabinet that we have trouble getting to, we want the file , in essence, sitting on our desk, ready for immediate access.
The first things are first for a reason.