Self Defense Without Sparring?

[DoctorTaco]

I'm confused what the sparring has to do with your self defense training exactly. Sparring isn't 100% like real life and death situations are, is that what you are attempting to practice? Going full blast in self defense situations?

If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.

 

[panamaican]

Why are martial artists so quick to dismiss something they admit they know nothing about? It's the ultimate incompetence.

I'm with you on your main argument anyways, in order to really know if something works you have to do full commit to it, but that's not what sparing is either. To tie it back into what this thread was about, it will take a very specialized setting to train at 100% like that.....mostly because that's not what the average person wants to actually do, and the insurance to cover such practice is though the roof. I'm sure you can find some backroom shit with a 8th level dragon master that claims he can absorb knife wounds but good luck those places.

I think we're missing your point. You asked what the point of sparring was. It's to help you get a feel for conflict. No one said it's a perfect substitute, only the best available option. It can be structured in many different ways to highlight various parts of a conflict. The important part is that it's a live opponent and not predetermined/scripted attacks and defenses.

Beyond that, what exactly are you trying to share with us?

 

[spid3yo]

I think we're missing your point. You asked what the point of sparring was. It's to help you get a feel for conflict. No one said it's a perfect substitute, only the best available option. It can be structured in many different ways to highlight various parts of a conflict. The important part is that it's a live opponent and not predetermined/scripted attacks and defenses.

Beyond that, what exactly are you trying to share with us?

Share? nothing. Only wanted to know what sparring had to do with self defense training and was so important everyone was telling this guy to not go to this school over it.

 

[ForeverFiending]

JakeTKD,

I'm sure he is great at what he teaches, but there is a mentality to fighting that you cannot develop without sparring. You have to be able to perform under pressure and it's one of the most fun and important parts of training!

You said you are on a tight budget. I almost moved to Denver a few months back and I recall looking up some gyms. I'm pretty sure there is at least one community boxing gym. We have a few out here. These gyms are usually part of a boys and girls club and are dirt cheap. I went to one that was $50 a year.

These little hole-in-the-wall, dirty, stinky fighter gyms are almost always the best places to learn. Not only are they cheap, but all the ones I have known have a good amount of fighters and are very active in the fight scene. The ones I know also host a lot of their own smokers and have professional fighters, ammys, and kids.

Boxers have no fear of sparring, they spar constantly, so you will get plenty there. Nothing develops good mental character like keeping your cool while someone is trying to corner you and punch you in the face

I know boxing is not all that you wanted, but I would most definitely join the BJJ gym as well as a community boxing gym and use both. This would work out well. You could a stand up game and a ground game. Good luck!

 

[panamaican]

Share? nothing. Only wanted to know what sparring had to do with self defense training and was so important everyone was telling this guy to not go to this school over it.

They are related but they're 2 separate things.

A self-defense school that doesn't incorporate some form of sparring probably isn't adequately preparing students for the "adrenal stress" that will arise when a true self-defense situation arises. It's more obvious since the school he's considering claims to teach martial arts that have a heavy sparring component to them.

If the student can only afford to train in one place, he should pick a place with some form of sparring over a place with none.

So this guy shouldn't go to that school because the lack of sparring shows that that school is not teaching at least part of the curriculum the way it's meant to be taught.

As far as sparring and "self defense", if you're taking a martial art that usually has sparring (like BJJ, MT or boxing) for self-defense purposes then the sparring is part of learning the martial art and it's absence is a problem. If you're taking some random self-defense course then they can teach it however they want. I'd still take the guy with sparring in case of emergency but that's me.

 

[apizur**]

Pan, I follow your train of thought.

 

[SanShou01]

Why are martial artists so quick to dismiss something they admit they know nothing about? It's the ultimate incompetence.

Show me where I dismissed your Self Defense whatever training, completely. I merely said that it was inferior to fighting gyms, where 100% power sparring is part of the program and is way more realistic than your realistic, pretend to kick someone in the nuts training.

I'm with you on your main argument anyways, in order to really know if something works you have to do full commit to it, but that's not what sparing is either.

How are you agreeing with me when you just concluded this sentence by saying that my definition of sparring is false?

To tie it back into what this thread was about, it will take a very specialized setting to train at 100% like that.....mostly because that's not what the average person wants to actually do,

Then obviously they're scared shitless of getting hit in the face by someone intending to KO them during routine, hard sparring, therefore...whatever level of realism that they thought they were training at is quite inferior to that of MMA and especially, good ol' Boxing. Notice, I'm not implying that their training sucks, just don't even dare say that it's more realistic than MMA, because getting punched in the face is as real as it gets.

and the insurance to cover such practice is though the roof.

I'm talking about MMA being the highest level of training. And MMA gym ain't cheap compared to pretend contact Self Defense and Combat Yoga, but it's still doable. The most expensive insurance for Combat Sport gyms is actually Wrestling and Boxing.

I'm sure you can find some backroom shit with a 8th level dragon master that claims he can absorb knife wounds but good luck those places.

What are you talking about? I'm talking about MMA. Who the hell would try to make an argument about full contact knife fighting with real, sharpened knives?

Even if you do this, a full MMA fight still hurts a lot more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CELN-DQI5qc

 

[NAKMUAY18]

If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.

I've been waiting my whole life to use that in a legit conversation.
Well done Sir, well done

 

[NAKMUAY18]

Share? nothing. Only wanted to know what sparring had to do with self defense training and was so important everyone was telling this guy to not go to this school over it.

Same reason you fly the simulator before they let you take a spin in an Apache Gunship.


The other thing I was thinking about yesterday. I get smashed in the face on a weekly basis. If I got beat up in a bar fight, I don't think if give a shit.

 

[barnowl]

Where the hell do you live? Afghanistan, Iran, Detroit, City of God???? Where that you'd easily know that such "serious self defense" situations is about to go down? You make a mistake and you'll be the one going to jail, even for brandishing.

You're not the only one with gun in America. I have guns in my bathrooms and shit because I don't want to get home invaded while taking a shit. But I'm not pulling out my gun out over every thing in the streets. Brandishing it w/o just cause can mean lost of CCW and perhaps felony conviction, ending up with me having to get rid of all of my guns and never own one again unless I do a Gordon Liddy move. Then there's lost of job and all that shit that comes with a felony conviction w/GUN involved.

This is why we train and fight, in order to drop some fool or at least take a few hits w/o shriveling up and then go for the gun, maybe not even...and just duke it out.

Dude, you need to go back and reread what you responded too. You blew a gasket over something that is totally counter and unrelated to what I replied too.

I DON"T carry a gun becuase I DON'T train to use one. How the hell could I brandish one or think I was the only person with one? I specifically had replied to Dogstarman's comment about the need for training, which you also HAPPEN TO AGREE WITH.

 

[SanShou01]

Dude, you need to go back and reread what you responded too. You blew a gasket over something that is totally counter and unrelated to what I replied too.

I DON"T carry a gun becuase I DON'T train to use one. How the hell could I brandish one or think I was the only person with one? I specifically had replied to Dogstarman's comment about the need for training, which you also HAPPEN TO AGREE WITH.

my bad, but what you wrote afterward was very ambiguous.

 

[snowbro]

lol no. you will not be able to defend yourself if you've never sparred. you need to learn timing/distance control/footwork which can only be learned through sparring a fully resisting opponent.

not too mention learning how to deal with feints and other ish

i was in junior high school and had no money for martial arts. I watched whatever boxing and martial arts videos i could online and then I taped an X on my wall a little above my chin level. Then I would face the X and pretend the opponent was throwing a right haymaker at me. I would then dodge the haymaker and come back with a left counter. I practiced this while listening to fast paced music for hours a day for months. I then got in a fight with a much bigger kid at school, he swung at me with a right haymaker, I dodged and countered with a left. I then waited for his next show and did the same thing. Guy didn't land one shot on me the whole fight. I missed a few and landed a bunch.

No sparring training

No gym

it worked.

i then went on to actually learn about martial arts and my style has just tightened up over the years, but those early methods have always worked for me.

It basically was just a primitive sloppy boxing style with tons of holes. But it was better than 90 percent of people walking around's boxing skills.

 

[Minowafanatic]

Anecdotal evidence taken from a fight on a playground doesn't do a lot to undermine the importance of sparring.

Obviously training is better than doing nothing at all, but sparring is very clearly the next best thing to fighting and the experience gained from it is extremely beneficial. Any training regimen designed to prepare you to fight, which doesn't include sparring, is severely lacking and has undoubtedly bred a false sense of security in many "martial artists" and weekend warriors/hobbyists who believe themselves to be fighters despite having no relevant experience to claim as such.

edit: What you described is essentially just a crude form of shadowboxing. Practising countering the same punch, in front of an opponent who does not move at all, hours a day for months on end, is not good. But, better than nothing I suppose.

 

[wilddeuces]

Yeah the reality is that sparring is a must. He doesn't have to always be hard sparring. 20% even to hardwire responses and get you used to distance and such. But sparring has to be there. Drills are good for technique but years ago I trained at this one place that refused to explain footwork so all the sparring degenerated into what was basically two s*itty trains colliding. I made a change in my training and noticed how much drills AND sparring to work all aspects of self defense is essential.

 

[chombiebam]

Training for self-defense without full contact sparring is useless. You can't just practice moves and believe it'll work when you get hit. Believe me, when I spar new guys in my stand-up art and they get hit hard, they freeze a bit probably due to shock. And we do spar without gloves but no head hits. Also, drilling grappling moves without resisting opponent is pretty useless and waste of time.

But drilling moves over and over without sparring is better than no training at all.

 

[snowbro]

Anecdotal evidence taken from a fight on a playground doesn't do a lot to undermine the importance of sparring.

Obviously training is better than doing nothing at all, but sparring is very clearly the next best thing to fighting and the experience gained from it is extremely beneficial. Any training regimen designed to prepare you to fight, which doesn't include sparring, is severely lacking and has undoubtedly bred a false sense of security in many "martial artists" and weekend warriors/hobbyists who believe themselves to be fighters despite having no relevant experience to claim as such.

edit: What you described is essentially just a crude form of shadowboxing. Practising countering the same punch, in front of an opponent who does not move at all, hours a day for months on end, is not good. But, better than nothing I suppose.

self defense is self defense, is it not considered defense if you're young or if you're old? only using one training method would be stupid. but to say that you can not learn to defend yourself without sparring is wrong

 

[chombiebam]

self defense is self defense, is it not considered defense if you're young or if you're old? only using one training method would be stupid. but to say that you can not learn to defend yourself without sparring is wrong

yes, training and drilling however simple, is better than nothing at all.

 

[kpt018]

self defense is self defense, is it not considered defense if you're young or if you're old? only using one training method would be stupid. but to say that you can not learn to defend yourself without sparring is wrong

It depends how good the opponent is. If he's garbage and you're a decent athlete, you probably don't need training at all. But that isn't what training is for. The assumption is you train to beat a skilled opponent. Otherwise what's the point?

Training without sparring is like learning to hit a baseball without ever facing live pitching. Yeah, you can go to the cage, work on your swing just taking cuts and watch videos, but none of that shit matters until you face a guy who is trying to blown one past you (or fool you with off speed stuff).

Sparring is what separates the combat arts, which are very effective for fighting, from the bullshit traditional training that is terrible for fighting. (Not saying all traditional arts are bullshit, but the good ones have sparring).

 

[KnightTemplar]

"You can't learn to swim without getting in the water."
- Bruce Lee

 

[Paradigm]

"You can't learn to swim without getting in the water."
- Bruce Lee

that is so random...was about to come in and post something about swimming and not getting in the water because it popped in my head while I was at the bank.

I guess you could use resistance bands or something to simulate swimming motions lol.