Is sparring necessary for a martial art to be good for self-defense?

Heh, probably true, I'd have to say, on the 99% number.

On dangerous techniques.

A technique correctly executed using full force, speed, penetration, targeting, and rotation, is not safe. It will do what a bullet does, damage the target. Most live training or sparring takes one or two of certain ingredients out for safety.

In Martial Arts, guess what? It is targeting. Those kicks and punches are deliberately designed not to target effective zones of the human anatomy in a fashion that the force applied will break it. In joint locks, what is taken out is full force and penetration. Instead of snapping that guy's joint past 90 degrees, you are slowly pushing on it, deliberately applying pressure to produce a submission. To produce an injury, you snap it down with full force, including you body's mass, and it'll produce a distinct "reaction".

It is just a basic matter of safety that something has to be taken out of training physical moves. Force, penetration, targeting, speed. Something has to go from those. All techniques, done right, are too dangerous. Techniques that are not dangerous, probably should be discarded in favor of social de-escalation tools. Except in the case of police or bouncers, who sometimes have to physically subdue people without hurting them. Then again, if your friend is drunk, and you try that arm hold or what not on him, you should know before hand that drunk people have a 2-5 second gap in their response times. They don't feel the pain until then, so technically he could still hurt himself by struggling and popping his own shoulder joint out if you two aren't careful. Again, better to use social tools for social problems, and leave the dangerous stuff for dangerous situations.

On Brute Lee in MMA

The military really shouldn't be doing MMA, except for sports fun and morale boosts.

The MMA going to Marine Combatives training is an interesting case in point on that subject. Also combat AAR of some incidents for the Marines implicated a major weakness in MMA style training, especially a result of BJJ groundwork. Marines were standing around while a corporal and insurgent were on the ground, because BJJ 1 v 1 training had taken hold. Going over, putting a pistol to the target's head and blowing his brains out, obviously didn't occur to them. Nor did snapping the insurgent's neck from behind using a body roll. This incident resulted in a double kill because of training military personnel in MMA style training situations of 1 v 1.

Criticism of Sparring in Styles.

Train as you would fight. The more you sweat, the less you bleed. What this means is that the closer your training is to reality, the better results you will have. But you can't get too close to reality, else it will be reality. If a fight should be ended in 1-5 seconds. Your training should mimic that time scale. If you are training in sparring that takes longer. Guess what? You aren't training as you fight. That means your client better not remember something incorrect from their sparring in an actual fight. But can you guarantee that? They put hours into it. Their muscle memory will be it under adrenaline conditions.

"Avoid harming from full force contact"

That is correct. Sparring teaches people to fight under social conditions or rules. You do that to him, he does that to you. Real violence is about you getting injury on the target, not the target doing something to you. This ain't going to be a basketball game. This is more being the pool shark that never gives the other guy "his turn".

"I still am apprehensive it can be misapplied in training to develop bad habits, but I can see the benefits as well."

It is still misapplied, given the Black Belt anecdote. Both fights were social confrontations. Calling people out, trying to upgrade your status. The guy even left under a choke of a sort, because he was told "he won".

If your clients have gotten into such a situation, that's due to bad self-defense training period. I don't care who says otherwise. Black belt should have left the scene. His friends should have dragged him off if he didn't want to go.

There are too many incidents where people accidentally "fell" on concrete, busted their skull, and died from brain bleed, hematoma, or a cracked skull. This is like taking a gamble and if you win, you get to declare yourself a "strong man" and if you lose, you go to jail for 20 years (or get buried in the ground). Not exactly a good bet in my view.

The Black Belt had a freeze incident. He was worried about what the other guy was doing, so he kept blocking, then got to a point where he had to attack but he was too worried about defense. Sparring can increase a person's willingness to attack, but the mind isn't on the right track. The mind is still on this monkey politics of social competition. That will get you killed in asocial situations.

Sure, a guy could be fighting you, and you could be beating him down. Smashing his face on the ground or wall. Then he decides that he is getting himself beat down, so he pulls a gun and shoots you. And guess what the sparring trained person is going to do when that happens? He's going to freeze, having encountered something he wasn't trained for. The other guy may have started on you because he wanted to "fight" you, but then his motivations could shift to "kill you" and you wouldn't know until he did something about it, to you.

1

Question

Is sparring necessary for a martial art to be good for self-defense? Using the keyword necessary, I would say NO.

1. Sparring is used to help refine techniques and principles taught by the art, just like kata.

2. Sparring rarely involves the choas, variety and unpredictability that can be found in real life encounters

3. Non-Martial Artists are capable of defending themselves without even studying an art, much less sparring

4. Also there is such a wide range of training simulations that are called sparring, what is sparring in one dojo is not allowed in another, it is hard to draw the line on what is considered "practical sparring" look at WTF vs ITF Taekwondo

5. Sparring can help you, but it can also let you slip into a comfort zone. As in you become to comfortable fighting and expecting to be fought in a preconcieved manner. A good example of this, now hold on Im not trying to ruffle feathers here, the first few UFCs. Many of these Martial Artists had trained and fought in a certain manner, they were caught off guard by being rushed and wrestled to the ground. They had gotten too comfortable. Expierance can also do the same thing though. A bully who is getting into 1on1 schoolyard scraps, may become comfartable with that scenario and expect things to just work that way. Then he is in for a suprise when his target has four friends coming out of the woodwork.

I however do think sparring and kata are both great training tools.

The problem with NOT sparring is that students may not get a feel for real flowing fighting, not every student is looking to spend 10+ years learning an art upon where only in the later years does the combat come together with the techniques. There is also the problem that teachers AND students may get dis-illusioned in their training & think that certain moves are possible on un-resisting opponents(static)

Whilst forms etc are a brilliant way to build technique & are a good foundation much like a ballet dancer does with a pole, ultimately its not ''combat realistic'' the same way a dancer who only trained on poles wouldn't be as graceful & natural/fluid on stage.

I think that depending on teh nature of the students you can adapt it, Forms are important however practicing techniques on resisting opponents who tighten,push, pull etc etc is just as important & allows you to get the feel for a fight. Obviously dangerous moves can't be used in sparring but if the studnet has a feel of how a fight goes & how to seize oppourtunites to perform techniques in a fight when the opponent does something wrong (or you do something right) that it will be better than being left in the dark.

There are people who have never been formally trained in a fighting art who have been effective in real situations. I ll give two examples of friends: one, in a third world country was attacked by a guy with a knife; my friend (thin, but strong) caught the knife in his hand (he has a lifelong scar), killed the attacker and then cut off his head. This friend is a laid-back and nice guy otherwise. While he may not have an arsenal of techniques I would say he knows by instinct what to do. Of course, it would have been better not to catch the knife, but it worked for him. 2/ another friend, 5 5", 175 pounds, was into an antisocial fight .. not life and death although of course that can change in an instant. The other guy was 6 6" and big not fat. My friend gave him the bums rush, taking away his balance and proceeded to pummel the guy. It was stopped by a cop who happened to be a bodybuilder and he lifted my friend up by one leg and asked politely, "Ready to stop that___?" It was a halfway humorous situation since no one was permanently damaged. If you read Musashi s memoirs you can learn a lot of what he doesn t say. One thing he repeats is "You must study this matter carefully." Obvious, but he instructing to look beyond the surface as deeply as you can. When faced by a dozen men or whatever, he says basically, so what. "You must concentrate on cutting them all down." I don t believe he says much on sparring. I would say it s up to the individual. One person can become deadly without sparring and another would require it .... again, "You must study this carefully!" You know, in some prisons they have gladiator training where they trade secrets ... and little, if any, sparring. One thing is critical is the sucker move. You either are aware or you aren t. It s before potential trouble starts that is critical. Finally, I would like to remark on a once-assassin for the Mexican mobs; he killed hundreds of people. He detailed the best way to gather a trained team to kidnap a person in a car (several cars are used to box him in, for one thing) and he also described how to really kill someone in a car. Anyway, this guy changed his ways because of his family. One pertinent to the discussion is that he describes guys who have the ability to without guns and kill twelve attackers. He speaks of these guys with all professional respect. They do not do a lot of sparring, and even some very little. Finally, if you do hard sparring all the time, and get hit in the head and body (unknown to many, being hit in the body is also unhealthy in the long run and can damage the brain, but that s another discussion) you can suffer brain damage.

Even just one hour learning and practising a technique that the other guy doesn't know how to block, escape from or regain balance after will yeild an advantage. If that's what you mean by "significantly better". If you train for longer in any martial art, you will learn that there is always someone bigger, stronger and more skilled than you and it's a tough job figuring out who's who until it's too late and you're lying bleeding to death because you picked the wrong fight. It's much safer to learn techniques to verbally diffuse a potential fight, or better yet, spot trouble early on then be somewhere else when it does all kick off. Cheers.

People tend to criticize things that are different from what they believe. I know that the Bujinkan gets a lot of criticism because we don't spar as regularly as some sport martial arts. People don't take the time to think that there might be more than one way to effectively learn a martial art. I used to take Chung Do Kwan and I don't think that our sparring helped me learn to fight any better than I would have without it. In fact, it probably did more bad than good since you have to follow certain rules that will become habit. So when you're in an actual self-defense situation you may be hesitant to hit "below the belt" or something because that's how you've always trained to fight. However, if you've practiced a technique over and over and over and over during training at a slow speed then you should be more than capable of applying it in a real situation without even thinking about it. If you can do it slow, you can do it fast. All speed does is hide your mistakes. In S.W.A.T. training they always say, "slow is smooth, smooth is fast."

Regardless of what people say, I know from my own training that you do not have to spar for your training to be effective. Sometimes if someone puts their hands on me when I'm not expecting it, I'll just react and put them in a wrist lock without even giving it a thought. So let them say what they want to say. I'm sure sparring does play its own part in learning a martial art, but I don't believe it's essential. In my dojo we're thinking about starting to incorporate some sparring, so we'll so how it goes.

I thought this argument had been laid to rest in 1886. That's the year the Tokyo police held a tournament to determine which martial art they should adopt. The new Kodokan school, which placed emphasis on randori over kata, won 13 matches and drew the other two matches it participated in. It's not that the other Jujitsu schools didn't have a similar repertoire of techniques, it's that they had never practiced them on real people. Of course, people still argued about the whole sparring vs. not sparring thing, so in 1993, they had another tournament just to hammer the point home. They called it the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Lessons learned: the fewer restrictions you have on your sparring, the better you'll be able to translate your training into live situations. Or, in short hand:

No sparring < more restricted sparring < less restricted sparring

Sparring gives you pressure you wouldn't ordinarily have. It adds risk and unpredictability to your training. While the levels of risk and unpredictability are lower than those of a "for real super deadly fight to the death (TM)", they're higher than practically any non-sparring drill. Sparring also works your timing against a real life person, something you can't get with most drills. It simulates a real fight more closely and gets your body used to the physical sensations and conditioning that you'll experience. The old boxing expression is that "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face"; well, sparring gives you an opportunity to get punched in the face and alter your game plan.

It's not like sparring didn't exist, historically. European swordsmen used wasters in the same way that the Samurai used bokken. The Okinawans adopted bogu the second the equipment became available. In China, sparring was restricted by speed, allowed techniques, and allowed targets, but it was still utilized. Long before boxing adopted the Queensberry rules, "mufflers" (boxing gloves) were used by fighters who were later to face each other bare-knuckle in contests.

No amount of training is exactly like a real fight, but adding sparring to your curriculum can only help, as long as the sparring itself is a means to an end and not the end. Sparring requires you to use equipment or limited techniques for safety, but MMA-style sparring allows you to use almost a full range of skills. And frankly, the ability to kick, punch, knee, elbow, clinch fight, throw/sweep/take down, ground grapple, pin, and lock/choke the opponent is probably all the skills you'll need against an unarmed aggressor, and most of what you'll need against an armed one. The weapon is an extension of the body, after all, and not some separate entity that you have to have tunnel vision to use. But my point is, I'm not an assassin. A knockout punch thrown in sparring with boxing or MMA gloves on is enough of a "kill" to get away. There's no practical reason why I, as a civilian, would use techniques found outside of less-restricted (MMA-style) sparring in most cases. If I'm forced to bit or gouge, it's because I'm in a bad position, something all my other training should have kept me out of; there's no reason to break his neck and face jail time when a choke or knee to the face could buy me enough time to escape.

Yes, sparring must be restricted to some degree to prevent constant injuries, but eating a few gloves punches to the face will prepare you for a fight better than never having anyone try to actually hit you in training. Drills are important, drills are good, but sparring can only make you better.

traditional kung fu style are almost impossible to use in a sport challenge but anyhow people must do sparring. You can learn to play soccer only with teory, try pass and step without never play a match? The same thing happen in a martial arts but sure you must doing application in agreement of rule's fight and with protection otherwise you can applicate your tecnic only versus people as not pratice any martial arts or fighting sports, in the street punches are not controlled and are not clean.a kick in knee will be transform in kick in the leg and other..

In a real fight speed, tecniques and use of the force are really different than pratice or the same sparring but are most near to sparring than pratice tecniques.

I understand because you don't agree to pratice sparring but for learn how to fight or defense you have to do it.

Sparring has its place in learning to defend oneself. Many people have their point of view and there are many different arguments that are valid in their own right. The issue is where to start and when is it too much? Sparring has been around as long as training in any specified fighting method has been around. There are varying degrees and types of combat simulation that fall under the sparring umbrella.

Simply put in Okinawan martial arts, they are:

Kata interpretation - which is when a person comes up with the function of a technique and executes it against a fully compliant partner to discover how that technique will work in actuality.

Bunkai - which is the advanced interpretation of kata in which groups of techniques or series are executed in their grouping with rapid succession against a semi-compliant partner. (The partner is still trying to strike the person executing the technique with full intent, however, they are not trying to fight back against the technique execution for varying reasons.

Some systems have (Ippon Kumite, Sanbon-Kumite) one-steps or short forms which are broken down kata into just one series or group used to instruct flow. These are at first performed with a fully compliant partner, and at slower speeds. When both parties have advanced enough they are performed at random, with random attacks, and at full speed and strength having the control to stop once the technique has been executed.

There is (Kiso Kumite) form-sparring, which is a free-flow spontaneous attack and defense. This trains spontaneous action and reaction while instilling a methodology of form and function. This trains the student to think and behave in the styles of the kata. Form-sparring is not usually performed at full speed and with full resistance, however, it can at more advanced levels, and is a great tool at learning to read physical advantages and disadvantages when engaged in an altercation.

Then we come to Jiyu Kumite, which is a free-spar. This type of sparring is more freedom based, and where both parties strike and resist fully. There is still structure and limitations and the focus is only on one other person. Most people fall apart during this type of sparring to the point of not resembling anything they learned in their martial art because they have yet to learn to think and move in the methods taught. This usually comes from sparring too soon and wanting to be the best kick*** person present. This type of sparring is most commonly associate with point earning tournaments nowadays.

Finally, we come to Randori. This is supposed to emulate the chaotic nature of survival outside the dojo. Randori is completely free and mostly known for being against more than one attacker.

_________________

While sparring is a great tool to use in learning what self-defense is, it is only part of the whole, just like kata being only a part. Sparring does help the student learn how to handle being hit and how to hit back in an unpredictable manner. But if there is not proper preparation, the student will fall back on their natural instincts and the sparring won't be anything more than barbaric slinging of limbs, lacking all control and method which karate is meant to instill and employ.

I see sparring and self defense as two different things entirely. Sparring is a long, drawn out ebb and flow lasting several minutes with a set of rules (no matter how little they seem to be enforced at times). Self defense is about extracting yourself from a situation as soon and safely as possible.

I concentrate on the self-defense aspects of my training. I do not spend time studying my opponent to see if he drops his right or telegraphs his side kick. First off, if someone wants to fight me, I'd rather walk away. If someone leaves me no choice, I'd much rather quickly neutralize him long enough to get away than go toe-to-toe with him and demolish him completely like some Chuck Norris movie.

Now I don't want anyone to interpret what I said as thinking sparring is useless. It's a great exercise that I enjoy from time to time. I have some friends who enjoy it a lot, travel to open tournaments, and do quite well at them. That is the way they enjoy practicing the arts so who am I to say it's wrong?