When I was a gup, I sparred regularly and acheived some success in tournament fighting. I won two regional tournaments and was greatly impressed by the accolades and respect from my peers. During that time, I also worked as a security guard where physical confrontations were a regular part of my job. I can tell you without a doubt that my ability to deal with these physical confrontations was inversely proportional to my ability with sparring. The more I sparred, the less I was able to handle a real aggressor.
Why? Instinct. Sparring trains your instincts to do certain techniques that do not harm your opponent. Plain and simple - otherwise the ranks of martial artists would be greatly diminished. My decision, not to spar as much. Once a month is my personal guideline.
I still teach sparring though. I tell my students that it is fun. It will teach them how to move quickly and to overcome any fear of striking. It will teach them how to take a strike. And, yes, my students look horrible when they spar - coming from a person who has won tournaments - and this is okay with me. Hell, I don't have the skill I used to have. But it IS a game. To get good you need to practice. I tell them that if they want to train for tournaments, fine, I will train you, but remember the more you train these techniques the more likely they will come out in a real confrontation.
As far as sparring and randori goes, I believe there is a difference. Sparring is a game played to score points. Randori is a partially random situation created by the instructor in order to practice techniques in varying degrees of fight time. In my honest opinion randori is more important to self defense then sparring, consequently, we do randori almost every class.
In closing, I would like to state that sparring and randori are both important to training. They are a substitute for real fighting though. Saying this, I advise caution with sparring. A good street fighter will nearly always take the sparring champ to the cleaners because of instinct. Ask yourself, what techniques do you want in your instinctual repetoire? I also think its good to remember there is more to a martial artist then the ability to fight.
Why? Instinct. Sparring trains your instincts to do certain techniques that do not harm your opponent. Plain and simple - otherwise the ranks of martial artists would be greatly diminished. My decision, not to spar as much. Once a month is my personal guideline.
I still teach sparring though. I tell my students that it is fun. It will teach them how to move quickly and to overcome any fear of striking. It will teach them how to take a strike. And, yes, my students look horrible when they spar - coming from a person who has won tournaments - and this is okay with me. Hell, I don't have the skill I used to have. But it IS a game. To get good you need to practice. I tell them that if they want to train for tournaments, fine, I will train you, but remember the more you train these techniques the more likely they will come out in a real confrontation.
As far as sparring and randori goes, I believe there is a difference. Sparring is a game played to score points. Randori is a partially random situation created by the instructor in order to practice techniques in varying degrees of fight time. In my honest opinion randori is more important to self defense then sparring, consequently, we do randori almost every class.
In closing, I would like to state that sparring and randori are both important to training. They are a substitute for real fighting though. Saying this, I advise caution with sparring. A good street fighter will nearly always take the sparring champ to the cleaners because of instinct. Ask yourself, what techniques do you want in your instinctual repetoire? I also think its good to remember there is more to a martial artist then the ability to fight.
). TSD, at least, has more "allowed" hand techniques .... that I miss at times.
