A different take on sparring

[ralphmcpherson]

At my club we do no points sparring. We usually use the olympic rule set but instructors dont like to count points as we are taught that every strike is to cause damage not just tap in a point scoring area. We spar with our hands up and there is a lot of punching (usually no face punches). The end result is a very good product to watch. Anyway , a couple of weeks ago we had a club championship , it was only for members of our club but we have 4000 members and only the best usually compete so the standard is reasonably high. For the sparring part of the championships we actually had corner judges and counted points (which we normally wouldnt do). It was very interesting to watch a lot of the competitors as they had no idea how to aproach a points contest , they basically just bowed and went at it a hundred miles and hour punching and kicking like a street fight (but still maintaining technique). It was interesting to watch olympic rules used with a different mind set , it was actually really good to watch and the crowd (which was quite large) were getting right into it. All in all , I just thought Id give it a mention as I learned a lot from sparring where points are involved which is something we are not used it.

 

[Manny]

It's nice to see you people doing kyorugi just only doing the techs and not put atention in the score, in tournaments I have seen competitors everytime they do a tech look to the screen to se if it scored and this make me nuts, I think the sparring has to be continus till the central referee yells kalyeo (break), also I saw in the last couple of tornaments that competitors make a point and then just not fight to not get a point against them and that's sad.

Manny

 

[ralphmcpherson]

It's nice to see you people doing kyorugi just only doing the techs and not put atention in the score, in tournaments I have seen competitors everytime they do a tech look to the screen to se if it scored and this make me nuts, I think the sparring has to be continus till the central referee yells kalyeo (break), also I saw in the last couple of tornaments that competitors make a point and then just not fight to not get a point against them and that's sad.

Manny

yeah the biggest difference I noticed was that they were going all out trying to rack up points but put little effort into avoiding points being scored against them. They tended to block anything that may cause injury but were not worried about letting a soft kick or punch through , even if it was to a scoring area. It seemed to me also that they were only awarding points for shots that clearly "displaced" the opponent , basically a kick or punch had to knock an opponent back significantly to score a point.