Contact In Your Training

[Shicomm]

How much contact do you train with?

Both very little and pretty hard

How much contact is necessary to make the training worthwhile?

I'm not really into the "full contact" a.k.a. "tough" game , i love to train on things that involve balance and very little/light contact.

Do you include a balance of both hard and soft contact or is it mostly geared towards one in particular?

For bujinkan i think it's a mix of hard and soft indeed , but that could be just me

 

[KELLYG]

My contact in training varies depending who I am in front of and what we are doing. I general reflect back on my opponent what they are giving out. Some people don't like to play rough. Also when training self-defenses I like to go slow and easy until I feel comfortable then progress harder and faster to make good muscle memory and have confidence in the technique. I don't think that you can do it at full force with out the very real threat of life and limb.

 

[Hawke]

-How much contact do you train with?

I train from no contact (forms, katas) to full contact (with some protection gear).

-How much contact is necessary to make the training worthwhile?

For me pain is a great teacher (empty hand, sticks, and other tools). I have practiced air karate and full contact MA. I prefer the contact. You get a better feel for the technique. You learn to deal with the pain. You get an idea of how much you can take and dish out.

Ed Parker "To hear is to disbelieve, to see is to be deceived.....feeling is believing!"

-Do you include a balance of both hard and soft contact or is it mostly geared towards one in particular?

I am not sure if it's balanced, but I do practice both hard and soft contact.
Hard blocks and strikes with take downs.
Soft blocks and strikes with take downs.

Some of the techniques require a partner to cooperate for safety reasons.
Other techniques we go slow for the muscle to encode the moves into memory.
We hit the bags and mitts hard.
We hit each other hard (depends on the studio I go to).

If a person wants to learn MA for self defense I currently lean toward physical contact.

If a person wants to learn a sword art like using the katana, iaido is wonderful, but there is no real physical contact (until you add the aikido moves..hehe).

 

[shihansmurf]

Martial Arts training is obviously a physical activity and its going to involve contact. My questions are as follows:

-How much contact do you train with?

-How much contact is necessary to make the training worthwhile?

-Do you include a balance of both hard and soft contact or is it mostly geared towards one in particular?

I train with as much contact as my training partner is willing to go with. I take into account the skill level of my partner and our relative size and strength, but for the most part if you want to spar hard I'll spar hard. If you want to spar soft I'll spar soft.

Worthwhile is a nebulous term. How much contact you need in your training is entirely dependent on what objective you're training to reach. If you want to be a good fighter than you need to trin with medium to hard contact as often as possible. If you want to be good at point fighting tournaments than you need to traing light contact point sparring. If you want to be a great fencer then you need to fence under the conditions that you will compete.

I don't fight at heavy contact without protective gear anymore. I've had broken ribs in the past as well as a few concussion(Football, karate, and an IED in Iraq) have left me very protective of the little gray matter I have remaining so now I gear up.

Mark