Dojo Source - Respect The Strike - Should You Do Point Sparring?

Respect The Strike - Should You Be Doing Point Sparring?

By Jeff Baines

5th Degree Black Belt in Kempo

2nd Degree Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do

Level 5 Apprentice Instructor in Jeet Kune Do

Owner of Dojo Source

eff Chan posted a video about Sparring Pet Peeves, and his first Pet Peeve touches on something important, but I wish he had said more. Sparring has many uses, but one of its most important uses is when it is used as a combat simulation. It isn’t perfect as a combat simulation, but it is one of the best tools that we have. Jeff Chan’s first Pet Peeve is when you throw a Head Kick and you stop the kick next to your sparring partner's head (instead of hitting them hard with it), then they grab onto your leg and go for a takedown. I had this conversation with a student of mine recently as well. If you are sparring with someone and they go for a head kick that gets through and either gently touches or stops right next to your head, this was done as a kindness to you. You don’t have to search hard to find out what a full power head kick does to someone, just search “head kick mma” and you will find plenty of videos like “Top 50 Head Kicks in MMA”. Not all head kicks result in knockouts, sure, but when a head kick lands the person hit doesn’t have the ability to grab a leg to do a sweep or really much of anything and that is if they even remain standing. Head kicks can cause traumatic brain injuries, so if your partner is hitting you with a head kick and NOT giving you a concussion, don’t reward their amazing control by sweeping them or they may be tempted to give you the concussion next time.

I think that this doesn’t just apply to head kicks though. This is a Sparring Etiquette rule that should be in place everywhere, and I think the rule should be called “Respect The Strike”. Each time a strike gets through and touches you, there should be a short evaluation moment where you consider what would have happened if your sparring partner didn’t hold back at all on that strike. Sometimes the answer is not much would have happened because your partner was at the edge of their range and the strike only would have tapped you even at full speed, or it hit in a spot that wouldn’t have done any noticeable damage. Usually though, I think if we were honest with ourselves, many strikes that we get hit by would have done SOMETHING to us. Maybe it’s a knockout strike, maybe it would have knocked the wind out of us, or maybe it would have just disrupted us. A strike that disrupts you would maybe turn your head causing you to miss your next strike, or the strike might knock you off balance a bit making your next strike miss or not hit with power. So after you take this moment to think about what the strike would have done to you, you can decide on an appropriate response. If you got hit by a strike that would have knocked you out or at least disrupted you, it wouldn’t be appropriate to catch that strike and then sweep your partner. It would instead be appropriate to say “Nice shot” to your partner, back up and reset before throwing any strikes again. If you treat your partner’s strikes with Respect, and genuinely consider what their strike would have done to you, sparring becomes a better learning tool for you and for your partner.

A few years ago I was watching my students spar, and they had excellent control. Nobody was hurting each other, every strike was stopping before it did any damage to their sparring partner. However, I was watching one pair (they were kids) and one of them was throwing punches at their partner's body and the other was throwing punches at their partner's face. Neither student was Respecting The Strike, they weren’t considering what their partner’s strike would do to them, they were just worrying about landing their own strike. There are benefits to sparring like this, you can learn more in my And Then What? Blog, but if we spar with control (which is all of our sparring unless you are actually fighting or training for a fight) you get a slight sense of invincibility. It is this feeling of invincibility that lets people think that after a head kick they could catch the kick and/or counter attack and other unrealistic scenarios. This is why Jeff Chan, who has done actual MMA fights with strikes at full speed and power, gets frustrated when he controls his speed and power on a strike and you move on to your counter without any consideration of how his strike might have affected you. I can’t tell you how many times I have pulled a strike’s power back (a strike that I knew would have done significant damage to my partner) only to get hit back almost immediately. Usually the hit back that I receive in this moment is a jump up in power too, because I think my partner sensed that strike would have been significant and this hurts their ego a bit.

When you first start sparring, you are usually very timid and don’t throw enough strikes, so your instructor has to structure sparring in a way that helps you gain at least a small sense of invincibility. So the structure that most gyms do is what I call “Continuous Sparring”, where you just keep sparring until the time is up. When this is done with control, students can learn how to throw good combos and how to deal with combos being thrown at you. Continuous Sparring is great, but I found that eventually everyone gets to a point where they feel invincible and don’t “Respect The Strike”. One way to break someone from feeling invincible is to do hard sparring, this is difficult to do often because hard sparring sometimes ends up with one sparring partner injured to the point where they can’t train for a couple of weeks. Rather than hard spar with my students and hurt them, I needed a way to spar them where they would be a little afraid of a strike touching them on a good target. It was then that I realized why Point Sparring is something everyone should be doing as part of their training.

I am not saying that you should ONLY do Point Sparring. I think too much Point Sparring can lead to someone thinking that a fight ends after just one shot, and this is not usually true. There are many Martial Arts gyms who do only Point Sparring and this teaches people to stop striking after the first one lands in a target area. My first gym did this and it created certain ways of thinking and fighting that would get you into trouble in a real self defense scenario. However, I can see the logic behind why Point Sparring was created, and how everyone should do SOME Point Sparring. In a real fight, if I land the first shot and it disrupts you or does damage I’ll be more easily able to land a second shot, third shot, and so on until I’m able to finish the fight. So it is important that I have the ability to throw combos and land multiple shots in a row like in Continuous Sparring, but I should be nervous about what kinds of hits I take to get there. This is where Point Sparring comes in.

At Dojo Source we do mostly Continuous Sparring, so I see a noticeable difference when we do Point Sparring, people are a lot more hesitant and nervous when we do Point Sparring. If you add different point values to different targets and types of strikes, people start to actually consider where they got hit and what kind of strike hit them. Then when we go back to Continuous Sparring I notice people getting hit and then actually Respecting The Strikes, thinking about whether they could have done their next planned move immediately after or not. So if you want to become a better fighter, make sure you Respect The Strike, and consider adding Point Sparring into your training. Or come train with us at Dojo Source to increase your fighting skill, come try a Free Class at www.dojosource.fit/free-trial.