Episode 733 - The Necessity of Sparring
In this episode, Andrew and Jeremy talk about The Necessity of Sparring. Whether sparring is important or not.
The Necessity of Sparring - Episode 733
What happens to someone training if they don’t spar? Do you need to do sparring to be a well-rounded martial artist? In this episode, Andrew and Jeremy try to answer whether sparring is important or not for an individual who trains in martial arts. Listen to learn more!
After listening to the episode, it would be exciting for us to know your thoughts about it. Don’t forget to drop them in the comment section down below!
Show Transcript
You can read the transcript below.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Hey, what's going on everyone. Welcome. This is whistlekick Martial Arts Radio, and today, Andrew and I are talking about not just the existence of or the importance of, but the absolute necessity of sparring. In the martial arts. Welcome. We have good conversations on this show and we appreciate you for joining us if you're new.
My name is Jeremy Lesniak and I'm joined by my co host Andrew Adams. Here at whistlekick martial arts radio, where we connect, educate, and entertain the traditional martial artists of the world. If you wanna see all the things that we do to that end beyond this show, you can go to whistle, kick.com. One of the things you're gonna find there is our store, our stores.
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All right, Andrew, the necessity. Of sparring. Will we ruffle feathers with this one? Because every time I think we're gonna ruffle feathers, we don't people write in.
Andrew Adams:
So, now the answer, whenever you ask me, you think you're gonna ruffle feathers? My answer is always gonna be no, no, no, I don't.
Jeremy Lesniak:
No, because we get everything so right. We are so good and so smart that nobody ever objects to what we do.
Andrew Adams:
No, I don't know that's the case. I don't know if it's because we just surround ourselves and people are gravitating toward us cuz they feel the same way.
Jeremy Lesniak:
We could be part of it.
Andrew Adams:
I think that's part of it. That could be part of, some of it might be that people just don't want to, they don't wanna stir the pot. We're okay with that. If you do wanna stir the pot though. That's okay.
Jeremy Lesniak:
We, so first off let's let's respond to that. I like when people are willing to engage in debate.
Andrew Adams:
But you were a philosophy major?
Jeremy Lesniak:
I was. So I like those conversations I learned from those conversations. All right. Have you ever trained at a school that didn't spar? Are you able to, or very, very minimal sparring? I have to. If you think about that time and you think about it. What I collectively refer to as freeform movement, right? Anything that's not prearranged. Can you make a judgment call as to the quality of freeform movement in the schools that did not spar or did not spar much versus the schools that did.
Andrew Adams:
I think there's, it definitely has an impact for sure. And that makes sense, right?
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah. Sparring is free form movement. You're not told what you have to do. Yep. You do whatever you do, what is appropriate, given the circumstances. And so when you're doing things that are free form, you are better at cuz you have more time practicing it.
Andrew Adams:
Okay. You get better at the things you work at.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Crazy. Right. We talk often on this show about having different, why mm-hmm right. We all train for different reasons, but I don't know that I've ever met a martial artist. I'm sure they're out there, but I don't know that I've ever met a martial artist who explicitly said I do not care.
If my martial arts training doesn't have a positive impact on my ability to defend myself if needed mm-hmm yep. I think that's it. May, probably not top of the list for everyone, but it's on the list. So if it's on the list and we know that a self-defense situation is free form, it's not prearranged. It is not prearranged. It's not self-defense and sparring is the best. Broadly applied training methodology to prepare one's cell for free four movements.
There's a dramatic disconnect there. And that is, I think that that summary that we just went through is why we are saying sparring is a necessity. It is a requirement. I am not going to contradict myself and say, if you don't spar, you're not a martial artist. You can do whatever you want. But I think if you're gonna be training to be able to defend yourself in a real life situation, if that is on your list at all spar. And because I don't know anyone for whom that is not on the list. Mm-hmm . Though they may exist. It's possible. I'm sure somebody somewhere. Right. And not so many people train martial arts, quarter of a billion people are training in some way. At least one of them's like, nah, I don't care.
Andrew Adams:
Well, but here's the okay. Playing devil's advocate though. If there is someone training in martial arts that has zero interest in being able to defend themselves.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Why wouldn't they just choose something? Like, what are their reasons to, I'm just saying that there's gotta be one in 250 million. I'm sure there's gotta be one person out there. So I don't wanna make this, this, universal statement, because I find this to be really arrogant especially of late.
And we're probably gonna do an episode on why this is bothering me that's bothering me. It's coming up. It's coming. If you, why has to do with self-defense then you have to. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for failure or inadequacy, or you are simply not letting your training reflect your why. And the greater, the disconnect between why you do something and how you do something. The bigger the problem. For you not, I don't care.
Andrew Adams:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get it.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Go ahead.
Andrew Adams:
You know, and the schools that I have trained in that did very little sparring, they still did partner work. I would stand here and someone would come at me and they form a front stance and come forward and punch, and then I would get to do some technique or whatever, but that's not how. Someone would actually attack me on the street. Right?
It's gonna be much faster. There's not, you're not even to see it coming, cuz they're not gonna draw back into a formal stance and come at you. And so, you know, and within martial arts in art, in the school I'm in anyway, we often talk about timing, distance, and balance. Those are the three keys. Those are important things that you need when you're, when you're fighting timing, you have to have timing down, you can't get timing.
Real actual real life timing. If they're drawing back slowly and come stepping forward with a punch mm-hmm , the timing has to be faster, because that's what it'll be like distancing. Well, not everyone is gonna be coming at you from the same distance. You're gonna have to be able to attack them. As they're moving and you're moving. So you need that distance and your balance changes as you're moving around, as opposed to just standing stationary in one place, which is how a lot of schools will do one step or three steps or whatever. And again, there's nothing wrong with that.
Jeremy Lesniak:
There is value in those drills. Absolutely. We both agree there is value in those drills, but those drills are drills. And I think we did an episode at one point where we talked about the closer you got to actual stuff, the. More difficult. It was. Yeah. But the more value it had. There's a spectrum there. I don't know that I can definitively say this, but in my experience, the schools that do very little sparring and are doing instead, not in addition to, but look at it as an instead, they're doing the drills. You're talking about tend to be. Very traditional forms based karate schools. Mm-hmm that the majority of their, uh, time investment is spent on training forms.
Andrew Adams:
Yeah. I love forms. I'm not arguing forms. I know you do. Yeah, but they're not the same thing. There are different elements within them. So what happens when you end up in a school microphone? That is a microphone. See light when you end up in a school where that is the case, and those students go off and some of them will go and open their own school.
Mm-hmm, you're getting further and further away from the comfort level sparring.
How does a student become an instructor who opens a school that has very little freeform movement experience, very little sparring experience. Start getting their students to be smart. It's not gonna happen because they're terrified. Yep. Because how do you coach and teach and keep your students safe when you haven't had them, it's not something you've done yourself. Yeah. It's gonna be really difficult just as I'm not going to open a school and teach. I dunno, Kung Fu forms cuz I don't know. Kung Fu forms.
And you are part of one once. But I recognize that I'm not comfortable with that. Right? None of us are going to do that. So it becomes not a passing down of sparring, but an Antipas down, correct. The inverse of that. YeAnd it becomes that much less likely. Now we also know that people make emotional decisions and their logic is their justification. How many schools out there that do very little sparring? Or, no sparring. This is the reason that they, that the instructor was not taught and the instructor's instructor's instructor was not taught and it just got handed down and now you're trapped and you can't get out of it because in order to do it, you, as the instructor have to go kind of white belt level to another, something you're not comfortable doing, that's not gonna happen.
The easier decision is, well, we don't do that. And for those of you who are sitting there like you know, sparring a lot of you do the same thing with forms. I'm not good with forms. I don't like forms. I don't know how to do forms, so I don't do forms and I make lots of arguments about why forms are not valuable. So don't think I'm you off . All of these things are critical. As a reason, they all show up across the board in traditional arts. Anyway, when we talk about necessity, what happens if it's not there? What happens to someone's training? If they don't spar?
Andrew Adams:
I mean, I wanna lean against saying anything bad. It's not, there's nothing wrong with training. If you don't spar.
Jeremy Lesniak:
We're not making, we're not making a judgment of. You as a person. We're not making a judgment of your reason for training. Yeah, absolutely. We are making I guess it is a judgment based on our belief of what is good or complete or well rounded, well rounded that's I mean, towards that. So martial artist, I think you're missing. That is a void in your training. I think, is it okay to have voids in your training?
Andrew Adams:
Absolutely. There's nothing wrong with that, but I think it's important that people recognize, oh, this is something that I don't do. And, you know, there could be a multitude of reasons for it. I mean, I'll be the first to say right here and now I don't like sparring. It's not something that I enjoy. And because of that, I don't even know if I'm good at it. Like maybe I am. I have no idea. I just, if it's not something that comes naturally to me and I don't necessarily enjoy it. And that's probably one of the reasons why I don't do it as often as I probably should.
But I also have the wherewithal enough to recognize that that's the case. But it is, if you are going to have to defend yourself on the street, the necessity of having time and balance, which our school focuses on a lot. You have to have that. You have to know how the timing works. You can't learn that if you don't do that, all forms of sparring get closer to real world application mm-hmm okay.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Every form of sparring has rules. We said I've never trained at a school where they said you two go fight to the death or till one of you doesn't feel like fighting any, right? Like I've never seen that. And so without that there are rules mm-hmm point sparring, continuous sparring, uh, no punches to the head spar. Right? Sure. Whatever it is, whatever the rules say, there are rules and within those rules. You are able to develop certain skills. For example, the one that I think is the most critical and most traditional martial artists have the biggest challenge with the closer to real it is the more adrenaline comes up mm-hmm and becomes a barrier to your performance. Mm, interesting. Your basics.
Once you get beyond like a yellow belt or maybe a test. Not gonna your adrenaline's not gonna be a barrier to your performance. No, no. Unless you're competing at a very, very high level and you didn't practice, competition is not going to be an adrenaline barrier to your forms. Yeah. But I can step into spar with anyone and feel a little bit of that twinge. I've been training for a while. So that twin just is not as strong now as it used to be. There are times I step in with certain people and I'm like, Ooh, very strong twins here. There are times I step in with other people and I'm like, eh, I'm gonna have fun. I'm not worried at all.
And there are situations that have come up in my life where maybe it was not an actual fight but there was a brief moment where I didn't know if it was going to be, it was unsure. I think we've all had some those oh, sure. Absolutely. And it is because I've had enough time sparring mm-hmm feeling that pressure and knowing that, you know what I'm okay. That the adrenaline didn't come up. Right. Fight or flight. Absolutely panic or act. And I think that that is the most critical thing. And I don't know anything better than free four movements to practice that, to practice that.
Andrew Adams:
Yeah. I would agree wholeheartedly.
Jeremy Lesniak:
And now that's not to say that you're, that people should spar every class. I mean, I was in the school that did that, so we spared every single one. and we got good, I think at timing distancing because we were practicing it all the time, but some of the other aspects of what we did lost out, I mean, I think, I think it's important to take a step back and look at the overall picture of what you're learning and what you're working on, but that the sparring component, if you plan to really defend yourself really has to be there. It really, and it's not.
And this is where people say, if they're, if they're resistant to it, they might say, well, you know, How many hours do I need to invest in that per week? You know, if you're suggesting that maybe sparring every class is too much, how often do I need to spar in order to meet whatever standard I might need to meet?
Andrew Adams:
Well, first off, the standard that is expected is only your own. No one else can tell you what that standard should be. That's the first thing. And my response to that question would. As often as you need to feel comfortable doing it.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Yeah. Here's the sad part. When you start training, you don't need to put much time in to get better at things.
Andrew Adams:
Yep. Very true.
Jeremy Lesniak:
The more time you spend training, the more you're going to see skills deteriorate, cuz you build them up and there is a diminishing rate of return for the investment of time into that skill. So if you let it falter the rate of return is very different and that is slow. And some people get really frustrated at that. Oh, I'm not as good of a spar or fighter as I used to be. That's okay. My forms have suffered. But how long does it take you to get back there? Right.
Does your training line up with your… It depends dramatically. And there is no right or wrong there is. Do I need more? I want to. Does the need for more come from a disconnect between where I am and where I want to be? And this is why I think some people start training in multiple schools because maybe the school there only trains a few hours a week and you wanna do more. And so you go totally fine.
I love sparring. I know, but don't I know that about you. Always love sparring, everyone. And there are styles of sparring that I don't enjoy. I don't like heavy contact now I'll get in there and I'll mix it up. And if you hit me, I'll go hard. I really don't like it when someone who's six, four lacks control and likes to bang. Well, and it's different when it's someone, or those of you who don't watch videos, That's a big, much taller person with a much longer reach. If it's someone who's roughly my own height. Smash feet and hands and, but again, it also varies depending on how well the person is absolutely for sure. I have some of my best friends.Paul Mulholland has been on the show a few times. My super foot training partner loves Paul to death. We've both slipped plenty of times. We've both, you know, Hit hard and then accidentally gone a little bit harder than we meant to mm-hmm doesn't change anything. I know he is not trying to hurt me. We're trying to make each other better. Iron sharpens iron, right?
Like we kick, we kick that, that saying around a lot, but it's different if that it's different, if that sort of thing happens in a, in a competition or whatever, where you're not expecting heavy contact. Right. And it's not someone, you know, I, I, I get that. I totally understand. And I think that this comes down philosophically for me. I think the problem for a lot of people, and this is what I teach them, is, if you don't go zero to 60 or you don't go five to 60. Which is what a lot of, okay. We've done our basics and we've done some, one step sparring or some three steps sparring. Yeah. We've done some formalized drills. Okay, everybody goes 75% speed and half power. Everybody goes nuts.
That's too big of a step. Here's a bag of sparring here. Have fun, right? You've gotta work up to it. And, and this is why I believe really strongly that applying different rule sets to sparring, which again, we're calling it sparring. It's free form movement. When multiple people, two or more are engaged in. Movement that they determine based on a set of parameters, which is sparring, good things happen. And you can modulate not only speed and power but techniques used on targets. Yep. Spacing, etcetera. And the more you do that, the better, not, not less more because you're talking. Timing distance and balance. There are ways to create structure such that you can change those trains independently.
Andrew Adams:
Absolutely.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Because if I ask a newer student to train timing and distance and balance simultaneously, they are not doing an effective job of training. Any of them? Oh, but Jeremy, do you do the basics? Do you practice a certain technique and make it better? It's the same thing. You train techniques, you train principles, principles are worthy of training.
Independently. If they're of value I'm on board. I wonder if the viewers and listeners are on board as well. I hope so. So here's the challenge. If you are a school or trained at a school, if you have a say in a school that does a fair amount of sparring, I want to encourage you to keep doing that but also look at creating what really are arbitrary structures within that free form movement, such that people can train different things.
If you always train fast, train slow. If you always train fast or slow. Try just using hands, try, just using feet. Try just using the left or right side of your body. Switch it up a bit. Try training, try sparring where everybody's in, like a, like a box and you hula hoops. Can't move. I like that. We use hula hoops. The more you look at drilling in this way, the more, when it becomes anything goes, it goes. We need those constraints to under human beings, relate to the world based on boundaries. And when you create boundaries, people can understand how techniques and principles work. You take the boundaries away and they have a better understanding of how things are and they can apply them better. Okay. Now, on the flip side, if you are a school that does very little sparring or free form movement, I would like to encourage you to start to incorporate some.
Now we talked about a certain school type and maybe instructor type that is very uncomfortable. Don't go zero to 60. Doesn't have to be fast. There are drills that I suspect you do that involve some free form movement. What is the next step in that? What is the next step in that? What is the next, next, next step in that just gradually build on it. And you probably know someone that incorporates a lot of sparring in their school that you can talk to and say, you know what? This is a thing that I am not comfortable teaching, but I want to be, yeah. Can you help me get it? If you are uncomfortable teaching something to your students, you either bring somebody in or you get better at it yourself. My preference is on both because the more you're exposing your students to the better they will get, the more they will celebrate you. And as always, if you have feedback, if you have questions, if you wanna argue about this, if you want to come on and say Jeremy and Andrew, you're stupid.
And then back it up, we'll bring it on the show if you want. Or you can just email and just rant and I'll delete it. if it's disrespectful, I'll delete it. For indulging disrespect is over. Healthy critique and criticism. We love that. We should probably do something like a parody episode where we just like completely trash something, but make it sound serious. April 1st, we should put that on the list. Hopefully they'll all forget by. We should edit the last 15 seconds out or I'll just. My trick of the last 15 seconds didn't happen. These are not the podcast hosts you're looking for. Oh, if you wanna support us in all the things that we're doing, go check out whistlekick.com.
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Andrew Adams:
That's it.
Jeremy Lesniak:
Our social media is at whistlekick. Until next time, train hard, smile and have a great day. That is the most synchronized we've ever been on that.