The purpose and productivity of sparring for students.

The Reason We Practice Sparring.

In our current era, the martial arts industry has come to view sparring as this end-all, be-all kind of exercise that somehow magically elevates fighters. While I do have to admit that sparring is an absolutely necessary aspect of training, it's importance is often misunderstood. Why is that?

For most students at any martial arts institution, sparring will often be when they feel the most productive. Your adrenaline is pumping, you’re getting a fantastic workout, and it will probably be the closest thing you'll do in a class to fighting (at least, that how it feels).

A point that most students at most institutions don't think about, however, is that most instructors simply become relegated to being referees of sort. In a lot of cases, the instructor can tell you to start sparring just so they can proceed to no longer give a shit. It takes nothing for the instructor to just tell any two students in his class to start socking the shit out of each other within some mild parameters.

Because it leaves many students feeling fulfilled and makes the job for the instructor very easy, sparring is often over-prescribed (especially in the early stages of a student's development)

SO WHY DO WE SPAR? WHAT'S REALLY THE BENEFIT?

We have to understand that a bad pianist doesn't suddenly become good at playing their pieces because they were thrown into a concert. A bad dancer does not suddenly become a good one because they were suddenly thrown in front of an audience. A bad driver doesn’t suddenly become good when they’re put into an F1 vehicle and asked to race. Where improvement and refinement of skills occur is always during the endless hours of training, practice, and condidtioning prior to the stress levels being brought into the stratosphere when it's time to show what you know.

When we, as martial artists, allow our students to spar, we must understand from both angles that whatever mistakes or shortcomings a particular participant has, isn't going to suddenly resolve itself when they are under threat of being attacked and harmed. For Wing Chun students, you're not going to suddenly get better at not-chasing, fix your footwork problems you've had for several months/year(s), and suddenly get a better Pak Sau or whatever in the middle of a fight. In fact, the reality is most of what you learned will tend to get worse in a high stress situation. Very few things in your life will have as high of a stake as martial arts when done at high stress levels. If you mess up cooking a dish, the dish isn’t going to accidentally give you a concussion.

What should we do then?

Students need to spar, just like a pianist needs an audience and dishes need to be tasted. There comes a point in everyone’s training where you should check to see how you perform in a certain contexts and under pressure. That being said, a pianist that cannot play scales and haven’t practiced their pieces has no business playing for people, a chef that cannot prep or sanitize properly has no business serving food, and a Wing Chun student that doesn’t know their fundamentals has no business sparring.

We need to prep our students by gradually dialing up the stress in their training. We achieve this by providing a wide variety of drills that can be done with varying speed and strength intensities. When a student gains proficiency in drills, we try to acclimate students towards the stress of sparring by introducing them to countless hours of Gor Sau, which is how most Chinese Martial Arts have done since times of antiquity. Gor Sau, for the uninitiated, is a random feed of movements and drills that do not have the intention of knocking the other person out, with the mindset to test each other to see if responses can be mustered correctly and in time.

Sparring is, ultimately, a form of teaching students about how to manage stress levels and how to maintain their training when they are being threatened. It is to draw out the most primal and innate mistakes that counteract our Wing Chun training so that we can use it (just like Gor Sau) as a diagnostic tool for what to work on. You can only fight the way you train, and all your improvement occurs when you practice.

It is a great shame to admit that, in the greater Wing Chun community, most schools do not spar at all. They effectively rob both themselves and their students from the realities of fighting and what they must work on under stress (everyone crumbles in different ways). This is a contributor to why most Wing Chun schools cannot produce students that can actually fight. However, anyone who expects to just pit two students against each other with the expectation that they're going to somehow magically get better at their technique while sparring is being wildly disingenuous.

“We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

- Archilochus.