I love sparring – not just because it keeps me on my toes (hopefully not on my heels) but also because it makes me feel alive. In short, it helps me focus and reminds me never to get in a fight. Mainly because of two large glaring holes in my armor.
The emperor’s new armor. Of course, the big hole in my armor is the one I’m not talking about. It’s the complete lack of armor. I’m not a beetle or a knight – I’m a squishy bunch of organs in a laughably thin skin. I don’t like to think of myself as a dancing sausage in a fight, but that image is now firmly stuck in my head.
Hole One: A while back the delightful Shannon patiently wore a head camera while engaging me in some light sparring (the indefatigable GoPro2 was never in any real danger, nor was Shannon). The results are shown below. I learnt many things from this video but the first one was that I let my hands drop all the time. That’s apparently a bad thing.
Hole Two: I turtle. Again, if I was an armored chelonian, this might not be a problem, but when a sparring partner (so much more civilized than opponent) launches a barrage of strikes, or even just contacts me, I stand on one leg with my hands in front of my face. I think, though I’m not quite sure, that I also close my eyes and wait for it to stop.
So I asked my mixed martial arts instructor Larry for some advice and he gave me it in spades. This is the mindset he shared to avoid covering up and becoming turtle sausage gumbo.
Step 1 – Stay Out of Range
The first way to avoid being hit is to give myself time to think. If someone isn’t within striking range, then if they have to move to hit me, that gives me more time to figure out what’s going on. The key to being out of range is to know what your opponents range is, and if they go for a strike that won’t connect, just to calmly ignore it. At this range, fake strikes might be just to see how I react in certain circumstances.
Step 2 – When You Move, I Move
If being out of range is a good thing (and there are certainly times when I would want to be in range – if I wanted to launch a nuclear strike at Guam for example), then maintaining that range would be a goal. If the opponent (hopefully with much shorter limbs – that’s how I like them) moves towards me to kick, then if I simply move away the same distance they move, then they can’t possibly connect. Easy eh?
One challenge is the arena size. I had to correct myself from saying: if they move forward, I move back. The challenges with moving back are that it may incorrectly weight my legs if I’m not careful, and I also might run out of back if there’s a wall or some ropes behind me. So I shortened it to: move away. Which could be sideways.
Step 3 – Block and Move
The enemy here is not the glorious sparring partner raining jack-hammer punches at my body, the enemy is my tendency to turtle – to stand still and cover up. In the traditional fight or flight response to danger, it’s the equivalent of playing possum. And if you’ve ever clubbed a possum to death with a shovel, you know that playing possum isn’t always effective.
So the opposite of playing possum might be to block a few strikes and then move out of range. The blocking is nice – it’s not always possible. If I fail to block something, I tend to panic, and as sure as fear leads to hate, panic leads to possum, and quite possibly the end of the line for my genes. So getting hit is part of sparring, and that should be accepted. Block and move is a good Plan A, as long as Plan B can also kick in – get hit and move. The emphasis for me right now is the moving part.
Step 4 – Block and Fire
My grandfather always used to tell me that I was too defensive when I played him at chess. One reason might have been that he was a much better chess player than I. Gary Kasparov was the ruling chess meister of the day, and so perhaps I equated my Polish grandfather with some super-race of Eastern European / Asian grandmasters. So perhaps I was scared. At any rate, he always beat me.
Three decades later, I am still framing this post in terms of defense. My instructor says that I should take a “How dare you?” kind of attitude and knock the living snot out of anyone who dares to attack me.
When a sparring partner fires off a barrage or a combination or a blitz or a frenzy, then I simply block and fire. If they kick, I beat them with a punch. I might get hit. They might get hit. And then we move. If they punch, I go to the plume, and knee them in the head a bit.
This is not something that has ever occurred to me before. That in sparring, I could grab someone by the neck and drag their face down towards my knees. I drill it all the time, but it never really occurred to me that it was a tool I could actually use.
So this is all about the fight, rather than flight. The sacrificing a bishop to get a rook. The knowing that my body dimensions favor the bishop pin rather than a knight fork. Not that I’ve played chess in years.
How does one go about getting your hands around someone’s neck? This video shows a little about that:
This video shows the guy in yellow shorts taking some kicks and landing punches to illustrate the point.
There’s so much more to learn, but my main goal is to defeat my inner turtle. Next up, I’ll talk about being scared to kick at my partners, and three drills I can do to practice control.