You Need to Hard Spar

So this short and a bunch of others featuring the same female fighter have been showing up in my feed recently. Universally, on almost all of the clips featuring her, there are tons and tons of comments saying that she's sparring too hard, and that she's going to hurt someone, and that she should be fired, and people decrying that this is why they don't spar with women. I'm not going to go into specific comments here, but a link to the source channel is in the description, feel free to go read the comments yourself. And this isn't anything new either. It seems like Jeff Chan over on his channel gets called out for quote-unquote sparring hard every other post or so. Likewise, I've seen this same kind of commentary on wrestling videos and judo videos, although it is more prevalent in the striking arts. It definitely shows up in grappling too. These criticisms in the comments section hit kind of close to home for me, because where I train, there is a small but vocal faction of people who seem to think anything above a certain level of intensity is outright dangerous. So I took this short to some of my advanced martial arts friends, some currently practicing and others more or less retired, just to check to make sure I wasn't out of touch, but they all said the same thing. This isn't hard sparring, it's just intense sparring. There is such a thing as people genuinely trying to do harm to one another for the sake of harm itself, but the shorts I've been seeing just aren't that. I've noticed this trend starting to really flare up in the last decade or so now, where people get really bent out of shape about intensity. I want to make it clear that there is such a thing as reckless sparring. Having said that, I have never trained with a mouth guard or leg guards, and that's not for lack of blocking punches with my face from time to time. There is just a difference between intense sparring and reckless sparring. Reckless sparring is about doing harm for the sake of doing harm. It is often about ego or emotion or just plain bullying. Intense sparring is more about putting people under pressure relative to their level. Yes, you should feel in danger, because you are in danger. Yes, if you get hit, it will hurt, and you will feel it the next day. The easiest way to tell if sparring is reckless or intense is the following. First, attitude is one of the practitioners read in the face, swinging with abandon and clearly going for knockouts. Second, what are the kind of injuries that are actually happening? Knockouts, broken bones, hyperextensions, etc. sometimes happen by accident, but if that is a regular occurrence at your gym, if it is a regular pattern, then those people are sparring unsafe. Bruises, muscle soreness, mat burns, minor cuts, the occasional black eye even, these are not injuries. These are the price of doing a martial art. You have chosen a pursuit with the word martial in it, a word whose definition is appropriate to war, and among whose synonyms are combative. Feeling achy and breaky and battered in the morning is implicit to the experience. And more than that, you should feel under pressure when you are sparring. If you're just throwing out punches and you don't feel like you're in any kind of danger, then you're not learning anything, you're just larping through the experience. Now this isn't to say that there is no place for light sparring. Light sparring is great for building technical ability, but at some point you really do need to do harder sparring sessions to get good. You need to learn how to take and give hits. No, that should never land you in the hospital, but you definitely will want to invest in an ice pack and some good painkiller. I've heard a lot of more casual martial artists say that, well, they have work in the morning, or whatever else, and I get that. I work a very physical job at the moment at weird hours, I empathize, I do. But this isn't yoga. Likewise, I see many people ready to complain about safety, but I don't see very many warming up or actively stretching on off days, or eating right, or getting enough sleep, or being properly hydrated, you know, all that extra boring stuff that prevents injury. I'm not saying that there aren't bad actors out there, or that sometimes gym cultures aren't just awful, but this whole trend towards avoiding the inherent risk involved with martial arts is concerning. This is how arts degenerate into games of tag or just hypothetical nonsense. To end this video, I want to return to the woman in the original clip. Here is how I know she isn't hurting anyone. She's cracking jokes. People are all smiling in hugs after each session, and crucially, if people actually were getting hurt during these seminars with top Muay Thai talent, they wouldn't be profitable. People just wouldn't go, they wouldn't come back, plain and simple. At the end of the day, we need to be safe when we train, yes, absolutely, but we also have to realize the price is inevitably going to be walking around feeling beat up a lot of the time. Playing games of violence and expecting there to be zero risk, expecting yourself not to be scared some time of the intensity bearing down on you just isn't a thing, again, it's not yoga. If you just want to get fit or get out of the house, there are a million other awesome hobbies. I'm not saying that to deter people from the martial arts, I'm very biased, I think everybody should do martial arts, but if you want to learn how to fight, you eventually have to fight, you eventually have to learn to deal with pressure, intensity, and pain and how to work through those things. I want to make super clear, I'm not saying any of this to try and come off as tough, hardly. I'm saying this because I think martial arts are fundamentally about learning to confront and work through physical discomfort so that off the mats in daily life we can better handle emotional and psychological discomfort. Being a little late for an appointment or having an argument feel a lot less like a big deal when the night before you got the wind knocked out of you but you still fought through it. We are learning how to fight, but we are also learning resilience in a more general sense. But you can't learn that. You can't incorporate that into your character if there is no struggle. Nothing to practice resilience against. To quote Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, what is to give light is to endure burning. And we, my friends, are in the business of burning. Short video today, but that's all I've got. I'll be back with some bigger projects very soon, but I really wanted to get this topic off my chest. Happy training, and I will see you in the next one. Peace.