A word on awareness and avoidance
From the onset it’s vital that you understand that fighting is what happens when self-protection has gone bad. If you are truly serious about keeping yourself safe on the streets, it’s not fighting you should be focusing on, but awareness and avoidance.
The way I break down self-protection for my students is as follows: 95 percent of self-protection is awareness and avoidance skills coupled with a healthy attitude to personal safety. If you are unable to avoid a situation, you need to be able to control the dialogue and distance, strike preemptively, and use the opportunity to escape. This ability to control a situation before it becomes a fight makes up 4 percent of self-protection. The remaining 1 percent is the fighting skills you fall back on when all else fails. In my experience, it is common for martial artists to overly fixate on fighting (the last 1 percent) and hence they are not effectively addressing the issue of self-protection.
The point I’m making here is that you can be one hell of a kick-ass fighter, and yet still be incapable of keeping yourself safe. If your awareness skills are poor, you’ll be taken out before you are even aware there is a threat. You simply won’t get the opportunity to use your fighting skills. Consider that no matter how good a fighter you are, there will be people who are better. The way to keep yourself safe from more skilled fighters is very simple: don’t fight them! Avoid the situation entirely, and if you can’t, control distance through talking with your hands (keep them between the assailant and you), use dialogue and deception to facilitate a first strike, and then use the moment of confusion to flee. In this way, it can be possible to protect yourself from people you may not be able to out fight. However, if all that fails then you have no option but to fight.
As we’ve established, in this section we are looking at training for that last 1 percent should all your other skills fail; it is therefore not appropriate to discuss in detail awareness and pre-emption. The reason I mention them is that it is vitally important that the sparring methods we are going to examine are viewed from the correct perspective. Remember, fighting skills aren’t the key to self-protection: fighting is what happens when self-protection goes bad.
Sparring and the nature of a street fight
Having established where sparring and fighting fit into the grand scheme of things, the next thing we need to cover briefly is the nature of the environment we are training for. In this book we are talking about the street and therefore the nature of the street will determine how we should spar to prepare for it. If we look at the sparring used in the various combat sports, it is immediately apparent that many differing methods of sparring exist. They vary because what is needed to win varies. What is needed to win is determined by the rules, and hence people sometimes assume that seeing as there are no rules in the street, getting rid of the rules will make sparring like a street situation. However, it’s not that straight forward. Aside from the lack of rules, there are many other things that make a street situation what it is.
A fight is what happens when self-protection goes wrong.
The reality of street fights
A detailed discussion on the nature of street fights is beyond the scope of this look at sparring; however, here are a few key points that need to be considered:
The vast majority take place at close-range.Real fights often involve multiple assailants and weapons.Real fights are fast, frantic and chaotic.Real fights do not resemble a skilled exchange between two martial artists.In a real situation, you need to keep things really simple.The fight might begin without warning (awareness being the key to ensuring it doesn’t).Deceptive or aggressive dialogue will frequently precede any physical exchange.Real fights are terrifying and wholly unpleasant (assuming you’re not a psychopath).
To make our sparring relevant to real situations, we need to consider all the things listed above. When they are factored in, sparring can be quite a bit different from what is seen in most dojos. This does not mean other types of sparring have no value: far from it. As a martial artist, it’s very likely that you will train for a variety of reasons and have an interest in many aspects of martial training. It is therefore entirely possible that you will spar in more than one way: different types of sparring for different aspects of your training.
You may spar in one way for a straight fight with other martial artists, and another way for the street. Some argue that by sparring in more than one way you may inadvertently use the wrong method at the wrong time. I can follow this logic, but it’s my view that the dojo and street environments are so radically different that it is unlikely you’ll mix up the various methods so long as you keep the various types of sparring totally separate. (Almost all the leading realists that I know and train with also engage in sparring methods that aren’t directly transferable to the street and yet they are easily able to keep the various methods separate.)
Having covered some of the key issues, it’s now time to look at the 10 ways to make your sparring street smart.
Important point: All sparring is potentially dangerous and must always be closely supervised by a suitably qualified and experienced person. If you don’t have such supervision, don’t try out the methods we’re going to discuss.
Be aware of the flaws of any sparring exercise
No matter how realistic sparring is, it is never real. We are always making compromises in the name of safety. If we didn’t, every training session would result in the majority of students going to the hospital. We need to introduce necessary flaws into training to ensure that we can do it safely. Without these flaws, training would be just as dangerous as the street; which kind of defeats the whole point of training. It won’t make our lives any safer; it will just expose us to many more life-threatening encounters.
The necessity and problem of compromise
If you do any of the following you’ve introduced a flaw into your sparring: train on mats, wear sparring gloves, use a gum shield [mouth guard], limit contact levels, omit techniques such as biting, eye gouges, and groin attacks, you or your partner end the fight by tapping out or submitting, and so on. Changes such as these will make training safer and more productive, but they also move it further away from a real fight. The trick to ensuring that this drift from reality is minimal is to be aware of the flaws and their effects.
By way of example, let’s say you and a partner were about to engage in heavy contact sparring. To maximize safety, one precaution you may take is to wear boxing gloves. Before you start sparring, you should think about the flaws that donning them has introduced:
Your fists are now much bigger than they would be in reality and hence your hit rate may increase.You can hide behind the gloves to protect yourself.You can’t grab or effectively set up a datum and neither can your partner, meaning you use one hand to locate and control the opponent’s head so the other hand can strike more accurately during the chaos of combatThe blows have less of an effect than they would in reality.The nature of the gloves means that open-hand strikes cannot be delivered.Your grappling techniques are severely limited.
By being aware of the flaws introduced by any safety considerations, you ensure that the reality of the street stays at the forefront of your mind. Sparring is a means to an end; it is not the end in itself. Being aware of the flaws in sparring also helps keep that distinction clear.
It’s not just safety that introduces flaws. You may also purposefully introduce some limitations to enhance certain skills. As an example, when sparring you may wish to isolate striking from a
