Fair fights?

[rogue]

Here's the question, do many guys in ring arts or who spar a lot view all fights in regards to ring fighting? I don't mean technique wise but in that they seem to think all fights will start with them facing their opponent, both will be unarmed, and that the fight will be fought on their terms. In a nutshell that the fight will be fair.

What got me thinking about this was doing some practice knife play with a friend, who is now passing me by in skill. He thought it was unfair that during our session I threw a sweat shirt in his face and got the drop on him, and another time threw my knife at his face and got him down, pinned his arm and used a practice folder he didn't know I had. His view of fighting was influenced and limited by his sparring in class. BTW I'm as guilty of that as he was, but I wanted to somehow beat him at least once. ;)

[T'ai Ji Monkey]

Here is my take on it.

Fights are unpredictable and will develop randomly.
You need to react dynamically to whatever is thrown at you.
Thus any limitations like fair, style/combination and/or technique based thinking will be a hindrance to you.

Now if are doing only for comps, sport or re-creational purpose it does not matter as you will always be in a ontrolled environment with certain set rules and here sticking to the rules will be to YOUR advantage.

This is one of the reaons why I laugh at so many SD-classes or street-effective schools that train in a non-realistic environment and gear using pre-arranged techs and scenarios.

In real life the odds are stacked against you in a confrontation.

Ok, enough of the ranting now.

[bung bo]

that's a big 10-4, cerebus! you need to train for whatever mofos are gonna throw at you. it's good to train yourself slow in the beginning to develop technique and not to get into bad habits. but it's good to throw something unexpected in there. if you fight dirty, you can also learn to defend against it.

[rogue]

Here's the question, do many guys in ring arts or who spar a lot view all fights in regards to ring fighting? On further thought I'm going to toss in everybody and rephrase the last part to read "view all fights in regards to their specific training?". For example, in my case I primarily train to spar in class. So I have to make sure that I correct any bad habits or any assumptions about how fights go down outside of the dojo.

[jon]

so...
You cheated during a friendly sparring match with an old partner who by your own addmission was getting the drop on you.

Now your trying to seek justification?

:D




The rest of your post about sport fighting being unlike street fighting was definately a brave uncovered concept though :p



hehe just kidding, i actualy really enjoyed that post, it has some very relavent points. I was just forced to make fun of you becouse im generaly not a very nice person :D

[Mr Punch]

LOL jon.

Seriously, I think rogue hit on a major problem in training here. Those of us who do like to mix it up in a more 'realistic' way (ie: more 'unfair') have our hands tied, because most of this 'unfair' fighting involves surprise, so how do you get it into the kwoon/dojo/gym without unjustly beating on your innocently friendly sparring partners?

[GLW]

There are only two issues I see here:

If you were "Sparring" with a friend and you mutually agreed upon the "rules" and what was and was not OK in technique, target, etc....

Then, if you violated the mutually ageed upon limitations, you would be guilty of breaking the rules you agreed to.

However, if you both said and agreed to as real as possible, then there is no problem.

Now you have the fun part of making things as real as possible without someone getting hurt or worse.

This brings up the idea that once you "spar" with different people, in all probability, there is very nearly never an instance of "Friendly" sparring.

[Shaolin-Do]

I think rogue did hit the nail on the head with this one. "reality" training should be just that, but sparring should also be kept to what it is. Knives, chairs, midgets, richard simmons... throw in anything on occasion to keep things interesting.

[rogue]

You cheated during a friendly sparring match with an old partner who by your own addmission was getting the drop on you.

Now your trying to seek justification?[/QUOTE]Well, yeah. :D



The rest of your post about sport fighting being unlike street fighting was definately a brave uncovered concept though LOL, I was afraid it would come out like that. I was thinking more about mind set and assumptions that we all make because of our training. Many of us who practice within a set of rules can start viewing everything within that framwork and in some cases end up with some skinny Brazilian guy choking us out. I was wondering if the more someone works within those rules, either for competition or merely sparring in the dojo, does it influence and limit the posibilities of what is possible in a fight.

On the other hand as Jon pointed out the "realists" face the problem of how do you spontaneously surprise someone?

GLW, we never discussed rules. He's been taking classes for a couple of months, is feeling confident and wanted to spar. As a knife newbie his sparring is currently like fencing and is meant to work on his footwork. Since defanging the snake is his new toy, and was working for him, I switched to a more square stance with my left hand in front, right hand in close right above the solar plexus. That threw him off and while he tagged my left hand I would get his knife hand with my right and landed some solid thrusts to his body. Those were "fair". The sweat shirt was cheating, tossing the rubber knife at him was cheating, the takedown unexpected, the faux pocket folder was just mean on my part and scared the hell out him. ;)

If I tried that stunt with his instructor I'd be dead, literally.:eek:

[ninthdrunk]

Just wanted to chime in with a story of mine. We were doing two-on-one sparring at one of our brown belt level classes. It was two guys and a girl. When the two guys were attacking the girl, we were making our way around the room, and when we got near our instructor, he dropped a short stick. I have been in a lot more fights and I had noticed him standing there with the stick before he even dropped, wondering what he was doing with the stick. He dropped it for the girl, but of course I scooped it up and went to beat the heck out of her with it. He laughed and called an end to the round. She wasnt too happy, and it got a lot of laughs. I think it is really good to throw some stuff into the mix. Make your students do weapons sparring, circle war sparring, heck try some blindfolded sparring. These things help to increase people's awareness a lot. Of course you could just go out and get into fights! This will make sure you stay on your toes!

Ben

ps. Willow Sword, do you remember that? I thought it was pretty **** funny!

[Mr Punch]

Originally posted by rogue
On the other hand as Jon pointed out the "realists" face the problem of how do you spontaneously surprise someone? Jesuis H Christmas, I know I'm not around that often but it was ME!

me me ME, spelt M-A-T :D :p



Anyway, couple of ideas from an ex instructor of mine:

Tell the class you are going to have an all-out dirty tricks session sometime in the next n-lessons. Then;

1) Tell them you are going home early (actually he did this before he warned us about the upcoming surprise/animal day), get them all to line up for the bow, then get the high grades to jump them! (He himself jumped one of the high grades who had a perceived discipline problem!)

2) Keep chastising them to relax when they get tense cos they're expecting something. Give them some hippy relaxation drills to do in the corner... then get others to jump them.

3) Get them doing mokuso after a hard session (close-eyed meditation), massage their shoulders and necks, then beat them severely!

4) Jump them in the changing rooms.

5) Sneak weapons to attackers in two-person/three-person SD drills.

It helps if you are a low-down sneaky suuvabiatch. He would tell us about these drills with about one week off in between, so basically it was open season, which also gets you to relax into 'not expecting' it. After the initial adrenaline and injury-fueled sloppy frenzy, you could settle down into some more orthodox rhythm breaking drills and whatever.

Not now Katooooohh!!!'