How much contact is "full contact" sparring?

[DanT]

Hey all,

Ive heard some ppl say that when they spar they hit each other 100% even to the head. This seems a bit dangerous to me, after all sparring is to work on techniques not kill each other or give your partner a concussion and make him miss 6 weeks of practice. What do you think?

 

[Bill Mattocks]

Full contact does not necessarily mean full power. However, some competitions that are 'full contact' are also 'full power' and people do get knocked out and even hurt sometimes.

Not many styles of traditional martial arts practice full contact and full power. Even of those few that do, they traditionally wear bogu or other forms of protection.

 

[drop bear]

it depends on if you are preparing for a full contact fight. If you are then there is the concern that you will not be prepared if you havent experienced full contact before.

Sparring is also to work on your ability to fight. Which is more than just your technique.

 

[Tony Dismukes]

It varies quite a bit by gym and individual. I personally think that consistently going 100% in training is a bad idea, even if you plan on fighting in a full-contact sport like boxing, Muay Thai, or MMA. You can't condition your brain to withstand impact and the accumulated brain damage from sparring 100% all the time will shorten your career in the ring or cage. I prefer the approach, as John Cavanagh puts it, of "upgrading the software without damaging the hardware."

Still, there are some folks who train that way. Fighters out of Pat Miletich's gym used to regularly knock each other out in training. I have a friend who is a former two-time world boxing champion and he is in favor of 100% intensity sparring. (On the other hand a) he's talking about sparring opponents that he was paying to help him prepare for fights and b) when he teaches students he puts a heavy focus on building their defense so they don't get hit too much and c) his body is pretty much wrecked at the age of 48.)

More common, in my experience, is for "full" contact sparring in training to actually be hard contact, with the degree of hardness determined by the experience and conditioning of the individuals involved.

 

[JR 137]

I'll add to Tony Dismukes's post if he's ok with that...

Sometimes people call sparring with minimal protective gear full contact. Kyokushin karate falls under that banner. They typically only wear a cup and mouthpiece. Kyokushin doesn't punch/elbow to the head due to the rate of injury to the recipient and hitter. Kicks and knees to the head are still allowed however.

They don't typically spar as hard as they compete, but that doesn't mean the sparring isn't harsh by any means. And people think because they don't punch the head in competition they don't do so in class. In class, many dojos will put on gloves and head gear and allow controlled head punching from time to time.

Then there's systems that'll do a ton of conditioning. Not cardio conditioning (although they may do that too), but trading kicks and punches to the body to toughen up weak areas. Some will also hit with boards. Many will repeatedly hit hard objects to toughen body parts up.

Full contact can be a pretty vague term. But it's pretty much universally hard contact training.

 

[drop bear]

mostly because I like watching jules the jackal get knocked out. But this would be full contact sparring.

Earl who I used to train with. Sparring a veteran pro fighter.

 

[crazydiamond]

I am just a beginner - and not training for pro fights or any competition . As a beginner we keep the sparing to functional like the video below. Occasionally it spiked up a bit more than this video. But I dont need concussions but enough discomfort to learn to defend and fight.

 

[JP3]

I trained full contact Muay Thai for 5 years, and we went full-tilt boogie every training day. But the thing was, we didn't actually fight every training day, most of each day was conditioning and drills, working on skills full speed & full power. When we went into the ring to spar, we wore the big heavy gloves and the old-school collegiate boxing headgear for the max protection. That was the training. But, when we went to an actual fight, as in an organized bout, even amateur, headgear off, and exchange the 16 oz gloves for 12 oz, or even 10 or 8 oz gloves, depending on which state you were fighting in. Since you were in the ring with another person who had trained just as hard as you had been for the preceding months, it got pretty damn rough.

Those 5 years taught me a lot, but I'm not going to repeat them. I am not positive that I'd recommend them to someone else, either.

 

[Blindside]

"Full contact" to me means guys aren't pulling anything. I very very rarely have guys go full in training, We use medium and hard contact for our advanced guys, "hard contact" for us means guys are moving fast and are sticking hard shots but aren't going for a KO, this is for empty hand or stick fighting.

 

[Midnight-shadow]

In our school we have 3 levels of sparring, which are as follows:

open-hand sparring. This focuses on good technique and points are awarded for both effective defence as well as attack, as well as looking like white crane as opposed to kickboxing. Rules include no headshots, no grabs, no takedowns and no kicks below the knee (i.e. sweeps). We wear no extra protective gear when open-hand sparring.

Semi-contact. Done on a points system with more emphasis on landing hits in the correct place. Headshots are allowed and award more points than body shots, but the hits still need to be light (heavy hitting or blocking is cautioned against). Grabs and takedowns are allowed but no floor grappling. Boxing-style gloves and head-guards are worn here

Full contact. Submission based fighting with no holds barred and anything goes. Think MMA fighting with a bit more body protection.

 

[Buka]

It's sometimes hard to define the term "Full Contact" in the Martial world, and in the sport fighting world, as I'm sure it means different things to different people and groups.

I remember the term first becoming known, at least in my world, in the late sixties from the Kyokushin guys led by Mas Oyama. If I remember correctly, it was both a competitive sport and the way they trained in their sparring. That being said, I don't think they were trying to knock each other out when they sparred, or even hurt each other (don't think that would make any sense) it was just a rule set, kind of like western boxing, with added techniques of course. It was a barehanded sparring, as was their competitions.

In 1974, the PKA (Professional Karate Association) was formed (again, we're talking about a sport here) where gloved hands and feet, rounds fighting with Karate techniques were utilized. The term "Full Contact Karate" was the most common way it was described. That's what everyone I knew called it. Two of the newly crowned champions of their first ever bouts (which were aired in prime time on network TV in the United States - a really big deal at the time) were Bill Wallace and Joe Lewis. Both have told me that when training for it, and continuing training in it, sparring was the same as every other kind of contact sparring - you weren't sparring like you were defending yourself in a street fight, you were just sparring with your sparring partners, as you would in boxing or any other contact fighting style.

As to Dan's OP, I don't think anyone is sparring on a regular basis going 100% to the head, or even to the body. Just doesn't make much sense. (Especially when you've learned to hit with technique). I'd be suspect of any trainer, coach or Sensei who allowed or encouraged people to try and take each others heads off. Not saying it's never happened, there are fools everywhere, but it's not the norm or good training. And it's not done by any professionals I know. And, besides the obvious safety factor - you just don't improve skills by trying to kill each other.

 

[WaterGal]

Like others have alluded to, full contact can be used to mean "you can hit with 100% of your power", but it can also be used instead to mean "you can hit any part of the body" (without necessarily going 100% in terms of power).

So your friends might be using the term full contact to mean they're doing lots of different strikes to different parts of the head, but not actually hitting hard enough to give each other concussions every week. Hopefully, otherwise they're all gonna be having a rough time sooner or later.

 

[Midnight-shadow]

Like others have alluded to, full contact can be used to mean "you can hit with 100% of your power", but it can also be used instead to mean "you can hit any part of the body" (without necessarily going 100% in terms of power).

So your friends might be using the term full contact to mean they're doing lots of different strikes to different parts of the head, but not actually hitting hard enough to give each other concussions every week. Hopefully, otherwise they're all gonna be having a rough time sooner or later.

You'd be surprised how little effort it takes to give someone a concussion during a fight.

 

[Andrew Green]

Hey all,

Ive heard some ppl say that when they spar they hit each other 100% even to the head. This seems a bit dangerous to me, after all sparring is to work on techniques not kill each other or give your partner a concussion and make him miss 6 weeks of practice. What do you think?

It depends, I think most gyms have gotten away from the go 100% in sparring mentality as it really shortens the time you get to do it. Going 100% sometimes maybe, but generally you are not trying to actually KO or injure in sparring.

That said I do think that most people that have never sparred hard tend to overestimate the damage that will get done. If you're trained, and wearing gloves & shin pads you can go pretty hard and wake up feeling just fine the next morning.

 

[Juany118]

I agree with @Buka for the most part. To mean full contact sparring tries to avoid full force to the head (stuff happens in the heat of sparring and you let it slide) and even to the body. Especially with gloves that allow grappling it's not hard to crack a rib. The way I look at it is that you are simply under real pressure because it, well because it hurts. In short because you are at risk for going home with bumps and bruises because your training partners are going full speed but with less power because they have acquired the appropriate striking technique.

 

[JP3]

It depends, I think most gyms have gotten away from the go 100% in sparring mentality as it really shortens the time you get to do it. Going 100% sometimes maybe, but generally you are not trying to actually KO or injure in sparring.

That said I do think that most people that have never sparred hard tend to overestimate the damage that will get done. If you're trained, and wearing gloves & shin pads you can go pretty hard and wake up feeling just fine the next morning.

That's true, but so is the... reverse? inverse? Converse?

Go medium hard with no pads and wake up the next day as if you didn't train at all.... or wake up and hardly be able to move. Either is possible. And, if you can't hardly move, you probably shouldn't go train that day, nor any day afterwards until you can move right, so you'd lose out on the training time.

So, the reason that "full power" sparring isn't done often is that it's likely to lead to loss of training time, which means regression in conditioning and skill.

I'd never thought of full contact being as WaterGal described it, as being a complete availability of all targets, but with controlled strike power. I'd probably call that something else, but I've no idea what. *shrug* I've never practiced sparring where there literally were no rules, as rules are for safety and safety with the training prtners has always been the school's #1 goal, as nobody is training gladiators any longer. Shoot, even then, the gladiators were too valuable to lose in training accidents, nobody would have made money on that, so I would wager *cough-cough* even they didn't train full tilt.