Is it better to jump around while sparring?

[Minidoggy]

When I say jump, I mean .. like hop around.. sorta. I've read that it's better not to and what not.. but I see that in the olympics they hop around (I just figured it would be best to watch them since.. it's better than anything else..). Also, it's better to keep your hands up while fighting and during kicks right? it's just that sometimes I watch sparring matches to learn from them.. but they keep their guards down and stuff..

Thanks

 

[Ceicei]

You're talking about Olympic-style TKD sparring, right? There are other types of sparring when hands are used (and remain up) along with feet.

 

[Xue Sheng]

Watch a Chinese Police Sanda/Sanshou Vs. anything match and you tell me.

 

[exile]

You're talking about Olympic-style TKD sparring, right? There are other types of sparring when hands are used (and remain up) along with feet.

Ceicei's exactly right here. Olympic sparring is just one point, at the extreme end of a spectrum which goes in the other direction more and more towards the kind of fighting that old-school TKD was built for—elbows and knees, shots to the head and throat, finger-thrusts to sensitive points on the face (and yes, the eyes are part of that target area), joint locks and breaks and other limb-destruction .... until you get to the kind of sparring which is a very good simulation of a street fight, with mouth guards and groin cups essential, and you better be willing to sign a stack of disclaimers. As you go from the WTF arena sparring style in the direction of the other extreme, you `jump around' and lower your guard less and less...

But I'm not exactly clear what `jumping around' refers to here. You mean moving in an out to deliver a high point-scorer and then pull back to the usual 10'-12' separation? Or do you mean actual jumping? Neither of these will get you very far at all (except on a stretcher) if you do seriously realistic CQ `sparring', but it does make a difference which of these you're asking about...

 

[Kacey]

Like exile, I'm not sure what type of jumping you mean. If you mean bouncing at a steady speed - the way some boxers do - then I'd be careful. Too many people I know who bounce boxer-style (most of whom claim they do it to stay loose and able to move) tend to fall into a pattern of only attacking at a certain point in the bounce, which makes them predictable, and easier to beat.

If you mean constantly moving in and out around your opponent, then yes - I would recommend working on it. Too many people fight flat-footed, standing in a solidly rooted stance waiting to be attacked. Move around your opponent, and go in unexpected directions - attack moving back, block moving forward, move sideways, move towards diagonals - and most, try not to be predictable in your movements.

Always keep your hands up. It is much easier - and therefore faster - to drop your hands than raise them. You can also block with your elbows... but only if they're high enough to begin with. Many people who train Olympic style - where there are no hand attacks to the head - tend to leave their hands down, because significantly fewer people kick to the head (which makes head kicks a great technique, because they're less expected) - but don't forget that TKD is also for self-defense - and in a self-defense situation, the person attacking you won't follow dojang rules.

I'm not sure if this answered your question - please feel free to clarify your question if we've misunderstood and ask again.

 

[TKDmel]

I'm assuming he referring to the footwork type of side stepping and in/out stuff.

 

[Tez3]

To an extent it also depends on your size, for example if you watch boxing or mma you won't find the big heavyweights moving around nearly as much as the light guys, too tiring. The light 'slippy' guys can afford to move more.
I would say too always keep your hands up. Even in amateur mma where there are no head shots it's no bad thing to keep your guard up. I would be careful about keeping your hands too high, a liver shot is evil!

 

[Minidoggy]

hey guys thanks for the replies
I'm sorry about being vague. I just couldnt think of the word when I was typing it out. for the first part, I meant the bouncing like boxers and stuff..
my main question would actually be how exactly are you suppose to move/stand while sparring?.. because I see olympic guys and boxers bounce around.. sometimes I hear it's good, and sometimes bad..

 

[Min]

That is never a good idea to jump around in a sparring match. An experienced fighter will blast you with a back kick as soon as you land and you can't defend against it. In most sparring you want to bounce to be agile, but the balls of your feet remain in contact with the floor at all times.

My little two cents on this.

 

[exile]

I'm assuming he referring to the footwork type of side stepping and in/out stuff.

I'd assume that too, but it wasn't quite clear. The OP's subsequent post seems to confirm it.

That is never a good idea to jump around in a sparring match. An experienced fighter will blast you with a back kick as soon as you land and you can't defend against it. In most sparring you want to bounce to be agile, but the balls of your feet remain in contact with the floor at all times.

My little two cents on this.

This is based on the alternative interpretation, that `jumping around' is to be taken as literal jumping. It seems that that's not what was intended...

So the question is, should you move in/out and all around the town whilst sparring? Again, you can't answer this in advance, because you have to identify just what kind of sparring is in question. `When in Rome', and all that. A trained CQ guy doing realistic SD sparring against a WTF opponent who's using Olympic-rules scoring will wait till the first high kick his oppo fires, step off the centerline and move in, trapping his oppo's leg, pulling him off his feet and kicking him hard in the testicles to disable the `assailant'... and will then be disqualified, quite possibly charged with assault, and subject to a massive lawsuit for damages. You have to relativize the question to a particular context: just what kind of sparring are you talking about when you ask what's good and what isn't? For SD purposes, most WTF guidelines are going to be hopeless. But is that what you're asking about, or is it something else. It's not quite clear, you see...

 

[Minidoggy]

actually moving around and stuff (and should you bounce around?) for both cases.. SD and sparring (not olympic but one that allows punches to face and.. yea)
I do ITF so it's a bit different from WTF.
thanks a lot for the replies

 

[stoneheart]

In my opinion the bouncing on the balls of your feet is a sport technique, and it's great for that purpose of gaining mobility. In a self-defense situation I think it is much less effective and can open you to a tackle or other form of takedown.

 

[Last Fearner]

When I say jump, I mean .. like hop around.. sorta. I've read that it's better not to and what not.. but I see that in the olympics they hop around (I just figured it would be best to watch them since.. it's better than anything else..). Also, it's better to keep your hands up while fighting and during kicks right? it's just that sometimes I watch sparring matches to learn from them.. but they keep their guards down and stuff..

Thanks

I don't mean to ruffle anyone's feathers, but the question here has only been partly, and vaguely answered. Those who have said that the answer depends on certain factors are correct in that you must take into consideration the venue, and the rules for competition. Even in the street, every scenario is different, and movement about, or up and down can be useful in certain circumstances.

When you are referring to tournament fighting (whether WTF, ITF, ATA, or Karate matches) you have common factors. One factor pertains to what movements are prohibited by the rules (eg: grabbing, pushing, tackling, sweeps, throws, take-downs, low kicks, face punches, etc.). In the street, there are no rules (other than punishment after the fact for unlawful use of force), however an attacker will often display a certain skill-set and fighting-approach early on (boxer, wrestler, brawler, Martial Artist, etc). It is within the scope of your defenses to respond accordingly which might include a "sparring like atmosphere" where you are more mobile to avoid contact, and then close in for your counter.

The bouncing that you see in Olympic competition is very effective, and smart strategy in most cases. Most of the comments I read in many threads about this topic appear to come from a perspective of those who have never been trained in this type of fighting, nor have they ever competed in the Olympics, so most of their criticism is based on conjecture.

The topic of "movement" while sparring is an important one, just as "distance" is (I'll get to that in a moment). Excessive movements (eg: jumping high off the feet or lunging in and out and from side to side), are usually uncontrolled actions by unskilled beginners. They are a waste of energy, and often trap the person in an awkward position for counter attack.

Conversely, the light bouncing on the balls of the feet is not done constantly, but at more regular intervals than standing still. The fighter does not completely leave the ground for the most part, but remains on the balls of their feet with an up and down rhythm. The bounce is fast, and not high enough for an opponent to "wait till they are on the way down" then attack.

Any amount of movement during a match can expend energy, and wear you down, but a skilled tournament fighter has trained their endurance to last several times longer than the regulation match with constant attacking and defense. Thus, they are actually toning it down during a tournament match.

There are several good reasons for the light bounce. One is based on Isaac Newton's law of motion as it relates to inertia (paraphrased: A body at rest tends to stay at rest, and a body in motion tends to stay in motion). "Superfoot" Bill Wallace teaches the same basic strategy, and used it quite successfully for many years. When you strike out at an opponent, if you are at rest (standing still), you have to over come inertia and propel your body into motion. If you are in motion (light bouncing) all you have to do is to rapidly accelerate the muscle contractions and enhance upon the movement that is already there. In addition, your opponent will recognize the "change" from a stationary fighter who suddenly launches into action, as opposed to the disguised attack which comes from a body already in motion.

Finally, the point about the guards is one that is quite often misunderstood, and criticized incorrectly. There is a good reason why many fighters in Martial Art tournaments (not just Taekwondo or WTF), as well as boxers in some cases, allow their guards to hang down. First of all, putting your guards up for protection is a basic skill taught to all beginners. It is important to learn this skill, and use it when appropriate. However, to think that an advanced Black Belt, or Olympic fighter is vulnerable because their guards are down is rather naive.

The subject of "distance," that I mentioned earlier, is the key here. First of all, if I am just out of range of my opponent's strike (hand or foot), then they must advance to make contact. A good fighter can read this movement and know when the opponent is coming. My options then would be to a). distance further to avoid impact [no blocking necessary], b.) move forward and jam [no blocking needed - just cover] c.) side step and evade [no blocking required, but guards are adjusted as needed]. The only other option is to remain stationary and get hit, or hope they misjudged and miss you. On any of these options you could choose to raise your guards and block, and you will have plenty of time to do so (believe it or not).

Fighting toe-to-toe (like boxers often do) requires that you keep your guards up, otherwise the opponent can hit before you can react, but rather than blocking, you are putting up more of a shield. Even very skilled boxers like Ali, and Sugar Ray Leonard would back off, dance around their opponent, and lower both guards for a time. However, boxers like Mike Tysen fight different than Ali, and tend to put up a "peek-a-boo" shield to move in close and swing hard, hoping for that big knock-out punch.

Keeping your guards up through most of a fight is tiring on your arms. The muscles in the biceps and triceps become fatigued, and by the end of a match you might have difficulty responding when you really do need to block something. Your movements will become much slower as the lactic acid builds up. Instead, Olympic fighters keep their arms down because they don't intend to block. Not because they are relying on the "tournament rules," but because they understand the nature of their opponent's attack. A slight movement of my body can prevent contact, spoil the impact, or jam the movement without ever blocking. It is actually a smart defense, because I don't get hit hard by my opponent's kick or punch, and my hands are still free if I wanted block or strike.

Also, a slight lean of the body away from an attacker can utilize the shoulder as a natural obstruction to head kicks and/or punches without blocking with the forearms. Therefore, it does not matter if face punches are allowed. If my opponent can not reach my head, I don't need to block, thus I don't need my guards up. Any attempt to close that distance places them within range of my kicks as well as my hands.

The reason Olympic fighters don't raise the arms in bent postitions to block kicks is because you can not cover every open target on your body, thus "spoiling" the attack is a better strategy. To stop a kick from reaching the head, the arms are extended forward like the wings of a fighter jet to impede the path of the leg on the way up, before it gets to the head, rather than bending the elbows, and trying to block the kick near the ankle and risk missing the block, or getting your elbows smacked.

Believe it or not, in specific street fighting scenarios, this same strategy works very well. When attacked by an opponent upon whom it would not work well, the smart fighter knows not to use it, and reverts to other tools in their repertoire.

CM D.J. Eisenhart

 

[Drac]

To an extent it also depends on your size, for example if you watch boxing or mma you won't find the big heavyweights moving around nearly as much as the light guys, too tiring. The light 'slippy' guys can afford to move more!

Ahhhhh!!! I wanted to say that..Well said Tez3

 

[Tez3]

Ahhhhh!!! I wanted to say that..Well said Tez3

Sorry! Are there weight categories in competive TKD? Can't say as i've ever seen the real big guys in the Olympics.
Another good reason to keep light on your feet, some people like to stand on your feet to hold you still while they hit you!
I had to learn to change my karate stance for MMA where you can be taken down just as Last Fearner said. I used to compete in karate full contact comps and we did move a lot on our feet with a sideways stance, both arms about shoulder height, hands out. Now I'm more 'planted' wide stanced moving working the angles more, with guard more like a boxers one. Kicks are usually blocked with Thai shin blocks so my hands don't go down unless I can catch a kick. I recently went to a friends TKD class as he wanted the girls to train with a female black belt, when it came to sparring I asked if he'd like me to do karate/TKD style or MMA, he said MMA for fun! Just to give them something different to handle. The main differences were that they tried to high kick a lot which meant I caught them and took them down ( gently I might add as they weren't used to it), if I blocked them it was with a 'telephone' block and I came in close especially to the taller ones and used a lot of body punches and low Thai style kicks to the thighs inner as well as outer.I didn't do any shoots or takesdowns though. They caught on quickly though and we all had a great deal of fun swapping techniques.

It made them think about self defence techniques more and I left feeling envious of the high kicks and their speed! (that's why TKD is not for me, I had trouble with high kicks in karate) There was no my style better than your stuff just a lot of fun.

 

[exile]

The kind of sparring where you train for actual fighting—self-defense, life-preserving fighting in the face of a violent attack from a dangerous, untrained assailant, the kind of fighting that the `civilian'-based MAs (as vs., say, the samurai/professional warrior arts) were designed for—as vs. dueling (sports competition or other mock combat governed by scoring systems and rules of engagement)—isn't going to involve any `in/out', ranging-back-and-forth etc. type movement. It's at close quarters, involving simulated `habitual acts of violence' that reflect the kind of attack initiators that are well-documented as the most common ways an assault begins. In this kind of `sparring', you are really training realistic bunkai for the various hyungs, kata or hsings of your art; your response will to a large extent be determined by whether the attack is optimally handled by a move outside (preferable for safety and the establishment of control, but not always possible) or operations inside (typically what happens in the face of an untrained roundhouse punch at your head). You are looking to (i) deflect the attack and (ii) deliver your own, terminating strike so that (i) and (ii) occur as close to simultaneously as you can manage. In the face of a single or double grab, typically part of a grab-and-strike or head-butt or groin kick scenario by your assailant, you need to respond with an immediately damaging attack—preferably to the attacker's forcibly lowered upper body: throat, eyes, temple, with elbows or knifehand strikes to neck and face targets; knee or low leg strikes on the attacker's groin or low leg, preferable while the attacker is under control by a trap or pin, and so on.

This kind of `sparring' takes place at very close range, obviously, and while you can't deliver techs full out, you need to make them realistic enough that neither of the partners in the training session can be considered compliant. Control of the attacker's body to render them vulnerable to a severe strike on weak points is the goal, and the intention is to closely simulate dispatching the assailant, and doing so using the minimum number of moves—the ideal being, `one strike, one kill'. I can tell you, from experience, that this kind of `sparring' is radically unlike any kind of competitive sparring, and is rather unpleasant. But it's the only way to train so that you can be reasonably sure you know what you're doing in the event of a typical street attack. And since such attacks take place at very close range, you don't get the option of backing away—if you could do that, you'd be able to get away from your assailant, which rarely happens once a real assault begins.

Obviously, you have to understand how to move in this kind of simulated fighting; but the nature of the movement is quite different from movement in tournament competition: you are basically training the automatic projection of your weight into a controlling technique (bringing your full bodyweight into an arm pin, moving from an anchoring back-weighted position, to into what looks like a `front stance' as part of delivering a hard blow to a trapped assailant's jaw or throat, that sort of thing). You are not `bobbing and weaving', feinting or any of the other techniques that come into play when you're involved in an artificial combat game which you and your opponent are both involved in completely voluntarily. In the latter, as I suggested above, you're constrained by certain rules and a scoring system designed to reward aesthetically or acrobatically pleasing movements, rather than infliction of maximum damage on someone who is not an opponent but rather an enemy. So it seems to me that if you want to learn to move in a way effective for self-defense, you are going to have to—just by the nature of the case—train in a completely different way from tournament competition, and that includes a radically different view of movement. As both a participant an observer in the former and an observer of the latter, I have to say, the two look nothing like each other.

A very good introduction to this kind of `sparring'—I have to say, I hate having to use that word for what I've been describing, but `realistically-simulated-street-attack training' is a bit cumbersome, eh?—is Chapter 15, `Kata-based sparring', in Iain Abernethy's Bunkai-Jutsu: the Practical Application of Karate Kata. The whole book is a great, eye-opening read; it's very good, among other things, in getting you to understand the vast strategic and tactical differences (including differences in the uses of movement) between competition and `survival' fighting.

 

[Minidoggy]

hey thanks so much for the great replies guys.
and I'll definitely look into that book exile
I'll try to use what last fearner explained.
one more thing fearner, during a part of the sparring where the two are closed in together and attacking, would it be better to bring your guards up while attacking.. since you mentioned the part on distance, i think when they're not attacking, it would be best to keep the guards down then.
and when you mentioned extending your arm to spoil the kick.. would doing that more often be better than blocking?

 

[exile]

and I'll definitely look into that book exile

Abernethy's book is available from Amazon.com, but it always seems to take a while to get to people in the US—I don't think there's a US distributor, so it has to come over from the UK.

Meanwhile, though, if you go to IA's website and sign up for his newsletter (costs nothing), you can get two e-books, one on bunkai for the Pinan/Heian katas (which provide the vast majority of the movement subsequences for the WTF colored belt forms, so you can get a lot of terrific off-the-shelf bunkai for the Palgwes and Taegeuk, not to mention of course the Pyung-Ahns if your TKD school is enlightened enough to still do them in spite of the WTF's unilateral, politically-based agenda in suppressing these in the curriculum), the other on the realistic bunkai-based sparring format I was talking about. It's still worth getting the full book I mentioned, but the second of IA's e-books, An Introduction to Applied Karate, has enough martial content to keep you going for a long time, especially if you take seriously IA's method for decoding kata (i.e., Japanese hyungs :wink1 into sets of combat-ready movement subsequences. The link is

http://www.iainabernethy.com/Joinnewsletter.htm

The newsletter is free, the sixty or so technical articles authored by IA and others at the site (many associated with the British Combat Association) is free, and the e-books are free. I have no idea how the economics of it can work like that, but IA's extended network of associates, which is probably the largest `experimental martial arts' research program going, seems to be thriving. Probably, once people become aware of the bunkai-jutsu approach to forms in the karate-based arts (Stuart Anslow, a major UK TKDist who's already got a major work on bunkai for ITF tuls out there, with several more in preparation, is an active contributor to that group's work), they seek out Abernethy's seminars and training programs, so that's what keeps the enterprise going. But it means that you can get an enormous amount of incredibly useful, directly applicable material of very high quality for free, no strings attached... You might want to take a look at the whole site once you get to the e-book/newsletter signup page.

 

[jdinca]

hey thanks so much for the great replies guys.
and I'll definitely look into that book exile
I'll try to use what last fearner explained.
one more thing fearner, during a part of the sparring where the two are closed in together and attacking, would it be better to bring your guards up while attacking.. since you mentioned the part on distance, i think when they're not attacking, it would be best to keep the guards down then.
and when you mentioned extending your arm to spoil the kick.. would doing that more often be better than blocking?

Always keep your guards up. The alternative is exposing targets for the other guy. Be aware also that striking creates an opening for the opponent too and he should try and hit you at the same time you're trying to hit him. Strike fast and make sure your other arm is in the proper position to defend.

 

[exile]

Always keep your guards up. The alternative is exposing targets for the other guy. Be aware also that striking creates an opening for the opponent too and he should try and hit you at the same time you're trying to hit him. Strike fast and make sure your other arm is in the proper position to defend.

Yes, yes and yes!