Sparring with your teacher

[kung fu fighter]

I am interested to know what does sparring with your teachers feel like?

 

[Buka]

Depends on where you are in skill. A white belt sparring with his teacher will have a completely different experience than when he/she is a black belt sparring with the teacher. And everywhere in the middle will obviously be a little different.

Same thing when you spar with your students.

 

[Tony Dismukes]

Also depends on the individual teacher and their personality. Some of my teachers keep it very playful and flowing, offering up opportunities to try different things. Others play a meaner game.

 

[donald1]

The karate class i go to is usually small so it happens often, (at this point it happens almost every class or at least if practicing bunkai counts)

 

[Marnetmar]

It's like falling into a hole.

 

[donald1]

It's like falling into a hole.

???

 

[Takai]

Depends on his mood. Usually it is playful and he lets you experiment but, if he is trying to teach something specific to you it can be....painful.

 

[drop bear]

???

Where it doesn't really matter what you do. You keep sliding into these bad positions that he is taking advantage of.

We had a bjjer come in and at the end of the class he is looking all discouraged and confused. Eventually he came out with.

" I was doing all the right defences they just were not working. I don't know what is wrong."

And we had to explain that our coach is kind of good at that sort of thing. The defences still work just not at the different skill levels.

 

[tshadowchaser]

Most of the time it felt like pain.
It should feel like an uphill challenge race with him/her always a little ahead of you. You will wonder how he/she hit you with a technique but you will try to prevent it happening again only to find you have left some part of your body open to a different technique. Hell its fun if they are in a good mood

 

[Xue Sheng]

This is in the Wing Chun area and I have no experience sparring with a Wing Chun Shifu. But sparing with my Xingyi shifu was painful and mighty cool and the little bit of sparing with my Taiji shifu was absolutely incredible, he has absolutely the best qinna I have ever dealt with

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

In wrestling, if you are a right hand person, you don't mind your opponent to enter through your right side, you don't want your opponent to enter through your left side (his right side). If a right hand teacher wrestles against a right hand student long enough, that teacher may change that student from a right hand person into a left hand person. The stronger can always influence on the weaker.

In striking art, a student may have a lucky shot on his teacher. In throwing art, a student will never have a lucky throw on his teacher. The following story was true.

In wrestling, a student could throw all the other students in the same class. Soon that student got a big head. One day the teacher told that student, "You are too good for the other students. Starting from today, you are going to wrestle with me only." The student was very happy and treated it as an honor. In the following year, the teacher wrestled with that students 15 rounds daily. Among all the matches 15 x 365 ~= 5,000 rounds of match, the score between the teacher and the student was 5,000 - 0. After 1 year, the teacher said, "You are not as good as you may think. You will need to go back to train with other students." Since in this year, the teacher had beaten him up so badly that he lost his self-confidence completely, every students in the same class could beat him now.

 

[Cephalopod]

It's like falling into a hole.

Oh, I know exactly what you mean...

... the more aggressive energy I came on with, the harder I felt myself falling into a hole



Yeah. Kinda like that. But with spikes at the bottom.

Essentially what it amounts to is a suberb control of the 'on and off' (or yin-yang if you prefer).
For example, if I lunge forward with a committed strike his left will intercept my right. Fine. But where I instinctively anticipate a reaction force to my action I get none. His left will have a forward presence, but not one that I can feel or latch onto. On some subconscious level I get tricked into overcommiting or overextending and then just at the apex of my movement, where all my power has been expended, he'll shear me in some orthagonal direction that will collapse my structure, stiffen my, and unbalance me. It feels like I've just thrown myself into a hole in the ground.
Meanwhile I get slammed on the other side, as the power that he 'absorbs' with his left is used to fuel his right.

I know, I know, it sounds like fancy theories. But when someone who is a head shorter than me (and pushing 70) can do this to me effortlessly and at full speed, I start paying attention.

I have a slender build so I am very familiar with being overpowered by stronger advanced practioners, just as I have run into some chunners that are simply lightning fast. But this insidious 'bypassing' of my attacks is something different. It feels to me much more like an obtainable skill than an innate ability.

 

[kung fu fighter]

the little bit of sparing with my Taiji shifu was absolutely incredible, he has absolutely the best qinna I have ever dealt with

Was this a chen style tai chi sifu? if so I have to agree! Chen style tai chi have absolutely the best chin na skills I've ever seen.

 

[Dirty Dog]

My teacher has a rather large number of arteriovenous malformations, the largest being the size of a walnut. So he doesn't spar.
However, given that back in the day he used to fight semi-professionally (I honestly have never asked for details, but I know it wasn't anything big like the PKA) and fought in a number of convict vs guard competitions (before the state said that really needed to stop), I suspect it might have been a very painful experience. There is one black belt who was with him then and still is, and he has told me that it was, in fact, painful, when Master Valdez was prepping for a match.

 

[seasoned]

Some of the best lessons I have ever learned, the least of which was survival. Nothing better then training with a Sensei that "talk the talk and walk the walk". All this and a friend to boot, RIP.

 

[Kung Fu Wang]

I am interested to know what does sparring with your teachers feel like?

What if when you are a student, your teacher is already in his 70? I don't think I'll be able to spar with my student when I have reached 75.

 

[tshadowchaser]

Im only 68 but I still spar with my students and with students of other schools. Sometimes I wonder if they try to take it easy on the old man but if that happens I try to "wake them up a little" as to what the old man still is able to do.
A few of the older folks I know still spar on a regular bases and enjoy it they ask no quarter and give as good as they get.

If the instructor dose not wish to spa he/she will tell you so