Training equipment in sparring

[trueaspirer]

Until a few years ago, my karate school used no body gear, although it did use gear for the appendages. When it was decided to start doing semi-full contact sparring, body gear became a requirement. For sparring that is only semi-full contact, I am not sure is gear is needed for more advanced students. It is encumbersome, and I have only known two accidents to have happened without them, one of them to me. And I am fine. And I am fine. Opinions?

 

[monkey]

For arts like karate -tae kwon do ect. the gear helps you to train to be able to deliver a good realistic powerfull blow & the wearer of the gear can train & not sustain lots of pain or damage that they may have a hard time to recover or even never recover.The chance is not worth it with out pads.Now for arts like tai chi- hsing i - paqua ect.Pads do little or nothing as the hits go threw the pads to shut the internal down.Let me give a short example or the 2 differant ways,If you were pads & I hit you with a stick-normaly great damage on outter body occurs.Now It I use internal like a mouse trap ( the stick in now in coiled postur & the pads stop only superfical blow but the limb that attacked me & now shut down)much like when you arm gose to sleep.

 

[stone_dragone]

My school trains semi-full contact as well, but we don't use the body pads. We do use hand, foot, shin and sometimes forearm pads (depending on the student). Sometimes accidents happen, but generally we have had few injuries to that portion of the body.

All of my worst injuries have came from grappling and not striking...but there eas this one time.....ouch

 

[karatekid1975]

In TSD, we used to wear the bare minimum (head gear .... sometimes, shin and arm guards or gloves ... cups for the gens). But it was light contact. We sometimes only had boxing goves on. That's it (for tournies, we needed the shin and arm guards, head gear, and cup).

In TKD, we do the whole thing (chest guard, head gear, mouth guard, shin and arm guards, and cups for the gens). It's light contact for beginners, and hard contact for red and up. The advanced students usually go pretty hard, and I like the gear (at least the head gear) so I don't get hurt. But I do my fair share of trading hits also. But, the chest gear, I hate. Just for the fact it is limitating for my kicks (as in, I can't kick as high with it on, because it restricts my kicks). But when I'm up against "bubba" who kicks hard, it's nice to have it on.

But having done both hard and light contact, most of my sparring injuries came from light contact (lack of gear and lack of control of my sparring partner).