Sparring vs. Fencing

I am making a distinction between "fighting," "sparring" and "fencing." Most people understand what figthing is, but they don't understand that sparring is the best thing that ever happened to martial arts:

• A fight is for keeps. Two people go at it to see who's best. There's a permanent record of who won, and who lost. Fights help to keep martial arts schools in check, to make sure their teaching methods are effective compared to other schools. For example in a submission grappling tournament, how well the participants do against each other gives us some feedback on how effective their schools are at teaching submission grappling.
• In sparring, you set a time limit for the round, and practice against each other for the duration of that round. You do not stop and talk about every little move that works in the round, you keep going continuously. Sparring isn't super competitive, you might work on advanced techniques you are not good at yet, even if it means your opponent does better against you. Sparring is the most important activity when it comes to learning moves you can use in a fight. For example in a submission grappling school students will typically spend half the class time wrestling against each other trying to land submission wrestling moves. A beginning student might land some moves on a more experienced student who is practicing moves they aren't good at yet. 
• Fencing is a perversion of fighting and sparring, where every time someone lands a successful technique, judges or the fencers themselves pause to discuss what happened and credit whoever "successfully" executed the technique. In martial arts there are many kinds of forms and two person drills, and fencing is a type of two person drill. Fencing is very problematic because people so often and easily mistake it for sparring. Sparring is the the single most important martial art exercise. For example if a submission grappling class only worked on position escapes and never had full sparring rounds, their students would never become competent grapplers.

This great evil of fencing instead of sparring or fighting in the martial arts takes many forms, be it light-contact karate point fighting, "calling kill shots" or judges separating fighters after each successful blow in Renaissance weapons tournaments, or honestly even in Olympic-style fencing. In fact I think Olympic style fencing is where this whole problem begins:

I think that the evils of fencing spills out into all other forms of "fencing" as well, be it Kendo or people trying to learn to fight with real swords:

The worst part is that many of the people who should know better, the folks proclaiming to teach the "martial arts" side of weapons, are some of the worst offenders. The justification for stopping as soon as the successful technique lands is that supposedly it would kill the opponent so quickly and instantaneously that it is unrealistic to assume the opponent might keep fighting back. This is a very naive view:

Consider how much of this ARMA tournament is actually spent trying to land blows, and how much of it is instead spent walking around and getting commentary from spectators... very problematic considering how much pretense there is in their stylized technique:

Where in the ancient training manuals does it say to stop every time you think you might have landed a good blow? When fencing replaces fighting or sparring it promotes the following bad habits:

• Posturing and Ego.
• Wasting sparring time by walking back to corners and getting to breath and have bad cardio generally.
• Stopping when you think you got a good hit in.
• Stopping when you think they got a good hit in.

Look at how pathetic this becomes when it is applied to unarmed martial arts:

In today's world with full contact tournaments of many different kinds, there simply is no excuse for adults acting like that in the name of martial arts.

Contrast that to people who are actually taking sparring and fighting in weapon martial arts seriously:

Very legitimate competition going on there, very unlike those "fencing" videos above. Consider how superior the technique is at Dog Brothers Gathering compared to any of the fencing above:

Now Dog Brothers is pretty much a fight. People who spar (not fight) in the same martial arts outside of competition use safety weapons or armor instead of wood vs. flesh: 

On the ARMA website they have a rant about how padded weapons are obsolete, yet as you see in their video above, their fighting and sparring is terribly inadequate, not sparring at all, just fencing.

At Tres Espadas we use a wide variety of safety weapons to do a wide variety of real sparring with, so we can test out martial arts techniques from numerous cultural origins, and to develop new techniques:

Fencing is expressly forbidden at Tres Espadas. That is because fencing is the worst thing that ever happened to martial arts.