You Spar Or You Don't!

All proficient practitioners of the martial arts spar, because learning to go through the motions of a technique is only about 10% of learning the technique, the other 90% is learning to do the technique while sparring:

There are often newbies who are delusional about their abilities who pass on forms (kata) without having mastered any techniques through sparring. They and their students are not proficient practitioners, being generally ignorant of the real martial art from which those forms came.

Let's start with the ultimate example, Tai Chi. People love to talk about Tai Chi like it is a set of line dancing routines that after decades of practice cause people to be deadly. Though some Tai Chi forms are ridiculously time consuming, the forms are only meant to augment other important training methods, namely standing meditation, stationary push hands drills, moving step push hands sparring, kickboxing and in many cases sword sparring:

Another common example brought up is a form of Japanese Tai Chi called Aikido. But the style of Aikido that is closest to the real martial arts roots of Aikido is Tomiki Aikido, which is still based on sparring. In fact, they are the only sport in today's world that actually spars with one person having a knife and another person being unarmed - the real self defense situation so many martial arts are obsessed with:

People like to talk about other forms of pseudo fighting besides forms/kata as an alternative to sparring, such as Karate Kumite-Point Fighting. But the man responsible for making Karate world famous, Mas Oyama, didn't fool around with that nonsense, his sparring strongly resembled what we now think of as K-1 Kickboxing:

Some like to use cultural or fitness excuses as to why so-called martial artists would not spar. Capoeira is the best example of this, yet serious practitioners of that art do indeed spar:

No matter how "traditional" your martial art is, sparring is a moral choice. Either you choose to do martial arts related exercise without sparring under the false pretense that you are learning martial arts - OR - you pay the price that it takes to really learn martial arts, enduring the minor injuries and physical pain associated with sparring: 

You spar or you don't!