Sparring Evolution

In the 80's, this was the only way most martial artists could fight against people from other styles:

That is called "Kumite Point Fighting" and that is how martial arts got a well deserved reputation for being useless in the face of wrestlers, boxers and street fighters. The kick boxing popular at the time, called "full contact karate" or "American kickboxing" combined a long-stance Floyd Mayweather style of boxing with these kind of kicks. Then in the 90's an international influence came to kickboxing in the USA, including leg kicks and more realistic fighting stances:

In the 90's many schools stopped training for Kumite Point Fighting all together and started doing REAL international kickboxing instead. Before our sparring was very weak because of the competition we trained for, but now our sparring was very brutal for the competitions we trained for, sparring almost as hard as we could fight almost every time we put on gloves. Martial Arts became something more for tough guys and athletes than for nerds looking for a way to protect themselves.

As martial artists came back from training in Kickboxing in Thailand, they brought back strange practices with them. Most of the athletes in that country are kick boxers. Thai kick boxers fight very frequently, sometimes multiple times per month. They don't want to get injured doing hard sparring in while training, because that could make them delay or loose their next fight. Instead they have perfected a type of light sparring that is still effective for building fighting skills:

Notes on this "Muay Thai Sparring":

1. It is continuous, not stop and go, you keep going especially when you get hit.
2. You must "touch" the opponent. You might "sting" them, but you are not trying to hurt them like you would in a fight.
3. You have to focus on real moves that really work, not on dumb moves like the ones in the first video in this post.
4. Comparing this to grappling, this is more similar in intensity to the injury-sensitive "rolling" in BJJ than it is to the "explosive power" of collegiate wrestling.