Sparring vs. Fighting

Sparring and fighting are not the same thing. Over all, fighting gives us significant quality control when it comes to instructors, especially with combat sports. For example, if an MMA gym has fighters who occasionally win fights down at the local Casino, you know they are probably really teaching MMA. Same goes for participation in contact martial arts tournaments or gatherings.

But fighting isn't sparring. In sparring the objective is to practice, not to win. Sparring:

1. Does not require referee or judge to keep the participants safe or to declare a technique successful. No one is keeping score, so it is safe to try moves you are still not good at yet.
2. Maximizes the length of time the participants are practicing. End a sparring round early and you lose out on practice time. (With a fight you want it to end as soon as possible with victory in your favor.)
3. Is continuous - talking about what just happened isn't sparring, it's taking a break from sparring. Sparring keeps flowing as much as possible without stopping to pose, keep score or lecture. It encourages good habits like having good conditioning, protecting yourself after attacking, and counter attacking when you are hit.
4. Uses the same techniques you would use in a fight, though often with less intensity: contact is always made. (For example sparring in BJJ is called "rolling", and in rolling you are very careful with your submission holds, releasing them as soon as the opponent indicates you should. In a fight, you are probably executing that same hold until the ref or judge tells you to stop... Also, BJJ people never try to roll without touching each other.)

Taking Tai Chi for example, there are two types of "push hands":

• "stationary" where both opponents try to keep their feet in one place while trying to get the other opponent to move their feet.
• "moving step" where moving your feet is allowed, but instead the goal is to get the opponent on the ground or out of the ring.

Since no one in a fight ever got a big advantage from simply getting the other person to move one of their feet a little (see 4 above) and because people have to constantly reset to start over again after a foot moves (see 3 above,) "stationary push hands" is a two person drill with resistance, but it is NOT sparring. "Moving step push hands" for example could be considered sparring because shoving people around is indeed used in fighting:

Stop and go fighting like Kumite Point Fighting, LARP swordplay or Olympic style Fencing can't actually be considered sparring. There are martial arts instructors who I respect that use this stop-and-go fighting, but every last one of them also use real sparring as well. This stop-and-go fighting is not sparring because:

1. On every single "successful" technique someone is telling participants weather or not a technique was successful. The participants are constantly judged on who is being more successful, given little opportunity to innovate and develop new skills.
2. It massively cuts into over all practice time during the sparring round. Usually over half the time is spent getting ready to set and go again instead of doing anything martial arts related.
3. It lacks the realism of continuous action. Even with sharp weapons, it is very unrealistic to assume the fight will end on the first apparently-good technique. It can teach students to drop their guard as soon as they think their attack was successful, and to "control" themselves instead of counter attacking when they are struck.
4. Most of the technique used in a fight happens AFTER the first person lands a technique that appears effective, since that normally happens very early on in most fights. Even with sharp weapons, landing the first hit in a fight is about as relevant to fighting as being able to get the other fighter to move their feet: fights are won by landing combinations of strikes, not usually by a single opening strike!

I will allow for the possibility that stop and go fighting isn't always a competition, when practiced without any public record it could definitely be considered a drill with resistance. It might be useful as a drill to practice what happens at the beginning of a fight, especially to help ease beginners into real sparring. But no "drills with resistance" can ever be considered an effective replacement for real sparring.

People trash Aikido for not sparring, because that lack of sparring has led to unrealistic technique. But when we consider that stop-and-go fighting is also NEVER sparring, a lot of other martial arts belong in the Aikido hall of shame. The most common example is probably Shotokan Karate:

That is not sparring, that is a drill with resistance not entirely unlike stationary push hands. Because as a whole Shotokan does stop-and-go drills instead of real sparring, Shotokan is notorious for:

1. Using unrealistically long stances.
2. Using low power round kicks.
3. Completely dropping their hands in a fist fight.
4. Not understanding the importance of kicks to the leg. 

If we contrast this to another style of Karate (Ashihara) that does real sparring:

We can see that Karate in general does not need to have all of the problems that Shotokan has, and that Shotokan's problems do indeed originate from their using stop and go fighting drills instead of real sparring. Even though people compete in drills with resistance as a sort of performance art (as in the case of Olympic style Fencing, Kumite Point Fighting and Tai Chi Stationary Push Hands,) drills-with-resistance are no substitute for real sparring!