Sport vs Street

Most of my disagreements with people over technique have boiled down to fighting stance. I prefer a short stance with my hips facing my opponent, but originally in the karate of my youth I was taught a longer stance, where I stood more sideways. When it comes to kicking, on one hand standing in my more "square" stance lead to the kicks I prefer - round kicks and front kicks with an occasional back/side kick. On the other hand standing sideways leads to the kicking practices I am critical of, such as the "snapping roundhouse" kick, heavy reliance on the stepping side kick, and relying on a hook kick as a basic KO strategy.

Something I have been acutely aware of for some time is that many styles of martial arts have BOTH sets of techniques. In fact, both strategies are used in Boxing:

And two of the biggest household names in Boxing epitomize these rival strategies. Mike Tyson was the ultimate square stance fist fighter, and Floyd Mayweather the ultimate long stance fist fighter. And Mayweather remains undefeated. In Full Contact Karate/American Kickboxing, Bill Wallace pulled off an similar undefeated status using a very similar strategy. So that means since this stance works to win matches in Combat Sports, we should use it to defend ourselves on the street, right?

In the above video it makes it clear: Square stance for power, long stance to score points. But what strategy should you be using for self defense on the street, a Tyson strategy or a Mayweather strategy? Every time you throw a punch, you take a significant risk on the street:

1. You could injure your hand in some horrible fight ending way.
2. You take one step closer towards being legally liable for the injuries in the fight.

If you are going to hit on the street, you need to make those risky punches count. But isn't the long stance better for moving in and out of range? Maybe, but if it is the square stance is much better for moving around the opponent to the left and right, which is considerably more important in self defense (since if the opponent is bigger, stronger or faster than you they will run you over if you can't move sideways around their charge, and because moving backwards away from your opponent in a street fight is moving blindly outside of your own field of vision.)

My question for you: why would you want to throw strikes with less power in a self defense situation? Your answer: you wouldn't. This is the difference between sport and the street, there are hacks in sport that score points but which are less effective on the street. Muay Thai is the most self defense related striking sport because it allows most of the strikes the human body can deliver. There are no rules against the long stance in Muay Thai, yet the long stance has never caught on in that sport.

"There's more to self defense than fighting skills" we hear constantly from the self defense industry, and that is so true. Useful non-fighting self defense skills include:

• Situational awareness: staying alert and being aware of your surroundings, actively changing your plans when something doesn't look right.
• Confident appearance: don't look like an easy target; stand up straight, keep your head up, look where you are going, and move swiftly. Don't make your whole neighborhood more dangerous by making it look like a neighborhood full of easy victims.
• Safety oriented commute: choosing to walk through safe (well populated and well lit) areas. Randomizing your commute, being harder to predict what route you will take.
• Exodus 12 v 20: Actively avoid problematic situations. Don't hang out at place where people like to get drunk and get into fights. In those situations you aren't defending yourself, you are just being a dick.
• Surveillance Detection: 1. Take a look around and make a list of what spots would be best to spy on you from. 2. Look around and make second list of  list of spots that would be best to spy on that first list. 3. Use the second list of spots to spy on the first list of spots to see who's spying on you or others.

Then we have self defense fighting tactics that are different from sport tactics:

1. The ultimate goal is escape, not knock out, not submission, not judge's decision and not points. Escaping with your life is priority 1.
2. The secondary goal is to avoid legal consequences to yourself from having the encounter. You want to minimize how much hostility you demonstrate in front of witnesses to the encounter.
3. A final third goal is justice: when you are attacked it is nice if you can make the world a safer place by in some way making it harder for the attacker to try the same thing again in the future.
4. The basic fundamental strategy is to use highly active footwork, so that you A) have to make physical contact with as few attackers as possible at any one moment and B) maximize your opportunities to escape. I don't know of anyone who is good at this that doesn't occasionally spar multiple opponents. It's not good enough to talk about the strategy, you must spar with the strategy.
5. Weapon deployment: so many people carry this or that self defense tool, and never practice deploying it while others are attacking them. Again you must spar multiple opponents, trying to deploy your weapon in order to get good at really deploying your weapon.
6. Weapon retention: there seems to be a very poor understanding of how easy it is to get disarmed. To avoid this you must spar with people trying to grab your weapon or knock it out of your hand.
7. Fighting techniques: the fact is most eye gouges and groin shots are not reliable enough to land in a fight. So what moves ARE you going to do? You need to figure this out in advance, and spar with those moves. They need to be practical movements you can do without warming up first. This IS were combat sports are important, because the best unarmed self defense fighting techniques ARE seen in the MMA ring! Until you get your weapon deployed, assuming you even have one, these techniques are all you will have.

There is a dangerous myth out there that to defend yourself, you need to have nerves of steel, and a killer instinct mindset that you will "do whatever it takes" to protect yourself, in order to avoid a "fight, flight or freeze" reaction. In my experience this is 100% wrong.

When you are attacked, you don't have time to get scared. All that happens is you do whatever it is you do when you are attacked in sparring. I once heard a story by a Muay Thai instructor about a female student who was attacked in the parking lot. They both lamented that she did not beat the attacker into oblivion. However she was not seriously hurt, she was not killed, she was not raped, the attacker who was larger than her didn't even manage to knock her down. Her Muay Thai training served her well indeed!

I personally have found myself dodging head buts or punches before I even realized I was being attacked, sometimes continuing a conversation with the attacker before I realized the conversation was very over. The one time I had a knife pulled on me, it took a few days for me to internalize how dangerous the situation had actually been.

Nothing messes with your nerves more than preparing to fight in a match or tournament, typically in very revealing clothes in front of a large audience. Competing in matches or tournaments is having to confront a challenger who is far more competent than the average attacker on the street, but instead of on the street on a stage where your humiliation can be far more widely publicized. The fear you have to deal with preparing to fight in a match or tournament is far more extreme and tangible than just getting really worried about a potential attacker situation. If training your nerves or natural ferocity is important, there is no better way to train for that than combat sports. Talking about what a solemn and serious danger a self defense situation is, in my view, is a total and complete waste of time. It's generally done by people both in and out of combat sports who don't want to spar with an appropriate range of techniques for the situation they are talking about.

The Orthodox Technique

When it comes to the subject of martial arts, this blog has become a broken record. In 2002 I started writing a book on Martial Arts called "The Orthodox Technique", a direct response to "The Art of Jeet Kun Do" by Bruce Lee. And in 2002 I was not wrong about where MMA, international kickboxing striking technique, and most Traditional Martial Arts (TMA) striking technique was at. The point of The Orthodox Technique, was to document that type of striking which I had learned while training in K-1 Rules kickboxing and Chinese TMA in the 90's. Now this kind of fighting is well documented, it's pretty much what we just call "Muay Thai" these days, where most of the time you:

1. Lead with your left side to protect your liver, keep your left hand in the game so you are functionally a two handed fighter, and to keep your fight foot primed for aggressive movement and power striking. 
2. Keep your hands up (and jaw down) to protect your jaw and keep your hands closer to hitting the face of your target.
3. Keep your hips facing your opponent, in a fairly square stance with your feet shoulder width apart, to block leg kicks, keep your body ready to twist into an attack, and to be ready to sprawl against a throw attempt.
4. Don't stop moving. Maybe you are closing distance or running away, orbiting your opponent or turning to face them, throwing a combo or checking with a jab, but you are most definitely never just standing there in your fighting stance waiting for something to happen.
5. Strikes should include a twist of the hips and shoulders following into the attack, in one simultaneous motion with the attack. In a fight, anything from a jab to a leg kick should have knock out potential.

Unfortunately MMA has not destroyed the cancer to martial arts that is Kumite Point Fighting. There are so many people doing MMA that many of them are also contaminated with this cancer, so that once is a great while they will pull off a technique in an MMA match which can be claimed to be related to Kumite Point Fighting. Fortunately this type of technique goes absolutely no where in Thailand, so that striking critics can always say "that stand up game might work in MMA where you can resolve your conflict grappling on the ground, but please show me this working in Thailand."

But there isn't any point in me writing about any of this anymore. Kumite Point Fighting is becoming an official Olympic Sport, apparently the UFC gyms are actually good with that, and few martial artists are speaking up against it. And why should I care? In the old days martial artists tried to keep their best secrets to themselves so their enemies couldn't train against those secret techniques. If the great secret today is "Muay Thai as practiced in MMA gyms is better in a street fight than MMA if that MMA is based on Olympic Tae Kwon Do and blue belt level sport-only BJJ," what do I have to gain by sharing that secret that isn't hardly any secret at all anyways?

We are moving into 2020, which may be the most important year for internet trolling of all time, and I have said most of what I have to say about martial arts. This blog is about a lot more than Martial Arts, and in 2020 it won't have much to do with martial arts. I have actually found my martial arts trolling time cutting into my martial arts training time, and that is a heavy price to pay for something that does me no good what so ever. In conclusion I want to respond to a few points of criticism I have gotten over the last few years in this "Martial Arts Messiah" martial arts troll campaign:

1. A BJJ instructor on the internet suggested something like "it's too bad you wasted your life studying a bunch of crap martial arts, now you should devote what years you have left to the BJJ industrial complex." If I had just done BJJ this whole time, I would have been stabbed and beaten severely, maybe even killed, or done time in prison for defending myself, several times over. I have never had the luxury of a life style where the worst threat to my person was some drunk guy at a bar - I don't experience self defense situations where A) both sides of the conflict are equally matched, or B) there won't be legal consequences for me taking one of my attackers to the ground and literally choking them. I value the BJJ training I have had, but I certainly don't value it as much as the stuff that has actually saved me numerous times, which if I had to describe in one word would be "Muay Thai," but which in reality includes some stuff I have only found in TMA.
2. I am "stuck in the 90's" or "just a Muay Thai fan": over time I have come to realize this is basically true about me, but in my defense I must say that my primary "doctrine of salvation" applies to all martial arts, a concept I call "Sparring First." I might talk trash on Full Contact Karate/American Kickboxing for not being Muay Thai, but I have to admit that they can do almost everything they think they can do, because they spar. No matter how unorthodox your martial art is, you can develop legitimate fighting skill as long as you dare to spar regularly. (Stop and go fighting by definition is not sparing - it is a carefully judged drill to see who can land the first hit, versus sparring which is often unsupervised and always continuous.)

Martial Racism

It is important to me that people from the cultures specific martial arts come from have access to those martial arts. As a communitarian and amateur ethnologist, I despise a uniform world of big box stores and cultural uniformity. Cultural diversity not only creates innovation to help mankind as a whole, it makes life far more enjoyable than it otherwise would be.

Studying the martial arts of other cultures helps us appreciate those other cultures, actively working against racism. Beyond that, two of the Asian martial arts masters in my area that I know in my area, who I have tremendous respect for, both have at least one instructor who is white. Thanks to cultural appropriation, these Asian Martial Arts are here for these Asian Martial Arts masters.

A major annoyance of mine is people clinging to the cultural origins of each martial art, as if "Budo, the ancient  martial arts of Japan" was some how functionally different from "Kung Fu, the ancient martial arts of China." NO one ever did "Budo" or "Kung Fu," that is a far broader reference than what any one individual ever actually experienced. You can say a person trained in "Kyokushin Karate" or "Choy Lay Fut" for example, and then culture actually matters, because it was specific Japanese people who passed on the art Kyokushin, and specific Chinese people who passed on Choy Lay Fut. These specific people operated with specific cultural values, and that history matters.

But the fact is Choy Lay Fut, regardless of cultural circumstances, is far more similar to Kyokushin, than Choy Lay Fut is to its rival, Wing Chun. Furthermore, Kyokushin is far more similar to Choy Lay Fut than it is to the more popular form of Karate, Shotokan. To suggest that Choy Lay Fut is functionally related to Wing Chun simply because they have a shared culture (or Kyokushin to Shotokan,) THAT is a cultural stereotype, THAT is martial racism.

For example I am interested in a certain type of grappling, the sort of grappling Aikido aspires to, the type of grappling you see in Muay Thai, Sumo, Tai Chi and Viking Wrestling, where people work on takedowns from the clinch, without going to the ground themselves. Many if not most martial arts consumers are also interested in that. But a conversation about this was recently mired when someone wanted to start talking about "Chinese Grappling," as if Chinese Wrestling and Tai Chi had the same objectives because they shared cultural origins, ignoring that Muay Thai, Sumo and Viking Wrestling aspired to the same thing as Tai Chi - particularly problematic since some martial arts like Choy Lay Fut have adopted certain Tai Chi practices as a way of getting better at these kinds of takedowns. He was able to avoid admitting an entire functional range of martial arts techniques existed by throwing up a smoke screen of martial racism.

Martial Moniker

There has been a lot of talk about what the best martial art is. But what I have found since I took my first martial art lesson in 1988, is that the name of the martial art does not tell you how effective a specific martial art school is. There are certainly trends - Muay Thai schools have a tendency to teach more effective fighting skills than Shotokan Karate schools - but this isn't guaranteed. Furthermore there are usually vast differences in the quality of fighting skills taught between martial arts schools claiming to teach the same martial art.

When I trained in Choy Lay Fut in Bremerton from Vern Miller in the 1990's, Doc Fai Wong's "First Disciple" (first student approved to go off and start his own school in Doc Fai Wong's lineage,) learning to fight full contact was part of the training. Sometimes Vern would make everyone do K1-Rules Kickboxing before teaching them even the beginning katas in Choy Lay Fut. And historically, Choy Lay Fut's reputation has been all about the Lei Tai (Chinese fighting ring,) so Vern's approach was indeed very "traditional" for that style. Older videos and stories I have heard about how Doc Fai Wong's schools were sparring in the past were very similar to what is practiced by Enshin Karate now, lots of full contact strikes and take downs, not easily represented in the "American Kickboxing" rule sets of the 1960's and 70's.

Years later living in Seattle I ran into another Doc Fai Wong lineage school. I was exited to get back to training. But when I brought up sparring, the Sifu said "I don't like to spar, it makes for sloppy technique." I didn't even know where to get started with him - how did he not know that the real technique is the technique that happens in sparring? Kata hopefully informs that technique, but the technique isn't the step by step instructions in kata, technique is what you can actually do when someone's trying to do something similar to you at the same time.

So right there in schools of the same brand, geographical area and lineage, I had some of the most effective fighting skills I have ever heard of taught to me in one school, but in another school essentially no effective fighting technique taught at all.

All across the USA right now, you can find gyms that train MMA fighters. In many of those gyms, you can sign up to take kickboxing fitness classes that don't have any sparring in them. They will teach "Muay Thai" moves, but at no point in time in these classes I refer to will you do those moves on another person. You will have in actuality not ever really done the moves at all.

There are Shotokan schools that go beyond the lame Olympic-style kumite point fighting, proceeding to continuous American Kickboxing or "Full Contact Karate" sparring. I know, because my first style I learned, Tae Sho Karate Do (aka Tae Sho Arnis: a recognized kickboxing gym in the Pacific North West in the 1990's,) was one such school. Certainly there was a huge Arnis influence on that style, but the unarmed Kata was 100% Shotokan. Yes we participated in Kumite Point Fighting, but most of our sparring was continuous full contact karate. If you read my blog regularly you will know that I have a lot of contempt for American Kickboxing/Full contact karate, but it beats the hell out of Muay Thai with no sparring at all.

The bottom line is this: not everyone can relocate where they live in order to train at the perfect martial arts school for them. We have the martial arts available to us, not the martial arts we wish were available to us. But we've had the internet and YouTube for a long time now, we can look up best practices for martial arts, and elevate whatever martial arts we have available to us to the level we need in order to learn effective fighting technique.

100 Lessons

As a martial arts consumer advocate, I offer all martial arts instructors the following challenge: what are you teaching your students in the first 100 lessons that is going to help them in a fight for the rest of their lives? Because believe me, that is the ONLY reason why they walked in the doors to your school in the first place.* They were:

• NOT looking for a new "lifestyle."
• NOT looking for a way to spend their free time which they figured they had too much of.
• NOT looking for a way to spend their money which they figured they had too much of.
• NOT looking for a life long commitment to a new art to perfect.

They were willing to train hard to learn how to fight, and it's very unlikely they intended to spend more than a year doing it. It is also very unlikely they were planning to train more than twice a week. For YOU to make good on YOUR promise of teaching "Martial Arts", you have 50 weeks x 2 lessons = 100 lessons to make your teaching worth while.*

But YOU devoted YOUR life to the martial arts, and have so much to share! Cool story bro, not what the customer hand in mind when they walked in the door. If YOU can't provide SERIOUS customer value in the first 100 lessons, you shouldn't be wasting new student's time and money.*

Before you start raging about how I am not bowing to my betters here*, let me give you a few examples of martial arts that most definitely will permanently improve a student's odds of surviving a fight inside of 100 lessons:

1. Collegiate wrestling: in 100 lessons they might not win any matches at any tournaments, but for the rest of their lives they will have a few basic tools and strategies that will make them devastating against someone their size and weight, all other things being equal.
2. Same goes for Boxing: Almost nothing can prevent someone from learning a few very useful combos and footwork combined with serious sparring experience to back it up with in 100 boxing lessons. The vast majority of potential attackers will be dropped by a jab-straight combo, for the rest of the student's lives, and they'll never forget how to do it.

That is how useful your martial arts teachings need to be in the first 100 lessons. One of the best martial arts in the first 100 lessons is traditional Muay Thai. Muay Thai in the first 100 lessons will cover:

• Kicks to the leg, attacking and defending.
• Really amazing options for what to do when someone tries to grab you on the street.
• Attacking and defending punches and elbows to the head.
• Footwork.
• A few basic throws and foot sweeps that are very practical. 
• The safe, continuous, hands-on sparring to back this all up with.

And here I will offer unsolicited advice to grappling instructors: position before submission, right? The concept behind wrestling, the mantra of BJJ! I didn't start learning ground fighting until around the time I turned 40, and I can tell you for sure that many grappling instructors forget exactly how important "position before submission" is to beginners:

• Why teach me a straight arm bar if I don't know how to sprawl first?
• Why teach me teach me how to get a wizard grip if I can't even land a single take down in sparring?
• Why work on a kimura if I can't even do a side control escape?
• Why get into transitioning from an arm bar in guard to a triangle in guard if I don't even have an "around the world" drill down, with no understanding of dominant position theory?

The fact is "position before submission" is something far more important to the first 100 lessons than most grappling instructors seem to grasp.*

Now we get into less established martial arts. Judo is arguably the most deadly martial art of all time, but it is notoriously bad at teaching self defense in the first 100 lessons. More exotic Olympic martial arts fare far worse: fencers and karateka will learn virtually nothing of self defense value in their first 100 lessons. Olympic Style Tae Kwon Do fares better, but not by much. In the first 100 days, none of these less established Olympic Martial Arts holds a candle to Collegiate Wrestling, Boxing, or Muay Thai in the first 100 lessons.*

Then we get into the theoretical martial arts, like Systema, Wing Chun, Aikido, Tai Chi (my personal favorite martial art), and Silat. These martial arts have a particular burden of proof, so notorious they have been for not developing any actionable fighting skill at all. There are definitely exceptions: in all theoretical martial arts there seem to be people who are serious about and decent at fighting, but in all these arts these fighting instructors are rare. But to these rare saints of martial theory I propose: what are you doing to teach your students how to fight in the first 100 lessons?* (Update 2022... I taught this kid Yang style Tai Chi Saber well enough to fight with in less than 50 lessons...)

Then we have the truly great martial arts of hope: Kudo, Combat BJJ, Combat Sambo, MMA-lessons-at-MMA-gyms and sparring-oriented Kali. The promise is that from one point of view or another, you will be primed and ready to take on just about anyone who would dare to try to lay hands on you, teaching a very wide variety of self defense options, covering at least two of the three following ranges: grappling, striking, and weapons. But the question I have there is: with such a wide variety of techniques, how do you know any one student is mastering techniques well enough to be able to execute those techniques in an emergency? Does your art have enough focus for the student to master useful fighting techniques in just only 100 lessons?

*Yeah yeah yeah, I know, you can kick my ass, and blah blah blah, you already know every damned thing that there is to know about martial arts. Cool story bro. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to keep you from wasting a lot of time in your student's first 100 lessons.

Martial Elements

From my consumer advocacy POV, I see martial arts as having 6 elements of training: Conditioning, Kata, Focused Sparring, Basic Sparring, Advanced Sparring and Fighting. Here I am going to give examples of each from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ,) Muay Thai and other martial arts.


Conditioning: are exercises considered to be critical to the martial art, but which do not have exact martial application. For example, jumping rope is almost universal in Muay Thai:

In some martial arts the standing shoulder roll is actually meant to be used to pick up weapons on the ground, or to roll out of a throw back on to your feet free back into striking or fleeing range, but BJJ isn't focused on weapons, or escaping grappling range. Yes there are BJJ techniques that use motions very similar to the standing shoulder roll, just as there are Muay Thai techniques that could be seen as similar to jump roping. Yet most BJJ classes I have seen train newbies to do a standing shoulder roll as part of the conditioning part of their class:

Before we get into kata, notice that some martial arts have mediation, stretching or dance exercises without a lot of clear martial arts moves denoted. These should be considered conditioning exercises rather than considered kata:

In Tai Chi and other traditional martial arts, horse-stance mediation is clearly in the category of conditioning, with no viable combat application to the exercise what so ever:

There is a lot of debate out there and yet to be had about what types of conditioning are the most effective, but everyone who knows what they are talking about agrees that conditioning is important for martial arts proficiency.


Kata: are exercises that explain the theory behind how the specific martial arts moves are supposed to work. They may or may not be good conditioning, but the point is to further perfect the ideal version of the technique. An example of Kata in Muay Thai is working with Thai Pads:

The "around the world" drill is common in BJJ, and is an example of Kata in BJJ:

Not all traditional martial arts dances are strictly conditioning, some are also legitimate kata:

(Before we go on to focused sparring, notice that the word "drills" could mean all sorts of things, including any of these kata exercises. One popular phrase is "drills with resistance," meaning that some how you are doing kata, but someone is making it hard for you to do that kata. The people who coined this phrase meant for kata to transition into what I call focused sparring... so a "drill" could refer to a kata practice or a focused sparring practice.)


Sparring: Sparring differs from Kata in that sparring moves past the theory and into what happens when you really attack someone. In sparring, neither side is taking turns, instead both sides are protecting themselves while also attacking.


Focused Sparring: focused sparring means to spar with a very narrow range of techniques, in order to practice and develop those very specific techniques. The best example is probably "positionals" from BJJ:

Here's an example of people training with Muay Thai technique using only kicks and no punches or elbows:

Something very important here is that sparring must focus on moves people would actually use in a fight, as demonstrated in kata. Sparring that does not resemble kata is conditioning, not sparring.

(Another phrase I often here that is similar is "technical sparring." Like "drilling with resistance," technical sparring means different things to different people, sometimes it refers to trying to spar safety, and other times it refers to what I call focused sparring, and sometimes it means other things all together.)


Free Sparring: free sparring is sparring, allowing the most of thed techniques in that martial art. Free sparring allows you to test your moves and strategy against someone who has a wide range of possibilities to stop you from succeeding. In free sparring we become fully prepared to take on someone in a fight. In BJJ this is called "rolling", and as I said before it doesn't involve much shoulder rolling:

Muay Thai is known for allowing a wide range of striking techniques, but sparring as safely as possible:

From a martial arts consumer advocacy POV, the genius of both Muay Thai and BJJ is that they: 1) have the widest possible range of techniques for what they are focusing on (grappling in the case of BJJ and striking in the case of Muay Thai,) while 2) also having the safest possible practices and culture around sparring. When it comes to the value of putting your time and money into martial arts training, it's hard to beat these two styles, largely because of their free sparring practices!


Basic Sparring: most free sparring martial arts have a safety form of free sparring that they do most often, which I call "Basic Sparring." In Muay Thai this might be "controlled contact, no elbows." In BJJ this might be "starting from the knees," free sparring without stand up take downs.

But taking an example from Kali, though they often spar using a wide range of punches and kicks, the majority of their sparring focuses on weapons only.  The stockier person in the following kali (basic) sparring video is a well known Muay Thai instructor in the Seattle Area:

In Tai Chi and some other traditional martial arts, "push hands" moves beyond conditioning and drills into the realm of sumo-like basic sparring:

Basic sparring is a safety oriented, frequently practiced type of free sparring that focuses on that martial arts most commonly used techniques.


Advanced Sparring: martial arts need to do free sparring with the full range of techniques they profess to teach, and this is what I call "Advanced Sparring." In Muay Thai if the intensity of the sparring goes beyond their normal safety oriented free sparring practice and includes elbow strikes in preparation for a professional bout, you are definitely looking at advanced sparring there. Likewise in BJJ if they are starting standing up and slapping each other around to show each other where they are vulnerable to strikes, you are seeing some advanced sparring in that art.

Following that first Kali example, he's an example of what I would call Kali advanced sparring, where they are incorporating more than weapon strikes in their sparring:

Back to Tai Chi sparring example, it is common for serious Tai Chi schools to fully apply their Tai Chi into Chinese Kickboxing (I myself learned most of the Tai Chi I know from the same person who taught me most of the kickboxing I know):

Fighting: is where we are showing ours skills against someone showing their skills, for the record. Practice time is over, and now in a fight it is time to go for it, 100%. In BJJ, this happens primarily in the form of tournaments:

In Muay Thai this happens in organized matches that where a fighter trains to fight another specific fighter usually for weeks before the two fighters have their confrontation:

There is a myth that in order to fight and train to fight that there has to be clear winners and losers, and that there must be a highly competitive spirit. An example of how this is not true is in Filipino Martial Arts there are sometimes Tipons (gatherings) where fighters show up for the express purpose of finding other fighters to duel. Once you step into the ring at a Tipon the object isn't so much to destroy your opponent as it is to survive the confrontation. This is my most physically painful Tipon fight I have had:

Sparring vs. Drills

In both Tai Chi and Karate there are types of full contact continuous fighting that draw skepticism from people who don't practice the art. "American Kickboxing" or "Full Contact Karate," (not to be confused with "Knock Down Karate") which I myself practiced when I was in Jr. High and High School:

Most critics objections to this? No kicks to the legs... if we are going to kick, why skip the most likely kicks be thrown in a real street fight? Likewise, Tai Chi has a form of wrestling called "moving step push hands" where no grabbing of the legs is allowed, which I myself have had some training in as an adult:

I think it is very helpful for self defense purposes to practice putting the your opponent on the ground while you remain standing as with the Tai Chi above. I strongly doubt the usefulness of fighting in a throwing high kicks (which can easily be caught) while in a long stance as with the Karate above (less effective for grappling, fighting with both hands and evasive footwork.) HOWEVER, the above Karate guys ARE fighting continuously, if they were sparring like that continuously (instead of competing in it,) it would be extremely legit sparring, just like the above Tai Chi. Because they are both continuous and have contact, they can really pull off the moves they are practicing in a fight.

But there are closely related to drills, which though often competed in and can thus sort of be called "fighting," can't be called "sparring" at all if practiced outside of competition. Starting with Tai Chi "stationary push hands" here:

That is not sparring. I myself have competed in this, and I can tell you that though it is a great drill for developing balance on your feet when someone is trying to push you, it doesn't cover any techniques you would actually use in a fight - and it is constantly stopping and starting over. Sparring, by definition, is a continuous form of practice where you do not have a ref judging you, pulling you apart, or making you restart. Sparring also always includes techniques you might actually defend yourself with some day.

The above drill is with 100% resistance, but it is nothing close to sparring. It may or may not be helpful for some martial artists, but it is no replacement for sparring. Same goes for this incredibly popular practice related to the karate "kick boxing" above:

As you can plainly see, these fighters don't spend most of their time practicing against each other, they spend most of their time stopping and starting over whenever the ref or judge tells them to, they are not getting the same kind of continuous practice in the first karate "kick boxing" video above. Also, the techniques used in this karate "Kumite Point Fighting" drill are less realistic for fighting than in the first karate "kick boxing" video above. I have competed in this as well. It is an interesting drill for using reach, timing, and finding openings on your target, but it is no substitute for actual sparring.

Before you attempt to say this is not a fair comparison because Karate "kick boxing" has been successful in MMA but Tai Chi has not, please keep in mind that numerous Tai Chi practitioners are involved in combat sports, and you have probably already seen Tai Chi in combat sports without realizing it. The best example is probably Nick Osipczak of the UFC:

So yes, it is a fair comparison, in fact I believe it is a direct parallel. I am livid that in the 2020 Olympics Karate has been reduced to Kata and Drills without any real continuous fighting technique of any kind, which Tai Chi and Karate are both capable of. In fact, this is what people who understand martial arts wish was in the Olympics instead of Karate drills:

But as you see above, there is a big difference between drills and sparring. Drills can involve a lot of instructional oversight, stopping and starting over, and may use obscure techniques not often actually used while fighting, in the interest of building certain characteristics in the martial artist. Sparring on the other hand is continuous and ongoing, and focuses on techniques that are actually going to be used. Karate "kick boxing" and Tai Chi "moving step push hands" are examples of sparring, but Karate "kumite point fighting" and Tai Chi "stationary push hands" are example of drills that are not sparring.