Whether it's Muay Thai, MMA, BJJ, or Judo; sparring is where we get to test our skills, and most importantly, improve our ability to beat another person in unarmed combat. Whilst sometimes sparring can leave you feeling accomplished and proud of your effort in training, more often than not, you'll walk away frustrated and confused about what went wrong and why you couldn't land more shots on the other person. In this article, we'll take a dive into a strategy to help overcome those feelings of frustration by restructuring your approach to sparring.
The Problem With "Winning"...
The first step towards improving in sparring is changing your objectives when you spar. Typically, the only objective going through your mind when sparring is to "beat" the other person. There are two major problems with "beating" the other person; firstly, it's a far too open-ended and subjective goal. There isn't a referee, nor any judges keeping track, so it's not something you can truly determine. Of course, in grappling, you can consider a win as a submission, however, that leads straight into the second major problem; what if your sparring partner is just better than you?
Obviously then, the objective of beating them becomes highly unlikely, and this is what often leads to those feelings of frustration, self-doubt, and ultimately lack of interest in sparring or even martial arts altogether.
What Should My Objective Be?
So what exactly do we change our objective to if it isn't to win? To improve, we need to stop viewing sparring as a competition, and start seeing it as a workshop. More specifically, we need to set a clear and manageable goal that falls into one of two categories; offensive or defensive. At the end of the day, everything we do in martial arts can be characterised at some level into an offensive technique, or a defensive technique. Even other aspects of martial arts such as footwork or fitness have a purpose that is either offensive or defensive. From there, we break it down even further. At this stage we need to identify a particular technique, movement or concept that we want to directly apply and improve upon in sparring. This should be specific and clear. Offensively, this could be landing a clean left hook, and defensively this could be catching turning kicks. Next is implementation, we'll start with offensive techniques below.
Offensive Techniques
Establishing a clear offensive technique that you want to improve upon in sparring is the first step. A few examples are: Landing a left hook, landing teeps, chopping the leg, getting a takedown, passing guard, etc. Try to avoid less specific goals such as: landing punches, or getting a submission, as once again these can get derailed if you have a particularly good sparring partner. Now that you've selected your goal, take it into sparring. Everything that you do in your sparring match should be with the sole intent of landing your chosen technique, regardless of what else might be happening; for instance, if your goal is landing teeps, and your partner wraps you up in a clinch, you shouldn't be trying to engage in the clinch. Instead, your priority should be to break free from the clinch so that you can go back to your objective of throwing teeps. Similarly, if you end up with guard, and your objective is to get to mount, don't start going for submissions from guard.
Here's a few benefits of staying focused on your offensive goal technique:
It eliminates the frustration that comes from "losing". Now that your metric for success isn't tied to what your partner is doing to you, but rather what you're doing to them, it frames the entire experience positively and allows you to focus on your own success
You'll be able to highlight insufficiencies in your technique much more clearly. When you have a clear and objective goal in mind, you'll find it much easier to identify what's going well, what's going poorly, and what you need to improve on. For instance, if your goal was teeps, and you find that you kept getting them caught, you might start to think of strategies to set them up or hide them behind other techniques.
You'll rapidly improve upon a single technique, meaning you can see much clearer results from your training, and thus maintain motivation to train. Whilst you may still not be "winning" in sparring, seeing some results is sure to help you stay on track and continue improving.
Defensive Techniques
This one can be a little harder to define and put into practice, but still serves a purpose. In this scenario, you've identified a technique that has been repeatedly landing on you, and you implement a strategy to defend against it. For instance, if you are repeatedly getting kicked in the legs, be hyper mindful of checking kicks, and actively look for kicks to check. If you keep getting swept when you have mount, stop thinking about submissions and instead just focus on holding the position.
Here's a few benefits of focusing on defensive techniques.
You'll start to build up autonomous reactions to stimuli. While at first, you'll have to focus a lot harder on reacting correctly to attacks, over time you'll start to defend techniques with much less effort!
You'll become less likely to freeze up. When you first start, the overwhelming number of techniques that get thrown your way can leave you feeling stuck and unable to defend anything. If you instead focus on just one thing, you'll be more likely to perform well.
The Bottom Line...
At the end of the day, at some point you'll have to accept that getting beaten and not performing to your own expectations is a reality that every martial artist has to deal with. So next time you're sparring, try to set yourself some goals and see how it changes your outcome.
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