Our normal sparring sessions begin with jab sparring, in which we are rapping and tapping one another with light retracting blows. This simulates the first phase of contact in a stick or knife fight. We prefer doing this with short sticks of about 20 inches, and then transitioning to the longer stick.
Most of our long stick sparring is done with the same jab control, but adds strokes, in an attempt to build a combination. This will sting some more and you will get some painful dings. There will be strokes that you would not want to pull back, as these would be slashes and you need to practice stroking through to get to your opposite chamber point.
Also, while raps and taps and jabs work well with bouncing in and out and to the side, slashes go better with slides, shifts and body passing motions in which you seek advantageous finishing angles and zones where the opponent will have limited countering targets.
There is also the aspect of a fatigued forearm. Pulling your stroke, at some point, will not be possible, as the weaker thumb side of the forearm must accomplish this and will tend to tire before the strong side.
We balance these factors by slowing the stick down as it impacts the target and not flexing the forename flexor muscles on the pinky side of the hand and under the palm.
If the stroke was intended to be a smash, just let the stick lay on him. When his hand comes down with a late check or a disarming garb, let him have it, and he needs to let it go free. Do not get into all of the bullshit disarm scenarios. You want to keep your flow. When disarms happen it is a quick snag. If you allow disarms in light sparring then the sparring partners will amp up their stick speed enough so that the stick cannot be grabbed, and also cannot be slowed down when it hits you, putting you on a power escalation slide into a pseudo-fight, which will not teach you half the lessons or give you a fraction of the work as the slow hand sparring.
Give his stick back right away, in order to maintain flow and facilitate light sparring.
When you catch him with a slash and your extensors are too burnt out to pull the shot back, then use your flexors to pull the stick in, as if you were shearing with a sword or drawl cutting with a knife. This gives you cutting practice for your blade art and saves him some skin. Just be certain you understand that driving the stick through the target is what is being simulated, and make certain to practice that on the bag or post or tire you use for training your power.
This past Sunday, for Cory’s Agon, the only other fighters that showed were Charles and I. We went at it competitively with the 14 inch knife-sticks. But when it came to the sticks, Charles is so far ahead of us right now, that serious fighting or even full speed sparring, would have resulted in little ring time, as a stick fight is usually resolved in under a minute. It would have been the “slaughter of the fat men.”
With minimal gear and keeping your sticks at half speed, you still end up working through a sheet of pain at certain points. Both Cory and I were stopped numerous times from hand, elbow and shoulder hits that numbed our hand and degraded our control. We would call ourselves out until we got our motor control back and then continue. This netted us about a half hour of work and thousands of reps, as opposed to only getting in a few minutes of work and dozens of reps, and walking away with minor injuries that would interfere with our training.
By keeping stick speed down, we are getting more work. Also, by being able to tolerate mid-range for longer periods, we get more work in the “make it or break it” mid-range that fighters spend so little time in an actual fight, but which constitutes the crucial combat range, where the tide usually turns. Going light in this mid-range crucible allows us to work on cutting angles and countering, and also on closing and distancing out of trouble.
To the extent that we amp it up we try to do so with movement. An old saying of ours is, “A Hundred percent movement, twenty-five percent power.”
This is easier to achieve for the more experienced fighters, and easier to maintain by the better conditioned forearms. Lately flexors have been failing me, having me abandon jab sparring and going to dead-hand sparring early in the session.
For a novice, you want to keep the motion slow too, doing your footwork in slow step to keep from getting excited and also to develop your form under stress. Concentrate on using minimal muscular effort.
The biggest pitfall in dealing with novice and intermediate fighters in this type of slow hand sparring, is that they let their ego take over and try to block a slow shot by speeding up their hand. Not only does the quickened hand usually not block the shot, nothing has been accomplished. What generally happens is that my one quarter speed stroke still scores and that my partner’s three quarter speed stroke catches my unprotected forearm as he is being hit and hurts me, cutting down on how much work I can give him.
Let the slow stroke hit you and ask him to throw it again and again until you get your slow stick into position. Speeding up the stick is teaching nothing and cutting down on your training time by wearing out your partner’s arm.
Let the stroke land and work on developing a solution, and also on countering. Don’t punish the guy that is taking it easy on you. This is where you conquer the first part of your fear, the fear of the idea of being hit.
The far of the pain of getting hit is something that must be simulated in this type of sparring. The actual pain does await you in full speed sparring and in competition, but serves no purpose in the bulk of your partner training. In developing a high level of control, one can dispense with all of the synchronized, bi-lateral, sympathetic stick-tapping drills that erode your combative instinct, permitting you to train for effect.
Controlled, continuous, jab-sparring and dead-hand sparring is where you will grow the most as a stick-fighter, where you will learn how to dominate the combat space through timing, cutting angles and position.
Your goal in this type of sparring—your point, if you so choose to engage your ego—is scored when you hit your man lightly with a slower stick than he was defending or attacking with.
