Just today I noticed that a competing martial arts (Jiu Jitsu) school had posted a couple of bogus reviews on our
Google Maps listing. While that’s a pretty childish thing for another school owner to do, I realize that it’s possible for other schools to somehow blame DSD for their lack of business success or think, wrongly, that we disrespect competitive martial arts.
There was one point made that I feel I need to address… The person claiming to have been at our school (they clearly were not) posted that, "I did a free lesson at this place. This school doesn’t spar. No preparation for a real world event can be complete without sparring.”
So let’s break this down…
What is sparring?
The dictionary defines sparring as: "boxing using fairly gentle blows instead of hitting your opponent hard, either when you are training or when you want to test how quickly your opponent reacts.”
By this definition we actually do spar… but in martial arts or boxing sparring is generally thought of as two opponents going at each other in some fair manner (free sparring). Either one could win. The objective could be for training or for competition – to get points or a submission.
So sparring typically refers to sport.
Survival in a self-defense situation has nothing to do with sport.
When we train at Dynamic Self Defense it’s not with a training dummy. In fact, we don’t even own one. We train with real people and we use safety gear because things can go wrong and occasionally there are injuries.
We call this "defense drills.”
When we learn a skill or practice a technique we tend to work one on one with a partner. Slower for lower ranks a bit more intense for those with more experience. But we don’t face off evenly. A self-defense situation isn’t a fair fight where two people duke it out to see who wins. It’s where one person (an attacker) wants to cause serious bodily harm to another (the defender).
Our training accounts for this dynamic… sport training does not.
We then take it up a notch… because attackers statistically come in numbers and often with weapons. Our "sparring” isn’t one on one… it’s two, three or even more on one. This is the type of training that not only builds spatial awareness and positioning… it very quickly drives home the point that one-on-one sparring has limited use in a self-defense situation.
Sparring has rules… self-defense does not.
According to the
International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation sport Jiu-Jitsu has clear rules. Competitors are disqualified for
"biting, hair pulling, putting fingers into the eyes or nose of one’s opponent, intentionally seeking to injure genitalia or the use of fists, feet, knees, elbows, or heads with the intention to hurt or gain unfair advantage.”
Gaining an unfair advantage is what we are trained to do!
When a 235 pound man is on top of you pounding his fists into your face while his buddy circles, fighting fair isn’t an option that will keep you alive. In self-defense no option is off the table and the objective isn’t to get him to "tap out.” The objective is to turn him off… leave him unable to function. Only in this state is his threat truly neutralized.
If you want to learn martial arts as a sport we’re the wrong school. We suck at sport. However, if you want to gain the confidence that comes from knowing you can handle "the bigger guy” and even from knowing when you don’t have to,
give us a call. We would love to have you come by and observe a class for yourself. You’ll be glad you did.