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This is a follow-up to "Sparring and Radical Training Design" with practitioner H. We want practitioners to be versed in sparring with various body types, and in this video, H is sparring with taller practitioners from both L-stance and J-stance.
This sparring video is about four sessions from the last video, and H is already defensively more responsible. (The emphasis for these spars was using kicks to off-balance.)
H is keeping her eyes on the shots and defending. She's maintaining distance and finding opportunities to collapse space. Not every shot is landing, but what's more important is that she's looking, moving, and trying to seize opportunities.
One thing you don't know until you spar with headgear on is how it impairs your vision. So sparring with it becomes its own skill. It unconsciously affects your behavior, where you step back to better see your opponent. The solution to this is more sparring with headgear.
Something else I'm observing is how H makes reads despite the headgear, trying to discern behavior patterns. Though the rounds are short, her behaviors change as the round progresses because she has a sense of how she needs to fight. There's a figuring-out process, not only of her opponents but of herself. What she's figuring out are her solutions for the problems being posed. But it's taking her a bit too long to go from seeing the problem to formulating an answer. The decision-making is quicker if she's aware of what she has available, but that's the part that's still unclear. Once she knows it's this, this, or this, then the process will go quicker and smoother. She's still exploring her answers, but this is where guided discovery comes in.
One sparring game I think will speed up her development is having another practitioner work on landing their body kicks while H works on blocking and swiping the kick to collapse the distance between her and her partner. In doing so, both are developing but differently. Practitioners don't have to play the same game; they can play two different games with two different clearing objectives. As training designers and organizers, we can individualize games and objectives for each practitioner, making training both personal and communal.
Something else that might be helpful is to create a sparring condition where H has to move laterally every three seconds. Moving laterally will present her with different looks and opportunities while maintaining the same distance from her opponent. There was a bit of serve, return, and return happening during the spars, and that's due to the nature of mainly moving forward and back. Lateral movements will break up that pattern.
Another sparring condition could be one where she's only allowed to jab. She currently relies on low kicks to gauge her distance, but that's all they're doing, gauging distance, rather than getting her closer to her target. Knowing your opponent is out of reach is not as useful as safely bringing your opponent within your reach.
In sparring, the first thing to develop is game sense, which H has developed (and will continue to develop). Now she needs a game to go with that sense. Having a game allows for automaticity, where things happen without thought, freeing up your mind for new decisions and opportunities.
At the beginning of your development, it's all conscious decision-making, which is why developing practitioners are slow, awkward, and hesitant. With enough experience, these decisions become automatic, giving you surplus attention for new tasks. Automaticity is why we scaffold. The last scaffolding becomes second nature while the new scaffolding takes root. We start with kicks because it takes the longest to develop. Once kicks (executing and blocking) become automatic, we move on to other new tasks. The new task is manageable because the last task is automatic. You only need to concentrate then on the new task. Organizing training in this way, scaffolding on top of scaffolding, makes the complex manageable. My job as a training organizer, even while watching sparring, is to encourage, support, guide, trust, and wait rather than micromanage and dictate.
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Sparring and Radical Training Design 2