Sparring Videos

A little back story: Me vs. A TKD nidan. I was at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington visiting some friends. A friend of a friend is a second degree black belt in TKD. At around 1:30 in the morning, we decided to do a bit of friendly extremely light contact sparring.

At our school, we usually do hard contact point sparring to full contact continuous sparring (almost like kickboxing) but there was no way I was going to jump into a full contact fight with someone I had just met. I'm a headhunter, and some people just can't take being pounded in the head. Secondly, all I had was one set of gear and some old boxing gloves. Also, since there's no sound I'll have to explain why I keep clutching the side of my stomach. The day before I was sparring someone and ran into a body breaking punch and did something to my ribs I guess. Every time I tried to kick at this guy, my side exploded into pain. Around 3:14 he made me mad once I announced that my side was hurting, he deliberately started aiming for my side which I felt was a bit disrespectful. For the record, I've been practicing karate around 1.8 years and I'm a blue belt.

Me (black guy) vs. Jon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_bUbt-pqDE

Creech (The guy that hurt my ribs) vs. Jon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3J_RR_x4qk

And yes, he's arrogant, toys with him and beats him like a child quite easily.

Enjoy or something.

EDIT: I also brought a friend of mine with me that does some kind of freestyle wrestling up in Washington D.C. The TKD guy claims he does BJJ and I have a video of them wrestling that I have yet to get off the camera. Upload later.

EDIT EDIT: Dunno why my sparring video still says that it's not available. My control panel says it's live.

Come on now, not a single comment? It can't be THAT bad.

Jon keeps his hands low and away from his body, and that's why he got lit up like a Christmas tree in the second video.

A few questions:

-The guy in the blue shirt is a tkd nidan? I sure hope not. He looked like he's about a yellow belt with a bad stretch.

-Why are you even wearing gloves? You punched about 4 times in 4 minutes. Keep your hands up and hit him in the face. For being a headhunter I saw very little of that. But a headhunter against you would have a field day.

Make sure you follow your own gameplan, it looked like you got sucked into his of throwing a bunch of wild kicks everywhere hoping the other guy would walk into them. If the opponent is 5 feet away, you have no business lifting your leg off of the ground, you're just wasting energy kicking the air.

2 cent from someone out of formal training for quite a while.

Joel - Thanks for the advice!

Yes, he says he's a TKD nidan. I have no way of verifying, so I'll take his word for it. To answer your questions, yes I AM a headhunter but as I explained before I have a SERIOUS SERIOUS problem with fighting people I don't know. The last time I went to town on someone's head he went nuts and ended up headbutting me and knocking a tooth in. I do have fast and strong punches (if you look at 3:14 to 3:17 when I simply walked in and hit him in the head because he said I was "slow"). You're absolutely right about being sucked into his wild kicks, and it makes me mad because normally I don't do that. Then again, we primarily use hands when fighting at our school. Keep in mind this is just very light sparring and not a representative of fighting though. Thanks.

Steelwater -

Thanks for putting up the vids for us! I enjoy seeing the other members train. Very brave of you to put up vids with you being injured, so I will make comments with that in mind.

I like that you keep mobile, and around 1:25 you use circular footwork pretty well. I would say to use that often. I did see you give up your back a few times, when Jon came in on you. You are good about spinning kicks when you have room, but remember to use spinning backfists if you get jammed. Don't just cover up.

Cheech has some good timing and distancing, but I would like to see him against someone more his caliber. His flippy kicks did not appear to have much oomph to them, but that may have been because he was "toying" with Jon as you said.

Nice job for manning up with vids!

you guys definately need to fix those guards man. also your hands were always open. fair enough if you thinking of parrying or using a knife hand, but if he catches your fingers, theyre bound to break or dislocate.and tbh are you serious that the guy in blue is a black belt, his guard was all over the place during his kicks. my main comment is to fix up the guards specially if you do full contact as most full contact fighters will see that weakness and exploit it to the max specially in fighters, i know i would.

Aaron

well Creech was dominating him, he just looks for an opening and places something ( lot of backfist)

As far as I can see Creech saw your match and actually used the TKD guys own tactics on him
A bit like, what you can do, I can do better, I have done the same in the past when people from an other art came and trained with us and fought in their own weird( for our students) way for instance some kung fu guys started doing jump turning back kicks, however they jumped strait up, I then did them in such a way that I really come towards my opponent

Some with a guy from Pencak Silat ( Manyang Style) he used the ellusive hand movement of his style, I then did the same but in between I used Karate punches ( Wado Style)

You look like you do not have the skills yet to do the same but that is to be expected after only 2 years of training, how long has creech been training?
Also you tend to mov into a range where you make it hard for yourself to execute a proper kick, your hand tend to be to low although you raise them as soone as the other guy make a kick or "punch" ( can you call it that?)
In this style of competition, I think it is best to keep your front hand at shoulder level, arm bent 90 degrees and you should be able to place a fist under your armpit, the other hand should be near the elbow
Ths way you will actually keep guys like this at a better distance for you to work, it will be harder for them to come near
Last, when you notice that he is staarting a kick, insted of moving back all the time like you did now, try moving foreward, either strait or at an angle depending on the kick(for round kicks, you can go strait, for strait kicks go angled) this will render most kicks useless
Now the last probably was a bit of a problem as you were hurt

Thanks for all the advice, guys. To answer a couple of your questions:

MattJ: Yes, Creech was toying with him with his kicks. He's apprehensive about who he spars like me. The first couple of times he won't hit you very hard, he'll just pop you with an open hand or a light kick.

BabyBwoy: Yes, in our style we guard with open hands with the fingers pointing up and the palms forward. Supposedly this would prevent dislocation of the fingers because they are pointing upward. Your palm takes the blunt of the blow. Not to say that you're wrong, but when I used to clench my hands, I had more problems with getting my knuckles bashed into oblivion from kicks and punches than I do now. Thanks for the advice and I'll keep it in consideration!

Toudiyama: Good advice. No idea for an exact amount of how long he's been training. When I first joined the school, he said 14, so I'm guessing it's around 16 now. Also, you're right about my hands. When I train with Creech he gets on me all the time about having my hands down far too low and then lifting them too high when he comes in to attack. That's what happened to my ribs the day before these sparring videos were filmed. A note though is about the guard position you mentioned. We do practice that position at our school. We call it "The Wall". We also practice the one I was using (although I sorta bastardized it) which we call "the universal block".

I'm starting to realize that I have a really bad problem with aggression and pressuring.

Sounds good, steel. I hope to see a vid of your regular sparring some time.

Joel: I'm on my way to class in about an hour and a half. I'm going to ask Sensei if he'll allow me to film. He does every now and then.