nice! id love to get the chance to spar with you sometimes, but i have no formal work in any art. just a little informal work in boxing, TKD, aikido, wresting, hung gar kung fu, and karate.
i plan to start learning kick boxing or TKD formally next fall. in the mean time my schools hosting an open martial arts toury tomorrow i plan to attend

Good luck with the tourney. If you ever get up to the Baltimore area, let me know.

Here is a more recent sparring vid. My buddy RazorFoot has some awesome footwork, and most of what I know about footwork, I learned from him :

http://www.motionbox.com/videos/ee9ddcb21516e664

hmmm he seems to be running away alot. whats up with that?

He is primarily a defensive fighter, and I am primarily offensive. His counters are really fast and accurate, though. He can make you miss by a millimeter, and then deck you, LOL. His timing is really superb - start to move or drop your hands for a second, and you get hit.

Nice clip of you guys!

@ Stryker: Trust me the more you spar/compete the more you will want to tighten your defence! No one likes getting hit lol! Matt and Razorfoot both kept moving. This is an important skill to have in (striking) combat sports.

If you stand still you are going to be an easy target to hit. If you keep moving in one direction, it's going to be easy to figure out where you're going to be, so again, you'll be easy to hit. That's why moving round the bag is important as it gets you in to the habit of moving.

Here's a small tip on how to make your cross actually land...

When in doubt, jab.
If you jab with your left, move slightly towards your left.
If you move to your left jab again.
If you're standing 45 degrees to his right throw the cross through his defense.

I love slipping in those crosses, they're sneaky!

Another tip is; if you're going to attack, move forward and move left or right so you're standing square against him from an angle, not square against each other, if you do, chances that he'll be able to block or escape attacks are a big higher.

Nobody can figure out where the punches come from when they're being punched, so always attack from an angle, never straight on.

-Donnie out

Yeah, totally agree with Taison about striking from angles. I am still working on that skill. I definitely get hit more when I attack straight on compared to using angles. Takedowns and clinch stuff often work better from angles too, now as I think about it.

I got that from JKD by the way!

-Donnie out

I say your guard is to low, keep those hands up. And move around a bit, never stand still, bob and weave.

with no formal training, I have seen far, far worse

As others have said, movement is a big part of sparring/fighting, and its worth thinking about that now, rather than 'unlearning' bad habits later.

I would also suggest a little more visualisation in the structure of your striking.

By this I mean that at the moment, you just keep firing punches off in an almost non-stop super-long combination, with little feel for the timing or movement of the bag. All your punches are also thrown to a 'comfort zone' that equates to chest height on an average size oponent.

It feels great to lay in to a bag like this, but unless you are Manny Pacquiao, it is not going to work against an oponent

Try and see a person, not a bag, move and pick shots that maximise impact based on the relationship between you and the bag at that moment, bob, weave, get your chin behind your shoulder, expecting the bag to punch back, and switch ranges and targets from head to body as dictated by how you read the motion of the bag. Use this to create a rythm of crisp focused combinations of no more than 6 consecutive punches (unlikely to be able to throw more than this uninterupted against even the poorest of oponents).

This will help prepare you for more structured training in the future