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How to improve your karate sparring. First thing first, there's no substitute for experience and what experience will bring you, more than anything else in sparing, is a reflexive reaction to every situation that could exist.
So in my dojo, I encourage a lot of sparring. It's very, it's not only cooperative very it's very conversational almost. And someone, one of my teachers once spoke about, you know, "Sparring in the dojo should be much more of a conversation than an argument." So you don't want to be butting heads all the time because you can't continue that for two, three, four minutes let alone ten minutes or even 20 minutes.
And when I was in Japan I had the fortunate position to have a great champion who was junior to me. So he couldn't impose too much of his assertiveness on me and I wasn't sort of senior to just want to bully him. So I would use him and his ability to get a spar for 20 minutes or more with no injuries and no risk of injuries. We were just really exchanging many, many techniques and our bodies, rather than our intellect, would gradually start to perceive what was appropriate at what moment.
So when you're moving around, and this is true with all our techniques, you want to be feeling the ground, driving off the ground, and keeping all your limbs available for blocking and countering, for seeging from one block or one technique to another, for the ebb and flow of attack and counterattack and defense. So practicing regularly as Alex and I are doing here, and you can see, we're actually enjoying ourselves, you know, this is not a fight. This is really gaining reflex of the moment. That's how I consider we can improve our sparring.
