Control in Sparring
When your opponent is moving, when they are unpredictable in sparring, it demands a lot more skill to not hit your opponent...sometimes they don’t block, or they walk into the line of your attack. When you don’t hit them, they feel like they have more room to attack you, this in turn will give you more to play with, to react to. The whole experience becomes much more enjoyable and useful for all involved.
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In sparring we are learning more about control: control of ourselves under a more dynamic, unpredictable situation.
What do I mean by control? I don’t mean rigid predictable, life must be like this, holding on, forcing our will. I mean that we are able to hold who we are, in other words that we are not influenced by circumstance. That means, control of fear; control of arrogance; control of your body physically: balance, agility, technique, power ratio (effort to impact)
In other words ….Self-control….. this is extremely important.
When lacking self-control, we might win a fight by chance; however when we are in control, we don’t lose a fight. We lose a fight when we are out of control, not in control.
The greater our self-control, the greater our control over the situation/fight.
But often, we attempt to control the external to compensate for the lack of control over the internal.
So in sparring, I don’t wanna see you pounding your opponent…. Affecting the aggressor is not the objective. The objective is to maintain control of the self.
If we accept the premise that Hapkido is powerful and effective, then the calibre of the opponent becomes irrelevant, if not distracting. We need not and should not focus on what we do to our opponent but rather on our proficiency in technique, or more pointedly, our proficiency of the Hapkido principles.
Therefore opponents are illusions. Yet illusions have power if we believe in them.
When you come in too close like this, your technique goes down - because it hinges on diminishing the quality of the attack rather than improving the quality of the defence.
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In sparring we are learning more about control: control of ourselves under a more dynamic, unpredictable situation.
What do I mean by control? I don’t mean rigid predictable, life must be like this, holding on, forcing our will. I mean that we are able to hold who we are, in other words that we are not influenced by circumstance. That means, control of fear; control of arrogance; control of your body physically: balance, agility, technique, power ratio (effort to impact)
In other words ….Self-control….. this is extremely important.
When lacking self-control, we might win a fight by chance; however when we are in control, we don’t lose a fight. We lose a fight when we are out of control, not in control.
The greater our self-control, the greater our control over the situation/fight.
But often, we attempt to control the external to compensate for the lack of control over the internal.
So in sparring, I don’t wanna see you pounding your opponent…. Affecting the aggressor is not the objective. The objective is to maintain control of the self.
If we accept the premise that Hapkido is powerful and effective, then the calibre of the opponent becomes irrelevant, if not distracting. We need not and should not focus on what we do to our opponent but rather on our proficiency in technique, or more pointedly, our proficiency of the Hapkido principles.
Therefore opponents are illusions. Yet illusions have power if we believe in them.
When you come in too close like this, your technique goes down - because it hinges on diminishing the quality of the attack rather than improving the quality of the defence.
posted by Tammy Parlour at 12:59 AM
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