Learning To Spar

I opened my eyes this morning recalling the events of last evening. I flexed my quads to tighten my knees. I rotated my ankles. They did not hurt as bad as the night before. Sparring....the act of you and your kung fu brothers hitting each other. It can be rough, but you learn quite a lot.

In the mirror I saw a long rectilinear marking on the side of my ribs. My knees, pink and my shins purple.

"Better then yesterday," I said to myself, "at least it isn't green"

I've gone through 2 days of leg sparing at Rey's wing chun muay thai school in san jose. Each day is exhausting and guaranteed to make you sweat. In this sort of sparring you only use legs for offense, but you can use any part of your body as a means of Defense.

I am a wing chun Guy and I'll probably be one for a long long time. This Sparring training is much closer in relation to Muay Thai but honestly, the methods of these two arts are very similar. The more I study these two arts, the more similarities i will find. However, as far as I know, WC lacks a round house kick and trust me, you need a roundhouse kick. People will say, if they throw a round house kick, then you just gotta hit the standing leg.

So I tried that and ended up with another nice mark on my knees. Every time I threw that straight to counter their round, I still got hit. Instead of him hitting my thigh or my body, our knees would clash. A straight can counter a round and a round can counter a straight, but the one who wins depends on who moved second.

Straight kicks were only good for creating distance between you and you opponent. They can be used as an attack but they are so easy to counter. My opponents simply raised their knee to block my straight. My heel hit that spike and it left me with a purple heel. Doesn't hurt too bad since we were light sparring, thus I was holding back.

I had to go through 4 rounds of this. Plenty of roundhouses. Very rarely any straights. Most of them came from me and they hardly connected.

I fell down and hit the mat beneath me. I fell many times and each time I fell I got back up. There's no use in being dramatic. Drama simply wastes time and If I was to learn anything useful I would have to learn as much as I can. And just from these 2 days I have learned about how powerful the round house kick is.

Wing chun is known for its hands, but by the end of all this sparring my wing chun would have incorporated a very useful round house kick.

By Derrick Ho