Have you ever been afraid when you do sparring and when your student gets hurt?
If you have this fear, here’s a guide so you can prevent your student from being afraid or minimize it. The end goal is for your students to get really good at sparring because we cannot create students who cannot defend themselves.
Remember that sparring is a process.
You should never throw someone into someone else in the first 3 to 4 months of training, you’re having people spar from white belt to yellow belt level is not a good idea.
So at the beginning stages, they just kick in the air at each other maybe 4 feet away from each other and they have a partner who does the combination, the partners are not getting any contact but you are aiming at them.
When they start getting used to that it’s like the beginning of a drill, they start getting more comfortable then later on you can ask them to go 1 foot away, then 6 inches away. Then later as they get higher belts, more experience, and confidence you can touch them but you can’t hit them, by the time they get into the black belt they can do controlled contact.
This will build them confidence, eliminate a lot of fear, and they are building the skills that are necessary to be good at sparring eventually.
The other one is to group them into three, the two people are going to work with each other, and the third person is the safety coach and the job of this is to make sure that the two people aren’t hurting and hitting each other. By doing this, they’ll get to learn about safety. Before you start your sparring or drills, you need to train everybody how to be a safety coach.
You always start with drills and do the sparring later on, in that way they get to be very good with techniques, at the same time they are working safely and learning to become better and get the chance to apply them.
