Rob Mac wrote: Just finished a class (another enormous turn out of 4!) and got them sparring at the end at about 70%. I was pretty much letting them lay into me while I was covering, all stand-up. One of the guys said after how he couldn’t get near me(not showing off,it’s only his second time training) but I had 12oz gloves on, I try and make all my stuff as applicable to the street and cage as possible, isn’t this lulling into a false sense of security? It’s obviously a massive luxury covering with big gloves, but we’re going to be picking up alot of injuries otherwise. I’m VERY much a novice instructor and try and keep stuff simple and as real as possible, what’s your thoughts on this Steve?

Steve wrote: You know the saying, ‘You train as you will need to fight and fight as you have trained.’ What that doesn’t say, is that you train as you need to fight without killing the your training partner, but with the idea that you will be killing your opponent in the fight.

This has been the problem since the legions of Rome, who saw their training exercises as a ‘bloodless war,’ and war itself as a ‘bloody exercise’.

Knowing that from reading military journals, I realised way back that this was the essence of my problem as a trainer. In Earlham Street, we were lucky that nobody did die or end up seriously injured. Not to mention the fact that we were always short of training partners anyway.

This issue is what my method is all about. How to create a fighting environment within the gym that is relatively safe.

It isn’t really about what type of gloves you’re using, it’s about the principle of replicating a very high intensity, violent training environment and preserving an element of safety within it.

The short route is go and watch Peter Smit the Kyokushin Kai knockdown guy, I posted him a while back. If you eliminate kicks to the head, all the shots can be to body and legs. Guy stays pretty, but he gets to experience the mix. The only thing you shouldn’t do is defend the body shots as body shots. Keep thinking of protecting the head as you’re doing it. If the shots are coming to the upper body or shoulders, treat them as head shots. Treat the fight as if the head was included, rather than as in Kyokushin Kai where it isn’t included (except kicks). Do that in very short interval bursts, so you get a very high intensity exchange. Drill it technically, then raise the tempo of the drill to fight pace, and then just let it go. You’ve already set the conditions, so it’s a form of conditional fighting.

You should be able to do that with no gloves, or any size glove you want.

Once you’ve established that template, you can then start mixing in other stuff: clinch work, takedowns, etc.

That’s your short answer.