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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 381116" data-attributes="member: 5171">The funny thing was, I did really really well...The full-contact aspect was a killer... my testing buddy and I, the two people at this rank, knew it was gonna be tough, and we just trained the hell out of each other.  He had a lot more experience than I did -- he's 46, I'm 26, and he started taking martial arts when he was 14 at a kickboxing school.  So for this test, he really trained the hell out of me.  Got me to not freeze up when I got hit, improved my reflexes, my toughness, and my combat intelligence in terms of seeing holes in defenses and going for them.Thing was, I was a really lousy sparrer for a 4th degree.  It was never a huge part of our school, so I'd kind of slid by for awhile.  Training for this test just about killed me... we had bloody noses every training session -- 'cause once it happens once, it always happens again if you just get TOUCHED.  I got nailed in the ribs and couldn't sleep on my right side for a few months -- which ended up being a benefit, because I had to switch to left-side forward, which turned out to be a better style for me.  My partner fell wrong on a throw and hurt his shoulder, and had to learn how to fight without straining himself that way.We were psyched, we were jazzed, we had our strategies -- because we were sparring at the same time, not against each other but against the same pool of people.  Let the opponents tire themselves out in the first minute -- we'd been training, we could last the full three minutes no sweat.  Let them get tired, and then in the second minute, open it up a bit, use what we'd seen against them.  By the third minute, they'd be tired.  For aggressive people, we were ready to change all that and just drill them hard and hurt them so that they wouldn't be pounding on us for three straight minutes.   We were ready to hurt people, hit hard, stun them if necessary (although if we did any serious damage, we would fail the test for lacking control).And then we got there, and our opponents included one black belt who is a short, fast sparring demon but also a good guy, one big slow guy, one thin guy who had ability but some of the same sparring issues that I had had before, and one new brown belt kid who was scared out of his mind.  I'd been prepared for getting my headgear rocked by the biggest, strongest, most aggressive guys in the school, and the test itself ended up being a cakewalk compared to what I put myself through against my training buddy.  For part of one round, my teacher actually said, "Okay, Mr. Weekes (me), why don't you NOT PUNCH for a minute here, and Michael, you just relax and see what you can do?"My teachers had been watching my training buddy and I clobber each other for all those months, watching us bloody our noses and bruise our ribs and laugh and cry and bleed and lean against the wall with our bloody mouthpieces in our sweaty gloves. For them, we actually passed our sparring test weeks before we actually took it.-Tacky</blockquote>

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