How to get rid of fear of fighting

Question

"How to get rid of fear of fighting". When i get hit i am scared to get beaten more. I am worried about my nose getting break which costs me to lose. But i love the sport.

Answer 1

To be honest this is a tough question to answer because there is no one right answer or technique for this.

It is healthy to be scared in a match. If you are not scared then you are either highly experienced or somewhat mental.

I think the only way to overcome this (without some hypnotic reprogramming) is experience - which means getting hit. Overcoming pain and fear requires training, it requires that you face the fear and receive the pain and realize that you are still fine and you can carry on.

A smack on the nose can hurt and make you eyes water, ideally you should avoid it (keep your guard up, no be there Daniel-san). It might even break your nose, but after you've had a few of those you learn that it isn't so bad and you can continue.

When you fight you ideally want to be "in the zone", which is a state where you are not consciously thinking about what you are doing and what is happening around you. When in this state you will still feel the hits but won't consciously register the pain from it (this is kind of important especially when your thighs will be getting smashed during the match!) - the only way to achieve this is with ring experience and training.

Answer 2

try some like-sparring drills (like sticky hands from Wing Chun) - those drills will give you lots of confidence without much of a danger.

update:

1) The sticky hands drill presumes a very short distance of "fighting" (the distance is one thing lots of people and uncomfortable about)

2) the drill can be done as hard (aggressive) or soft as needed

3) since the contact is kept all the time, the danger is much less than during "conventional" sparring; I can't post an essay about Wing Chun and it's philosophy, so you would have to believe me or do some research on your own (or just ignore my post alltogether)

Answer 3

When I just started learning martial arts (Seido) I was in the same position that you refer to. The solution for me was sparring with black belts or a kyu at least two ranks above mine. They will have the experience to be able to control their strikes so you don't get hurt too much. An added bonus is if you make a mistake while sparring you will know immediately. Also keep practicing the basics eventually you will see their applications in sparring, osu.

Answer 4

I can offer some advice from my experience working with Tony Blauer. In Tony's system we do some drills called Emotional Climate Training (ECT) where the purpose is to think about how an attack or situation makes you "feel" on an emotional level.

How it works, starting with an attack such as haymaker is you stand there while an opponent tosses the haymaker at you in slow motion. What you do is a couple of things. First watch the attack, mental blueprint what a haymaker or whatever attack/situation looks and sounds like. Takes a good bad guy to do this part. Next think about how the attack makes you feel emotionally. Keep doing this attack over and over. Remember you are not making any defense movements, just analyze and think about the attack. This part of the drill can go on for a while. You stop when you start feeling "comfortable" with the attack on an emotional level.

From here we would usually progress to describing the attack. Same as above except now you are verbally describing what you see and hear from the attacker. Again, repeat this drill, maybe 10-20 times or till you feel comfortable with describing the aspects of the attack.

The next part of the drills just keep building upon this same thing. Next would be describing the safe/unsafe parts of the attack (unsafe is when the attacker is making contact, safe is all other times) and then working on defensive responses. Doing this in class can take a couple of hours but it does work in helping with fear management and analyzing attacks.

Answer 5

Yod Ruerngsa has a section on 'being hit' in Muay Thai - The Art of Fighting.

Here an excerpt:

If you want to evolve and grow as a human being, don't worry about what you'll get from others...learn to give, to try, to extend yourself, and to concentrate on what you're doing to and for others, not on what's being done to or for you. If you want to learn how to box, same thing: don't worry about what others will do to you, learn to give, to try, to extend yourself with effort, and concentrate on what you're doing, not on what's being done to you.

Answer 6

Sure, you can get rid of fear through daily practice & meditation.

• Through daily meditation, your mind will become calm and accurate.
• Through daily martial arts practicing, you will become
  stronger and healthier.

And finally a calm, accurate, stronger and healthier person will not afraid of anything other than God.

 "Mind and Body are two parts of a coin"

Answer 7

Good old body conditioning / body beating worked for me. First I got a guy with the same height as me to punch me around. I did not defend.

It mostly consisted of

• Punches to the abdomen (with gloves on)
• Punches to the chest.
• Jabs to the face
• Hooks to the face
• Slap kicks to the thigh
• Slaps on my stomach
• Front kick to the chest
• Slap kicks on my shoulder

This hurt for a few days, but after a month my body had got used to it. So I upgraded to a tall bloke (So that I did not get intimidated in an actual fight)

Basically you make yourself subconsciously used to get beaten up. I learned this from Kalari, where I was handed weapons on the first day. It seems daunting at first, the instinct of getting hurt/or hurting others just goes away over time.