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Emotions in general are detrimental to your sparring. Usually when I have seen this said to a student it is not because we want you to get angry, but that you are sparring as if you are afraid. If you are afraid of striking your opponent you become SLOW and hesitant. Remember here that you should only ever spar willingly (never spar if you don't want to) ...

Regarding cardio, there's a saying in fitness that being fit for cardio in an activity makes you fit for cardio in that area. Take someone who can run for two hours at a time, and tell them to attack the heavy bag non-stop, and they'll be gasping within minutes. Similarly, take someone who has learned to keep punching and kicking the heavy bag for long ...

While tigers can be considered savage in some sense, as in "uncivilized" or "fierce", they certainly don't get angry. When they are attacking, they have a goal in mind ("kill this prey to satisfy my hunger") and they use their instinct and physical might to reach that goal, there is no emotion. When they are defending themselves, they again use their ...

What works for your sensei might not work from you. He is teaching you, what had worked for him. For some, they use anger for the aggressiveness it brings. Anger dominates certain opponents. And in the case of draw, the more aggressive fighter that attacks more (whether contact or not) is usually declared the winner. But anger does not work for everyone. It ...

Martial arts are a journey on your own path, at your own time and speed. I have (or have had) a number of students with wide ranging issues with co-ordination, flexibility and movement. As an instructor it is very important for me to take these things into consideration when running the class - perhaps demonstrating things more slowly - or giving alternate ...

I'm generally opposed to anime questions, but there are a significant handful of MMA fights where one fighter is known to be semi-conscious yet still fighting. Edgar/Maynard 2 is my go-to example: Edgar is clearly concussed early, and has said on the record that he has no memory of multiple rounds, but he fought to a split draw nevertheless. He picked ...

I started judo for that very same reason. It's a great sport to learn spatial perception of your own body. 13 years later I can see a huge improvement in coordination and balance. You'll see the results in a few months. Try it. Now I just enrolled in karate :) As Jigoro Kano is rumoured to have once said, or maybe not: It is not important to be ...

No, anger is not a prerequisite for sparring. There is more than one school of thought for what your mental state should be to spar/fight. This list is not meant to be exhaustive: Fight without emotion. Buddhist or Daoist training for a state where thought is stopped (mushin) also means that your emotions do not disturb your mental state and create ...

I doubt that your instructor is an expert in human physiology. When your whole chest is heaving for air and each strike threatens to make you light-headed, that's not a mental issue. But mentally: Could you have friends or sparring partners hit you progressively harder over multiple weeks of sparring, so that you have to keep "fighting back". ...

Some thoughts on it: Fights are exhausting. You can see it in competitions all across disciplines. If many highly trained athletes tire within a handful of minutes, despite stalling or round pauses, no need to necessarily blame it on yourself. Normal street fights are fast and don't last long, many not even a minute. Wearing a mask is a great hindrance ...

Going slow is one of the best recommendations I could give you. While many techniques are done "in an instant" it's important to slow them down to a snail's pace once in a while & figure out all of the body mechanics (of yourself when executing a technique and your opponent as you apply a technique). That & practice physical literacy, & ...

The best solution for this is to gain experience. Experience is what teaches you to remain calm during contact sessions. There's no meditation mumbo-jumbo that will keep you calm when you get punched in the face. The only answer is to get used to it. And the only way to get used to it is to experience it. A lot. It's utter horse-puckey to let a yellow belt ...

I have had similar issues when training with more skilled/experience people than I am. These are some things that help me: Focus on relaxing my breathing. If my breathing is under control, so am I, mostly. Don't stare your opponent in the eyes. This is a big problem for most people and actually make your a worse fighter, since you it's harder to track what ...

Invest in loss. My opinion may be of marginal value because I'm coming from a different art, but for what it is worth, I'd advise you invest in loss. When I push hands, I'm regularly working against people senior to me - people who have devoted a week to this art for every hour that I've practiced. I'm not there to win, I'm there to learn. I know I'm ...

I had the same problem and I got to the bottom of it. I searched for what caused my frustation. First I worked out my ego. During martial arts most of the frustration is caused by fear of humiliation. If you are stressed during sparring that is because your ego fights back. Deep inside you fear loosing against your spar partner. From puberty to adulthood ...

There are numerous studies showing that visualization improves performance, often nearly as well as actually doing the thing in question. It never gets better results by itself, but in practice you'd be adding visualization to your normal activity, not replacing your activity with it. You can read more about this here: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/...

Thanks for this question. It's a subject that's near and dear to me. And I think I understand what you're asking. When I was a brown belt in Taekwondo, I was 17 years old, and I remember having an encounter with a drunk, crazy guy on the lawn of someone's home on Halloween night. A smaller friend of mine was with me, and I think we were going to a party or ...

I'd say your instructor is partly right, but it isn't the whole truth. Your muscles need oxygen to work, as does your brain. When you use more oxygen than you resorp through skin and breathing, this means you at least in part run anaerobically (= without oxygen), ie. you first burn creatine in your muscles. This works for about 90 seconds until you massively ...

For most people asking how to improve their mental strength, I'd suggest taking up a martial art - mental strength is one of the main benefits of doing so. As you're already doing that, and have been for a while by the sounds of it, if you lack mental strength now it might be a failure by your instructor. I don't know you, your fitness, your health or your ...

Q: why a perfect expert and trained taekwondo player or martial artist fear fights? A: Have you heard of the saying that the more you learn about something, the more you realize how much more there is to learn? The same thing is relevant in martial arts. For a novice, the "experts" seem to know everything and can handle any attacker. The "...

This answer aims to add to, rather than replace, those which have already been posted. I also wish to distance my comments from issues of mask-wearing and COVID. I acknowledge they are realities of your current situation, but I think there's value in discussing your question in the context of a return to relative normality. Exhaustion is technically an ...

This is not to contradict any of the great answers above, just to look at the problem in a different way. What they teach at my Muay Thai gym is that during a fight, you can give yourself a "break" to recover from temporary exhaustion and/or being stunned by a blow by keeping your guard up and active, keeping moving and breathing deeply, but ...

You don't. Mental strength is for filtering out instinctual messages you don't need, not for ignoring body status information. What messages do you need? In this case you have a sense that you're not getting enough air. Some people feel that way whenever they tire, you're describing it as unusual. You can confirm poor oxygenation with an under $20 O2 monitor ...

It happened to me this weekend... yes I trained when young (16years old now 51years old) with Robert and Danny Williams, Ti crane in High Point NC. I got sucker punched and was knocked out...I hit the concrete floor, back of my skull lumped up. When I got my sight and hearing back I was being tackled... When I asked why I was being punched and beat up by my ...

The answer to your question is that you need to find a dojo/club/class where you feel comfortable. One of the reasons I do martial arts is because I'm bad at it and I'm allowed to be bad at it. If I make a mistake in my work life, people suffer. If I make a mistake in my family/interpersonal life, there are consequences. But if I make a mistake on the ...

it's hard to control your emotions (especially while your mind is busy helping you to fight), it could be somewhat easier to control your body; that would most likely help you to calm down: keep your face relaxed (hard, but necessary) keep your shoulders relaxed (even harder, but even more necessary) try to unfocus your eyes, use peripheral vision - this ...