“To be truly successful, a ‘trophy person’, you need to be well rounded with both hard skills and soft skills …”
Many people do not like one step sparring plain and simple. You will often hear, “This is not how it will work on the Street.” or “Why waste time on one step sparring when we have free sparring at our disposal?” I get it. I wasn’t always a fan of one step sparring and I can understand why people don’t see its usefulness. When you look a little deeper though one step sparring is actually an invention of pure Genius!
When you look at different skills that you have or are trying to learn, they are often broken down into two categories: Hard Skills and Soft Skills. Hard skills are very technical and very concrete. The way to develop these skills is through gross repetition. Think Mathematical Equations, or kata. You’ve probably approached training these the same way! You can isolate yourself and train these skills on your own by working on them over and over again. While having a teacher or partner helps, you don’t actually need one to get good at these as long as you have the tools to be appropriately critical of yourself.
When you look at soft skills, you have skills that can never be rehearsed perfectly as they are based on reacting to different situations in real time. These skills require more creativity and to improve in these skills, you must experience them in different contexts with different people. Some examples of soft skills are conversational skills, presentation skills, and in martial arts, free sparring. You cannot practice conversation skills or free sparring to the greatest extent by simply practicing in front of a mirror by yourself! For this you really need a partner and organic situations for you to truly learn.
At least in the Karate world, you will hear people ask, “Are you a forms person, or a sparring person?” Most of the time, people will answer one way or another. In my martial arts organization, to win the grand championship cup, you need to be well rounded and succeed at both. When someone answers both forms and sparring to the aforementioned question they are colloquially described not as a forms person or a sparring person, but a “trophy person”.
I think this really transcends life as a whole. To be truly successful, a “trophy person”, you need to be well rounded with both hard skills and soft skills, but being well rounded isn’t just enough you need to find a way to UNIFY the hard and the soft skills.
This is where one step sparring comes in. They are hard skills that can be practiced solo or when trained with the perfect intention, they can be defined as soft skills, reacting with a partner, going with the flow and executing the techniques. This forms a bridge to free sparring at the end of the day. After all, this is what our martial arts ancestors meant for this to be when these skills were developed.
This bridge phase also gives us the ability to observe and evaluate the hard and the soft skills at the same time! You can have a good reaction but a poor finishing technique or vice versa. That execution of the one step failed in either case. To have a passing one step, both elements need to be there.
So next time your instructor asks you to practice one step sparring in class, don’t whine or complain. Take the opportunity to respect and treasure the great training opportunity that you have in front of you!
