Learn to develop your peripheral vision.
The first thing you have to do is to become "aware" that your peripheral vision can be used to enhance, not your minds, but your body's reaction to your opponents movements.
As mentioned in earlier Kumite Tips, your thinking mind is your worst enemy, when sparring, even more so than a real opponent.
Your true friend is your body and so by enlarging its field of view through peripheral training, you can literally see things happening that your normal vision and thinking mind would miss completely.
By utilizing your peripheral vision, your body will react twice as fast to movement than your normal visual perception could ever hope to achieve. Faster perception of movement means faster analysis and response to your opponents attack.
There are many ways to enhance your peripheral vision, simply Google it and you will have more than enough information to get you started. You'll find different focal points for your gaze from various martial artists, everything from your opponents eyes, to his neck to looking into the distance. Try them all and see which gives you the best overall perception.
The key is to be able to see your opponent from head to toe from a certain distance, of course when you are sparring in close, your perceptual field will be smaller.
This ability to see everything that your opponent is doing will improve your Kumite sparring skills by at least 100%, guaranteed.
Once you've mastered that you've only got your posture, stance, distancing and the correct time to execute a technique left to master...
...more on those aspects of freestyle sparring later.
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Kumite Tips #1/Kumite Tips #2/Kumite Tips #3/Kumite Tips #4/Kumite Tips #5/Kumite Tips #6/Kumite Tips #7/Kumite Tips #8/Kumite Tips #9
Kumite Drills # 1/Kumite Drills # 2/Kumite Drills # 3
Kumite Strategies # 1/Kumite Strategies # 2/
RJF
