hi tim,

besides flow/slow sparring, what drills can you recommend for integrating the skill sets and strategies/tactics (combinations, etc.) that you learn into your sparring?

aside from flow or slow sparring, we do flinch drills where one is only allowed to step forward or to the side, not back, and footwork drills with attack and defense.

while our sparring has improved a lot with these drills, we find that we sometimes still become too tense and therefore start to cover up instead of looking at what the opponent is doing and reacting. only thing we could think of was to up the intensity of the above-mentioned drills to match our sparring format. the skills we acquired from doing the drills were fine for sparring at a certain speed, but once we took it up several notches, the flinch reaction came back and everything started falling apart. would like to get your input. thanks in advance.