Fear is a beautiful, wonderful thing. Fear keeps you alive.
If you're gunshy, that's a little different...and is completely natural at first when acquiring a new skill.
I mean...chances are, if you're going at a proper pace with proper pressure...you're probably not going to injure your opponent. Accident's happen, but, I mean, justify it like this...how many ring fights end in severe injury?
Even if you're trying hard, if your opponent is skilled enough to defend himself, both of you should be relatively cool. It is important to build a repiore with your opponent...so that eventually you can go hard, but you also need to go soft to develope technique and timing, distancing, rythm, accuracy, correct mechanics, etc. Even going hard all the time is bad, because alot of these important attributes get tossed to the wind, and it ends up just becoming a free-for-all, haymaker and rigid-kick-fest.
Going soft at first and developing your training will also allow you to start and let yourself go hard and will allow you to expirement with different things and start taking chances.
Sparring is like Research and Development...it is far better to test your skills out and tweak things a little in the gym than to get destroyed in the ring or killed on the streets.
I USED to be gun-shy sparring. I would be careful and tentative, until I had my first ring fight...now I realize that my sparring partners back in the day were hitting me just as hard or harder than the guy I fought...so now, since I've learned to pace myself...I no longer fear hitting the other guy hard and having them get pissed, I hit them as hard as they hit me. But you train to learn...not to kill your partners...so take it easy, relax, and don't be affraid of a little smack to the head...
Consider that you do best relaxed and fully composed, but with a little anticipation, and come your first fight, you'll zone into it flawlessly. A fight is as much mental as it is physical, and if your conditioning is top notch, and you're overtrained on your technique, you will destroy the fool who steps out of the changing room and into the ring against you without trying. You can turn the pressure on and off, and when you start to get the technique down, and you spar heavily...you'll feel what I'm talking about.
My advice; work on counter-striking. If your personality seems to make your personal style passive...work on countering, i.e. counter punches, counters to kicks, prummb work, footwork, and how to move to create targets and maximize the damage of your strikes. Also try and learn some explosive and ice-breaking (you know, when both guys are just standing there shuffling their feet and panting) techniques, because after you jab for the round, the guy won't expect a jumping cross. Learn how to open your opponent up and when they do open up, put them down quick.
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homo homini lupus
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