Originally Posted by gabbah

Well, the rules in kickboxing (not muay thai) don't allow knees or clinching. So we sparr with boxing and kicks. Is it alive then? We may sparr hard, but since it doesn't have knees, clinching or takedown there certainly are aspects missing from a stand up fight point of view. Same thing with the training in any boxing gym.
So still I'm not sure we have the same view of the term "alive". You seem to have the view that if you train for stand up fight, you must allow for all possible attacks. With that definition, for instance boxing will not be "alive".

And just to make things clear, we train a lot with "full" sparring (kicks and punches to the whole body for us). Sometimes we isolate though as I descibed before.