MaartenSFS wrote: free fighting is not overrated. It is the ultimate test to check whether you can really apply your skills. If you can't apply your skills in free fighting or at least wrestling then you have no business teaching.
It’s absolutely overrated.
If you want to test your skills in free fight you need to first have skills to test. But then, are they skills to begin with if you can’t apply them in free fight? But if it’s free fight, how can you be sure you’ll get to test what you want to test?
Free fight? How do you know you can use your stuff for real, in a real situation even if you can use it in free fighting? Free fighting is regulated, you do it with friends under certain conditions. You can prepare for it, mentally and physically. Fighting is different.
It’s good to be well acquainted with free sparring. But still, free fighting is not more an ultimate skill test than applications practice. Honestly, if you believe you can fight because you do well in sparring, this is still a form of mental masturbation. You still know nothing about how you would react in a real situation. And even if you had fought ten or twenty street fights you could still be taken off guard and be facing something completely new.
Wanting to be able to fight is a childish dream. Who can fight? I can’t. No one can fight. Every situation is new, different and something completely else than from what you could be prepared for in your imagination. There is no ultimate test. There is no way to know if you could handle what could happen. Everyone who believe that they can fight are fooling themselves. There are a few who can. But they are mostly also the last people on earth who would want to fight. They understand the unpredictability of reality.