Over the years it has become a common sight to see a class of taekwondo students practising sparring wearing hand, feet pads and headguards using a variety of mid to high section techniques against their training partners to limited target areas who then return similar techniques back in a controlled manner.

Watching these skilful practitioners demonstrating their showy techniques would leave the onlookers with the impression that Taekwondo is only for the young, super fit and technically gifted, but this is far from the truth.
Taekwondo was originally developed as self defence for soldiers on the battlefield, so in the event of losing their weapon would still be able to defend themselves, so techniques employed would have to have been simple and very effective.
Looking at the patterns in Taekwondo will reveal self defence techniques such as grabbing, elbow strikes, knee strikes, joint locking, palm strikes, sweeping and striking to vulnerable areas.

Of course sparring has to be regulated in the name of safety due to the large number of junior students practicing Taekwondo, and the combat sport side of the art can valuable to develop awareness, understanding distancing and timing, as well as building confidence and aiding in adrenaline management, all important factors in a confrontation.

But for the more mature student who’s reason for taking up Taekwondo was purely for the purpose of self defence then the practise of the techniques found in the patterns and how and at what range to apply them are of paramount importance, and although the practise of patterns represent the ideal application of the techniques with a little adaptation in both attack and defence a student can learn effective self defence skills.

The techniques for self defense that are employed in training and sparring must be effective and workable in a real situation {i.e. against wild untrained attacks rather than well executed Taekwondo techniques}, this is not to say that sparring should not be safe, or that safety equipment should not be used but the introduction of hand pads in Taekwondo has over the years ceased the application of open hand techniques such as palm striking to grabbing to grappling, joint locking and throwing, by sparring with no hand pads and students grabbing flailing limbs will bring them into grappling range that allow all the close quarter techniques to be applied, elbows, knees, open hand strikes, sweeps, locks, and takedowns.

The training drills can be varied from practicing the specific moves employed in grappling range or from both students starting at distance with striking techniques and then moving into grappling range, this kind of sparring is very messy but a real physical confrontation is very messy.
Students must be supervised and still use a degree of control during this kind of training and training partners must respect each others threshold gradually building up the intensity, heavier contact can be introduced with the addition of body shields shin, forearm guards and head guards.

Sparring with different partners will learn a student to question the effectiveness of certain techniques against bigger stronger opponents, if practiced in sparring then the instinctive skills needed for self defense can be made aware of and the more realistic the attack the more the student will be prepared for in a real life threat.