Our school has a designated sparring night once each week. We start with drills (action reaction and/or you go I go), then move into sparring with specific instructions (often involving isolation) and then into free sparring - but with control (hit to "score", not to injure) and some rules (no head contact for ranks below brown belt, no sweeps/throws below brown belt, etc...).
Much of our regular curriculum involves self-defense and how we'd use classroom model techniques in real-life situations (adaptions, reaction drills, etc). Sparring for us is often less about self defense and more about tournament sparring and learning to read opponents, see openings, things like that - because we cover other aspects on other nights.
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