Sparring Etiquette, and the Jeff Chan Video Everyone Should Watch First

Most of what makes a sparring session good or bad has nothing to do with technique. It’s etiquette: how hard you go, who sets the pace, what you do when you get caught. Nobody writes these rules down, and beginners usually learn them by breaking one. Jeff Chan of MMAShredded made a video about exactly this, built from years of sparring at gyms all over the world, with clips of sessions that went well, sessions that went wrong, and a couple where he admits he was the one at fault. It’s the one we send people before their first rounds.

It’s an MMA video, with kicks, sweeps and one spinning elbow, and we don’t care. Every point in it transfers straight to boxing, because the problem is the same in any gym: two people with gloves on and different ideas about what “light” means. We’ve been fans of Jeff Chan for a long time. He shows sparring the way it should look, relaxed and playful with real technique and no ego, and he’s unusually willing to show his own mistakes on camera.

Hit as hard as you get hit

His baseline rule is simple: match your partner. If they go light, you go light. If they start hurting you, he’ll go up to around 80 percent even if they’re only at 70, because that’s the only language that gets the message across. He also says outright that this is not a license to hit everyone hard just because you’re fine being hit back. The default is to reply, never to initiate.

In boxing terms: nobody throws the first hard punch. If a round gets hard, it should be because both people agreed to it, not because one person decided and the other had to keep up.

The bigger or better person sets nothing

The part of the video that stuck with us most is about size and experience. In Thailand he sparred retired Muay Thai fighters, all over 40, all about 20 pounds lighter than him. He let them dictate the pace, went light and technical, and when they timed a sweep he didn’t fight it. His reasoning: if he had resisted with his size, they’d have had to go harder to land it, he’d have answered harder, and the round would have escalated on the back of an advantage he didn’t earn.

The bad example is the mirror image. A visitor at one of his camps in Bali, about 50 pounds heavier than him, opened their very first round with a hard shot. Jeff went up to 90 immediately, and considers the visitor’s opening the bad etiquette, because the significantly bigger person should let the smaller one set the pace. His line about it is worth remembering: bigger people underestimate how much of an advantage they have once power comes into play.

For boxing this is the rule that matters most, since size mismatches in a gym are constant. If you’re the heavier one, the more experienced one, or both, the intensity is not yours to decide. Let the other person show you what they’re comfortable with and stay there. A skilled fighter two weight classes above him did exactly that in another clip: he could have landed at will, pulled everything, and kept the round playful.

Light, then suddenly hard, then light again

A whole stretch of the video is about a pattern anyone who has sparred will recognize: tap, tap, tap, then one shot lands hard out of nowhere, then back to tapping. It confuses people, it breeds resentment, and it’s usually how light rounds turn into wars.

Jeff’s read is that a lot of it is misunderstanding. A sudden increase in speed can feel like an increase in power to the person on the receiving end, so they step it up, and then the first person steps up in response. In one session he took an explosive body kick as a challenge, went to 90 percent without a word, and only found out afterwards that his partner hadn’t meant to hit hard at all. He apologizes on camera. The lesson he draws is the one we’d give too: if your partner seems to be going hard, ask them why before you answer in kind, and tell them you’d rather do a light technical round. Thirty seconds of talking beats three minutes of escalation.

And if someone escalates because you’re moving too much and it annoys them, which happens to him in one clip, that’s on them. Being hard to hit is not a provocation.

When hard sparring is fine

He’s clear that hard sparring is not automatically bad etiquette. His guideline is that it should be maybe 20 percent of your sparring, when you’re preparing for a fight, and only with the right partner: someone you trust not to injure you, someone you respect, someone with no ego.

The clips with his long-time coach show what that looks like. They agree beforehand on full power to the body and half power to the head, and both stick to it. Because they trust each other, they can throw at speed, play with head movement, and try new things, knowing a clean shot won’t hurt anyone. That’s the argument for technical sparring over hard sparring in one scene: when rounds are hard, people play safe and stick to what they already do well. When they’re light and fast, they experiment, and that’s where the improvement is.

If you’re training for a fight and want harder rounds with someone you don’t know well, his advice is to say so and ask. If they agree, it’s fair. If you didn’t ask, it isn’t.

The boxing version, in short

• The default intensity is light. Nobody throws the first hard punch.
• The bigger, stronger, or more experienced person lets the other one set the pace and stays there.
• If a shot lands harder than expected, ask before you answer. Most of the time it wasn’t meant.
• Hard rounds are something both people agree to out loud beforehand, not something one person decides mid-round.
• Don’t go light, hard, light. Pick an intensity and hold it for the round.
• Gear matters. His spinning elbow with no pads has a boxing equivalent: nobody should be sparring in bag gloves or without a mouthguard.

He ends the video by saying the sport is ego driven, that everyone has been guilty of bad etiquette at some point, and that the best sparring he’s seen is between people who are fully capable of going hard and choose to keep it light, fast and technical. We agree with all of that. If you’re heading into your first sparring session, watch the video first and you’ll be ahead of most people in the room.

Keeping it light when nobody’s running the round

The hardest part of good etiquette is that it drifts. A coach in the room prevents that by giving every round a job: jabs only, body shots only, one attacks and one defends. When there’s no coach, the Shadow Boxing App can do that part. The new guided sparring workouts assign both boxers a rule per round, announce it before the bell, and remind you throughout to keep it light. It doesn’t replace good manners, but it removes the excuse.

The app is free to try, and everything else in it works alone if you don’t have a partner yet.