The real way to learn to fight is if you fight somebody who you know is willing to do you harm. Sparing in 'Controlled' environments are too artificial and choreographed to be proper training.

In a real life fight you will not know if your attacker is going to kick, punch, bite or throw himself at you. Although fighting technique does help immensely, you need to know how to implement it almost by instinct rather than choreography (as most dojos teach it) and be able to change and adapt your move based on the split second circumstance.

You can only learn that through real full contact fighting rather than the typical dojo 'I stand 1m apart and pretend to hit you with this move and you pretend defending a second after I do it' controlled environment.

I remember when I was a kid, I decided to do Karate for a few weeks - Boy that was a waste of time and money! All the moves were super artificially choreographed into awkward 'if I move I will trip over my leg' stances with lots of repetitive moves and stances that even as a 12 year old I could see how I could counter them through unorthodox thinking.

When it came to sparing, it was basically how I described it above 'I hit the air in front of you and then you hit the air in front of me' turn based training. I found it utterly ridiculous as there was no hope in hell that the school's method of teaching was going to work in a real life fight since there is no training on proper adaptive fighting and since the same style of training continued to higher belts, it became utterly pointless.

When it dawned on me how ridiculous the whole thing was during a sparing session, I decided to playfully kick 'my opponent' in the ass while he was waiting for a pretend punch. I found it hilarious but the other kid got really upset and almost cried although the kick wasn't hard enough to hurt him. He kept shouting 'Watch the contact! Watch the contact!' and then I knew I should probably quit since this show wasn't as advertised.