Be a Good Training Partner

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Every training partner contributes to your progress in one way or another.

You do the same to your training partners.

But it would be much better if you were actually a good training partner.

You could define “good” in various ways.

Instead of listing up every potential quality of such a good training partner, let me focus on what I think is essential for a good training partner.

First thing first, though… you don’t have to be skilled. You could be a beginner. Your skill level doesn’t matter much, especially if we are talking about sparring and not specific drills that require certain reactions.

For me, a good training partner is someone I can trust. And this is often based on how much control they have with their own movements and how much they care about their safety and the safety of their training partners.

In other words… do they/are they likely to do some moves that could severely & unnecessarily injure their training partners? Like jumping guard on a lighter partner, applying a submission with excessive force/too quickly, and so on.

Good training partners are less likely to do such moves because they know what they are doing, and they understand sparring is not a fight to win.

Why should you be a good training partner in this sense? It’s pretty simple: people generally don’t want to train with partners who jump and land on their knees. But they do want to train with partners whom they can trust.

Be a good (i.e., safe & trustworthy) training partner, and you’ll have more people wanting to roll with you.