Training partners

For last week’s blog, most of you find the obvious related articles, however, most of you missed the point about ‘partners’. It is at the end of the list and it almost seems like a “by the way” end of the list. Most of us think that we know how to be a good partner when in fact there are lots of room for improvement.

Just like any relationships, there are certain key success factors to keep in mind:

• code of conduct
  • don’t change what you are suppose to be practicing. Stay within the context of goal/training.
  • be courteous. It is not about winning or losing. In a training environment, there is no glory to winning and neither is there to losing. It is all about constant improvements.
• expectations and responsibility
  • Understand the goal of the exercise. Ask if you don’t understand.
  • The exercise has to be meaningful for both. Ask if you are failing to see where you can improve. If you are just doing mindless feeding of punches, kick or push, you are missing some valuable learnable moments. “Reading your opponent” is part of the “S” in SDAA.
  • Your partner cannot guess what you need or expect. Communicate if you need some interim adjustments as progression towards the end-goal.
  • Help your partner improve should be the goal. If you make it unrealistically easy (or too difficult when they are not ready), your partner cannot learn or improve. By helping them, you learn to spot errors. What is even more important is the corrections you help give helps you understand techniques at a deeper level.
  • Every partner is different from physical (height, length of limbs, body weight, endurance, strength, flexibility), mental (reaction, age, analytical thinking, ability to handle stress, etc), experience, preferences and much more. Every such interaction is important.
  • Remember to ask for help when you need it.
• care
  • Accept imperfections – when it is heading the right direction but not yet at the end destination, accept it, give them a high-5 and yet let them know there is still a long ways to go.
  • We all have a long way to go to perfect anything. Use encouraging comments like “yes, it is better than the last time, try it again to get it even better”. Use action words like “Stay lose” and sometimes even physically assist them in losening up works much better than “Too tight”, “totally wrong”.

All of you are partners to each other in the journey and even to me. I am improving every year because of my interactions with all of you!

Exercise
Design one interactive exercise to physically drill some of the concepts we talked about before.
Exercise is NOT OPTIONAL. Penalties applies starting this week.