10th Planet Watch – 10th Planet Jiu Jitsu Van Nuys Blog

In the last article we talked about the importance of training partners, you can check out that artcle here. This is part 2.

Please, be kind to your training partners! These people are the ones helping you get better, train for tournaments, teach you new moves, give you details on existing moves. It’s not a competition to see who can hurt each other the best. This is already a rough enough sport, we don’t need to be getting injured every time we show up to class. This might seem pretty obvious, but don’t bully people. Yes, I am talking to you adults! What does that prove? Ok maybe, you’re entertained at some poor saps expense, but what happens when there’s no more poor saps to torture, because you’ve ran them all out of the gym. A bad training partner can make an otherwise fun sport a terrible experience. I’ve seen people avoid certain classes to avoid problem training partners. I’ve also heard of seen people leaving gyms because the owner or the coach never addressed these bad training partners and people were either injured or abused. At 10th Planet Van Nuys my coaches and I are very careful to address people who may be abusing their partners. I make sure they understand what they’re doing is not cool. If they continue to do it, I wont hesitate to protect my team, and remove that person from our gym.

Another thing to watch out for is the opponent resisting 100% or reversing the position on you during training. I’m not talking about when you’re rolling live, I’m talking about when we’re learning a move and drilling it. If I’m working my technique and the person keeps blocking my technique, chances are they’re, not helping, they’re just being a jerk. Maybe you have all the best intentions in the world by trying to show him what could happen, but first let’s learn the move before we start talking about the options of what could happen when some body does, “this or that.” Let your partner do the move, help them, correct them, but it’s just annoying if you shut them down. Sometimes it can be helpful, you don’t want your opponent getting in repetitionss of something that is incorrect, but you don’t have to go hard and fight them in order to show them what they’re doing is incorrect.

I’ll write some more on this later, you can always learn to be a better training partner. You can’t write enough material on this subject, if nobody talks about it, you’ll continue to have bad training partners. If you don’t want to speak up and tell your training partners about this stuff because it’s uncomfortable, then just link you’re team to this article.

Coach Alder Hampel

10th Planet Jiu Jitsu Van Nuys

www.10thplanetvannuys.com