The 5 Types of Training Partners Who Can Ruin Your Night

I've spent a lot of years training in combat sports, and I've learned that having good training partners is one of the most valuable things you can have. The right person can push you, teach you something, expose a weakness and make you better without ever needing to say much. The wrong person can turn a perfectly good night of training into an experience that makes you question why you decided to take up grappling in the first place.

Most of these people aren't bad people. That's what makes this list interesting. They're usually just training in a way that creates problems for everyone around them. After enough years in gyms, you start to recognize the types.

Here are five training partners who can ruin your night.

1. The Human Petri Dish

Let's start with the obvious one.

The Human Petri Dish has somehow managed to turn personal hygiene into an optional part of martial arts training. The gi smells like it has been fermenting since Tuesday. The rash guard is doing things that modern science probably hasn't fully explained. The belt has never seen a washing machine. Toenails are long enough to qualify as grappling hooks, and you aren't entirely sure whether that red spot on his arm is a mat burn or something that requires its own zip code.

This isn't just unpleasant. In grappling, hygiene is part of being a responsible training partner. You're putting your face against somebody, grabbing their clothing, spending several minutes wrapped around them and occasionally getting sweat directly into places you would prefer sweat not be. Everyone in the room has a responsibility to keep themselves and their equipment clean.

Nobody should have to choose between getting submitted and contracting something.

Wash the gi. Wash the rash guard. Shower before and after training when appropriate. Keep your nails trimmed. Clean your equipment. Cover anything questionable and, if you have a skin infection, stay off the mats until it's safe to return.

This one isn't complicated. Don't be the guy everyone avoids pairing with because they can smell him from across the room.

2. The Human Wrecking Ball

The Human Wrecking Ball believes every round is a fight for the world championship.

It doesn't matter whether the coach said we're doing technical work, positional sparring or light rounds. Once the timer starts, this guy is fighting for his life. You're trying to work a particular escape and suddenly you're defending a submission like your family is being held hostage. You agree to light sparring and somehow discover that your partner has interpreted "light" to mean approximately 90 percent.

I like hard training. I like competitive training. Combat sports are supposed to be difficult, and there are times when training needs to be very intense. But intensity is a tool. It isn't the purpose of every round.

A good training partner understands that different rounds have different purposes. Sometimes I need you to give me a realistic problem. Sometimes I need you to let me work. Sometimes we need to go hard. Sometimes we need to slow down and figure something out. If the intensity never changes, you're not really adapting your training to the goal.

You're just hitting the same button over and over.

3. The Technique Police

The Technique Police is the person who somehow becomes your coach five minutes after you meet them.

You make a mistake and immediately the round stops. "What you should have done was..." Then comes the demonstration. Then another demonstration because apparently the first demonstration wasn't convincing enough. Before long, you've received a complete technical seminar from someone you didn't ask to coach you.

Again, this usually comes from a good place. Experienced training partners should help each other. If someone asks a question, answer it. If you see something genuinely important that needs to be addressed, by all means speak up.

But there is a difference between helping your training partner and taking over their learning process.

Sometimes people need to struggle with a problem. They need to make the wrong decision, feel why it doesn't work and eventually discover a better answer. If someone is constantly telling you what to do, they may be solving the problem for you instead of helping you learn to solve it yourself.

And let's be honest: if the coach is standing three feet away, there is probably a reason we're paying attention to him instead of the guy who just got promoted to Assistant Professor of Everything.

4. The Competitive Black Hole

The Competitive Black Hole cannot allow you to have anything.

You sweep him? He immediately has to sweep you back. You pass his guard? He has to get it back. You catch him with a submission? The next three minutes become an emergency operation to restore his honor.

There is nothing wrong with being competitive. In fact, I think a good training room should be competitive. Competition creates resistance, forces people to solve problems and gives everyone a reason to work harder.

The problem comes when winning every exchange becomes more important than getting better.

Sometimes your training partner should beat you. Sometimes you should deliberately start in a bad position. Sometimes you should try something you know probably won't work. Sometimes you should allow your partner to work because you're trying to develop something other than your ability to shut them down.

The best training partners I've had were extremely competitive. They wanted to beat me, and I wanted to beat them. But we also understood that sometimes the best thing that could happen in a training session was to get beat. We weren't there just to prove who was better that night. We were there to get better.

There is a difference.

5. The Mystery Partner

The Mystery Partner is perhaps the most difficult person to train with because you never know which version you're going to get.

One night they're technical, controlled and completely reasonable. The next night something apparently happened on the drive to the gym and they arrive with the intensity of a man who has been personally insulted by the existence of the martial arts.

You start with a normal round. Everything feels good. Then suddenly the intensity goes from three to eleven and you're trying to figure out whether you missed an announcement about this being a fight night.

The problem isn't simply that they're going hard. The problem is that you can't predict what they're going to do.

Good training requires some degree of trust. You need to know that the person across from you is going to give you an appropriate level of resistance and that the two of you can adjust that resistance based on what you're trying to accomplish. If you have to spend half the round figuring out whether your partner is going to suddenly explode, you're spending mental energy managing the training partner instead of training.

Consistency matters.

The Training Partner You Want to Be

The funny thing about these five people is that most of them aren't trying to ruin anyone's night. The Human Wrecking Ball probably thinks he's tough. The Technique Police probably thinks he's helping. The Competitive Black Hole probably thinks he's making everyone better by refusing to give an inch. The Mystery Partner may not even realize how unpredictable he is.

That's why being a good training partner is actually a skill.

A good training partner knows when to push and when to give space. They can provide resistance without turning every round into a fight. They can help without trying to become the coach. They can compete hard without becoming selfish. They understand that sometimes the best thing they can do for themselves is make their partner better.

That's especially important in a sport like BJJ or MMA because your development is tied to the people around you. You need partners who will expose your weaknesses, challenge you, let you experiment and occasionally make you feel like you have absolutely no idea what you're doing.

And you need to be that person for somebody else.

The best training rooms I've been part of weren't necessarily the rooms with the toughest people. They were the rooms where people cared about getting better and cared about helping the people around them get better at the same time.

That's a pretty good standard for a training partner.

Just don't show up smelling like a science experiment.