I first wanted to name this guide “How to Piss Off your Training Partner and Get Your Butt Whipped” but figured that might be a bit excessive… Not everything in my top three list will get you beat up in class, so some moderation is in order. But this behavior does often result in the offender getting either a beating, a couple of nasty blows under the radar or at the very least the training partner doesn’t want to play anymore. In a way, this guide is the opposite of this one about how to train at a new martial arts school or gym.
What am I talking about? Annoying the crap out of your training partner. Doing things that piss him off because he either doesn’t get to train like he wants to or you do something dangerous, something that can cause him injury. Over the years, I’ve experienced a lot of situations in which I wanted to tear my partner’s head off. Sometimes it was necessary to get rough on that partner to make him stop, other times I just had to point out what he was doing and ask him to stop it. And there were also instances where I lost my patience and had to restrain myself from doing damage. We’re all human and nobody has endless patience. And sometimes you just don’t have a choice.
To place this in proper context, there are a couple of reasons why training partner’s end up pissing you off and it isn’t always clear which one it is: