Training Buddies and Borrowing Ideas

Get a training buddy.

You can have one in real life that you actually get together with, but it's not necessary. People tell me frequently how lucky I am that I have my faithful sidekick (who is better than I am) Bradley to get thrown around by. Reality is that I'm only a little luckier than everyone else because of this cool get-up called the internet which in some ways makes the globe a bit like a neighborhood, at least in terms of communication. Cell phones with nation-wide calling plans condense the areas we live in even further.

My training partner and I trade off "I did this today" stories frequently, and if one of us lagged behind the other in terms of time invested or difficulty of the drills we worked, as often as not, we pick up our sorry tails and do some more whenever time and life allow. I know that personally it's committed me to a lot of training I wouldn't have done otherwise. There's no reason this kind of relationship wouldn't work electronically, though, since most of what my partner and I do is talk. We only usually see each other once a week, maybe twice (at the group get-togethers and occasionally otherwise).

We're also borrowing an idea from the increasingly popular program Cross-Fit. Our goal isn't to replicate their kind of workout so much as it is to kind of keep each other going. While grinding techniques for raw numbers is usually a bad thing, as can be turning to the clock, it makes a nice little motivator to set up a workout (we take turns) and then both, separately, try to meet it as our daily minimum: maybe it's turn at least for x minutes or to make sure we do at least y repetitions of some saber drill. Perhaps it's more ambiguous like "hit chopping strikes hard and seriously." Maybe it's a combination of these kinds of things or several others.

This kind of accountability is great for keeping motivation up. It catches the phasing "eh... I'll let training slide today because..." right by the tail and helps us both get more out of ourselves than we might have otherwise. It also solidifies our relationship.

Maybe in the future we can get some kind of system like this set up more formally and in a more widespread manner. Who knows? If you have a great workout to suggest, though, leave a comment!