Training Against Uncooperative Partners
Burton Richardson & Randy Couture
This is the third in six posts on “what makes Hertao different”. You can find the six concepts in a list at the bottom of our home page.
One of the great strengths of MMA and sport based martial arts like boxing, kickboxing, judo, BJJ, etc, is that the majority of time spent training is against an uncooperative partner. In sport based systems practitioners compete against each other and quickly discover what works and what doesn’t work. But all too often in traditional martial arts and so called “reality based self defense”, training never progresses to the level where your partner is completely uncooperative.
Burton Richardson, from JKD Unlimited, has a great saying:
If you want to learn how to fight, you have to practice fighting against someone who is fighting back.
Not many people would disagree with that statement, yet so many people fail to put it into practice. There are several levels at which your partner needs to be uncooperative if you want to be able to defend yourself: in resistance, form, and technique.
Progressive resistance (gradually increasing the physical resistance to your techniques as your skill increases) is essential, but it’s not enough. Your training partners also need to use form that doesn’t match the style you’re practicing. For example, a wing chun practitioner that only deals with straight line vertical punches thrown by other wing chun practitioners will likely be hit by an unskilled opponent throwing a punch at an angle they’ve never trained against. You and your training partners must vary the form of attacks to include form used by other styles and by unconventional fighters.
In addition to progressive resistance and form variations, free sparring must be done where any and all techniques are allowed. No real attacker is going to limit attacks to those you’ve trained, so you need to be prepared for anything. Every particular style has limitations. Even though boxers train against uncooperative opponents, they don’t train against takedowns from grapplers. Self defense training must include all three levels of “uncooperativeness”: resistance, form, and technique.
