Is it better to have a compliant training partner or a non-compliant partner? A compliant partner being one who goes with every movement as if you performed it flawlessly. A non-compliant partner being someone who is stiff and resists or even counters everything you attempt to do in your training. As with many myths, there is a grey area. I believe both training partners are needed. Therefore, in my opinion, complaint partners are not useless.

Most martial arts require a training partner to perform some or all of your material. Someone to perform a predetermined attack at you so you can perform a predetermined defense that you are attempting to learn and train. For instance, in Hapkido, one of the first joint locks we learn is an armbar
from a single hand grab attack. The attacker reaches out to grab part of you as they attempt to throw a punch or reach for their weapon, or to simply control you or a limb.

You grab the opponent’s hand or wrist with one hand and apply pressure to the back of their elbow to lock it and create an armbar to take the opponent down to the ground and control them. Should the “attacker” relax and just go with it, even if your technique isn’t great due to it being the first time you
have attempted it? Or should they be resistant and tighten their grip and tense up or even start punching you while you clumsily attempt to remember the grips and positioning to apply the technique while you stress out a bit as the technique does not seem to be working due to your poor technical skills?

Both approaches have their merits and downfalls. A compliant partner is useful as it gives you time to lightly apply and control the defense without needing to slam into a joint lock or throw. This keeps the practice safe and gives the defender time to focus on details that would otherwise be missed. On the other hand, a non-compliant partner will show you how you will perform in a more realistic situation as a real attacker will not be compliant. This forces you to expect the unexpected and truly apply the technique for it to work.

I am a firm believer that both of these training methods should be used at appropriate times. Your training partner should be just as involved in helping you learn a technique than you are. This is where I find many students, specifically youth, tend to fail. I see it quite often. A student half-heartedly throws a weak punch, with a terrible stance, casually near their training partner. Then just waits for the defender to get done and move on. This not only does not help your training partner, but it doesn’t help you and actually hurts your partners attempts at learning.

When I first started training in Hapkido back in the mid 1990’s, I was by far the youngest and smallest student at the age of fifteen and 125 pounds soaking wet. My training partners? Adult law enforcement officers, military, and security personnel that were twice my size and age. “Go easy” was not a phrase that was understood nor uttered by anyone. Thankfully, I was flexible and resilient. Nonetheless, trying to explain the bruises and cuts, limping and headaches to teachers and friends was not always easy.

While I felt this extreme resistance by my training partners was definitely leading me to refining my techniques to make them actually work, I began to see the downfall to this style of training. One by one, training partners dropped out due to injuries. Others asked to apply the joint lock to the “other” arm as “this” arm is a bit too sore. I saw my training partners become more and more limited. I survived simply due to my youthful resilience and ignorance over my own mortality.

I eventually gravitated towards the training partners that were a lot lighter in their resistance and more compliant. That allowed me to practice my technique safely and injury free. However, I had to often “test” the technique on my more stubborn partners in an effort to spot the holes in my technique and application. I eventually spent more and more time with my compliant partners than my non-compliant partners.

Luckily, sparring was a fairly consistent aspect of my training. That helped ground me and my thoughts that my technique was flawless. This makes me wonder, however, how many people stay in this comfortable spot of compliant training partners? I fear, more often than not, people will choose the
compliant training partner over the non-compliant. Therefore, it is on the instructor to help facilitate this switching of partners.

Adding sparring in isn’t enough though. Sparring is great within set boundaries. Two actively resistant combatants sparring through set rules/conditions. However, that does not encapsulate all of self-defense. As I have mentioned in a previous myth about joint locks, there are several stages and scenarios when it comes to self-defense.

For instance, techniques such as eye gouging, groin strikes, and small digit (fingers/toes) manipulation is generally frowned upon when sparring. In other instances, the timing in which techniques are applied is important. Most joint locking control techniques are done at the onset of an attack, not mid-fight.
Therefore, the attacker is focused on the attack and not typically expecting joint manipulation as retaliation. It’s subtle and quick.

Try using standing wrist, elbow, and shoulder locks during a sparring match. You will find it’s all but useless. Yet apply it to an attacker who decided to place their hands on you and get in your face, and that success rate goes up as they are not expecting it. This leads me to another issue I have had with
non-compliant partners. They know what is coming.

When a non-compliant partner is grabbing you to practice your techniques, they know, at the very least, that you are intending to do a defense. Even if they are not attempting to resist 100%, subconsciously, they know how to resist your movements. A stronger grip, a strengthening of their arm, the lowering of their chin to avoid a strike to the neck, and so on. A real attacker is not going to be resisting in this manner. They will be focused on the punch they are about to throw, or the words they want to shout in your face. Not lowering their chin and tightening their grip to make sure your defense doesn’t work as planned.

The combination of when and how to make use of compliant and non-compliant partners is crucial in my opinion. What makes it more difficult is that every person is different, and every system is different. I’ll layout a plan as a template. However, know that one size does not fit all. This is my attempt for the average person.

All new techniques should be first practiced with a compliant partner. Your training partners goal at first is to help you succeed in making the technique work. Once you have accomplished this, your training partner should slowly add to the resistance to help find holes in the application of your technique. Once you see consistent success in this phase, it’s time to step up the resistance a bit while applying additional movements such as throwing a punch when your partner sees an opening during the application. In Hapkido, with compliant partners, we tend to forget our face is wide open or that we
cannot just regrip a limb and expect it to stay there for you. This is a crucial phase that gets overlooked by students.

Notice that at no point I called for 100% resistance. As mentioned previously, I do not find that to be realistic when you know what’s coming. I believe moving and attempting to throw punches in the process as the non-compliant partner is what’s most important and most realistic. It is important to note
that there is really no end to these attempts to step up the resistance in various forms. Different training partners are great for this as everyone moves, reacts, and resists in different ways. The point is, there is no end to your training, and nothing should ever be seen as “good enough” or “done”.

Your rank is another important part of this phase-like training. I do not expect my white belts to do much more than understand a technique I’m teaching them and be “ok” with their ability to apply it. Generally speaking, that’s how I look at all of my color belt ranks. I expect the basics to be solid and well
understood and consistently applied to a non-compliant partner.

It’s at black belt where the most variations and refinement happens. The way you apply a joint lock at black belt should be considerably different than how you applied it at green belt. This is heavily due to more non-compliant training partners. Understand that the biggest key to all of this is that your training partner must work to be a good partner and help you find success. Even if that means finding ways to make you fail.

To conclude, both compliant and non-compliant partners are needed. Yet every martial art and every student is different in which needs more attention. Compliant partners will lead to a false sense of security in your skills, and you’ll never actually have your skills battle tested. Non-compliant partners,
while helping you understand some of the realities of resistance, may falsely apply resistance and will most likely lead to numerous injuries. This will also be a much slower process in learning your material compared to compliant training. The best route is to make use of both training styles with the guidance of your instructor.