Training partners, the good, the bad and the ugly

Training partners, the good, the bad and the ugly

This is one of those marmite moments, you either love a training partner or hate them. I have in the past had a few, some have been brilliant, and some have almost killed me.

I think the one thing I can really be thankful for, was in the beginning I started training with a friend, we didn’t really know much about training but both wanted to get bigger and stronger, I guess it was me that wanted it more, so I did a lot of the reading up on routines and exercises and my mate, lets call him “Bob” for the sake of this blog post, would follow what I said, I suppose really Bob was my first client.

So Bob and I would go to the gym and I would read up on exercises and what the Bodybuilders of the day where doing, there was lots of “forced reps” “assisted reps” “negatives” going on and I would get Bob to help or force me to lift and taught him how I wanted spotting etc and Bob was really good and attentive and with both progressed well, getting really strong in some lifts. Bob (The Good) ended up moving away and I was at a loss with my training as I really needed that person there to spot for me.

I found another training partner let’s call him “Khan” (the bad), when we started training it seemed like Khan was going to be the same as Bob, helping with the spotting and forcing me to lift heavy and push harder and things where going ok, But, Khan had an eye for the girls, as we all did in our teens, but he would get very easily distracted when a pretty girl was in the gym, one particular time we where doing forced reps on the bench press and I was under the bar with a particularly heavy weight on it, normally I would have the spotter, Khan, with his hands under the bar just lightly touching my hands to re assure me that a spot was there, just as I was hitting failure a pretty girl walked past and his momentary lapse in concentration just as my triceps gave out ended with me trapped under the bar with it pushing dangerously close to my throat……needless to say that we stopped training together. My training continued without a training partner for many years until we were living in Portugal

I used to train a client at the US embassy gym in Lisbon and would occasionally train there after, Peter (the Ugly) was a US marine who was stationed there, we started training together, I’m sure he had ambitions of being a “Gunnery sergeant” what a sadistic bastard, He used to push me so hard I would crawl out of the embassy like I had just gone through a weeks basic training in 1 session, we trained together for about 3 months there until he went back to the US, I was definitely fitter and stronger than I had been for a long time. I lost touch completely with him when I moved back to the UK, though he did come back for a short trip when I had opened my first gym in Portugal.

THIS IS NOT PETER, BUT ANOTHER GUNNERY SARGEANT, JUST AS SCARY

So are training partners a good thing, I’m going to say yes they can be, both Bob and Peter helped me massively, Bob actually got me on my journey to becoming a Personal trainer and Peter got me fitter and stronger than I would have been without his input

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