It's hard to overstate the influence and importance of training partners. They give you extrinsic motivation to help get your ass in gear when you'd rather be on the couch with bonbons and a book. They holler encouragement when you're attempting a particularly challenging training set. They load for you, cheer for you at meets, and help you in the warm-up area.
 
Sufficiently enthusiastic training partners can make you feel like a rock star. But beyond the usual assistance that good training partners provide, they're essential to an even deeper type of motivation and reward. Your training styles may be quite different, giving and receiving feedback differently, and you’ll need to learn the cues that work for yourselves and each other. There are a few roles played by these folks, all of which are important to success. 
 
The Steadier
 
There will be times when you go to a competition and your coach won’t be available. Unless you have enormous presence of mind and the Zen-like calm of a swan on a summer evening, you will need to enlist a training partner to give you a hand in the warm up area. This person’s duties are not to teach. It will be far too late for that. They can, however, help you focus your mind on the task at hand, rather than flying out the window on a magic carpet of nerves.
 
You need someone who won’t spend the time socializing with others, but instead keep one eye on you, one eye on the goings-on in the warm up area, and one eye on the platform. Yes, I know this is three eyes, and it’s exactly what’s needed. You must be able to count on The Steadier to simply take over and for the duration of your session become entirely focused on helping you, watching the board to keep track of where you are in the sequence, making sure you sit down between warm-up attempts, loading your bar, managing your work-in with other lifters, and calling your weights.
 
This is a very big job, often a make-or-break factor for success, so make your selection for The Steadier role very carefully. It is a great opportunity for a training partner who has aspirations to coaching to practice the art of working the warm-up at meets.
 
The Encourager
 
The Encourager is the external motivator and principal weightlifting muse. You might train together in the evenings, often when tired after a long day, when additional mutual motivation is necessary to tackle the bar. Sometimes it will be on weekend mornings, when you feel lazy and need to help each other get up, get off your butts and get at it. The Encourager will play this role for you.
 
Another important trait of The Encourager is to always to be honest with you, telling you straight up when you are unfocused or your temper is getting out of control and you’re no longer doing yourself any good (in other words, acting like an asshat). At the same time, The Encourager understands when to shut up because talk won't help. That person knows the all-important helpful moment when it’s right to say, “that was great,” because it was good enough.
 
The Driver
 
This training partner is an experienced lifter who knows what to look for when observing others. He or she is accomplished and probably has years of training and competing under the belt, as it were, and will hopefully be a far better lifter than you are. The Driver is also wickedly hard on you, because you need it. You will find working out with this person to be quite stressful. You might even dread it. The Driver will exhibit incredible patience with your fumbling efforts but will not blow sunshine. The Driver picks apart your technique, and – here’s the best part - tests you.
 
The Driver will get you to attempt lifts that you would never try on your own. Let’s say it's two weeks out from an important meet where your goal is to get a qualifying total. You’re doing heavy cleans, up at 90 percent for a single, and inching toward your previous training max. Your typical process is to add 1 or 2 kilos at a time, figuring to play it safe. But The Driver figures that you’re on fire today, and puts the bar at 10 percent over your previous competition PR. This is serious stuff. You have no idea if you can do it, but The Driver says “I know you can do it. Do you know it?”
 
You huff and puff to yourself a bit, then make the attempt, and because you’re a little freaked out, maybe you pull it too high and your legs get stiff and your elbows get slow, and you dump it. With any other partner, you’d be spooked and back the weight off before trying again. But here’s the magic of lifting with Drivers: you don’t want to let them down. So, you take six deep breaths and go at it again – this time, a perfect lift. That's what The Driver can do for you. (Did you get a video? Nope. You forgot to do that. Because you were focused. You were being Driven).
 
The Joker
 
This partner is always a blast to train with, because he or she sets such a great example with skill, strength, and a perpetually great attitude. The Joker pairs encouragement with enthusiasm and kindness, which is extremely useful at meets or when training sessions are frustrating. When you’re laughing, it’s hard to stay angry at yourself.
 
As an example, my Joker sat beside me behind the curtain at PanAms, with my teeth gritted and my heart going like a hammer as the bar was loaded for my third snatch, saying, “competing is easy, it's the training that's hard.” And of course it is. I laughed and felt better.
 
The Joker reminds you again and again about one of the main reasons why you’re a weightlifter; because it’s supposed to be fun. You need someone to remind you that things could always be worse; after all, you could have chosen to run on a treadmill instead. Blessed is the lifting partner who can make you laugh.
 
The All-Rounder
 
It’s perhaps most important to have that one single training partner who is the amalgamation of all the above. And that person is you.
 
No one else will force you to workout at 5.30 am, with a mug of black java in one hand and your logbook in the other, to fit in an hour of supersets before work. No one else will make you tackle lifting when you’re tired and your ass is killing you from doing squats and lunges on the previous day. Sometimes only you will know exactly when to push yourself to new attempts and when to cool it. It's the stories that you tell in your own head that will make that difference.
 
Training partners can provide external help and motivation, but in the end, you are responsible for treating yourself right to support your hard and consistent training. It’s up to you to use the right internal language to successfully lift that extra kilo or do one more set of shrugs.
 
Even if you’ve been lifting and competing for years, you absolutely need a coach to provide expertise and valuable, actionable feedback on the stuff you can't see. Your training partners are essential as well. They should encourage your approach to the bar, celebrate with you when you succeed, and give moral support when things crash. But there are also times when you need to lift alone, to try things out without an audience, muddle through a problem without cues or commentary, and adjust and observe your actions on your own.
 
Everyone needs training partners to provide a grounding, calming influence, strong motivation, objective assessment and advice, a sense of humour and wise encouragement. It's important to offer the same to others with your own unique style, but don’t forget to be all these for yourself as well.