Training

What is training?

Training (English: training, the same word) is, within BDSM, teaching behavior by repeating it in a fixed context with feedback on it. It covers postures, forms of address, tasks or habits. That makes training the part of discipline that takes time: you agree the rules, you build the behavior.

What training looks like in practice

Like something small that comes back often, and otherwise nothing special.

A common form is one agreement at one fixed moment. For example: every night before bed she sends a message with three sentences about how her day went. No ceremony, no scene. The first week it’s a chore she half forgets. The second week she notices she’s already thinking in the afternoon about what goes in it. Somewhere in the third week the message writes itself, and the moment she sends it is the moment her day ends.

That’s what training is about. Not the act, which is trivial. It’s what forms when an act gets a fixed place. You see the same thing in miniature during an evening appointment: the third time someone takes the same posture on the same word, nothing more needs to be said.

Where the word training comes from

From horse racing and hunting, and further back from the Latin for “to pull”.

The Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands traces trainen back to English train, “to instruct, to teach” (1542), before that “to treat in order to get into the right or desired shape” (around 1440), and earlier still traynen, “to pull along, to coax” (1375). English borrowed that from French traîner, “to pull, to drag along”, which goes back through Vulgar Latin to trahere, “to pull”.

The oldest Dutch attestation is uncomfortable and worth knowing. Around 1636 it’s about dogs that won’t go after big game “om dat se daer op niet en zijn getreent”. Only much later does it shift to people: “allen kunnen zich trainen” in 1893, and according to Van Veen and Van der Sijs the sports meaning arrives around 1898. So anyone who uses the word in a D/s arrangement is using a word that first meant animals and then athletes. That is exactly why some people won’t say it.

Why people want training

Because something forms that a single evening can’t make.

The pull is in continuity. A scene ends when the door closes; an arrangement that comes back every day doesn’t end. There’s relief in it too: as long as the act is fixed, you don’t have to figure out each day what you’re supposed to do.

• For you, training gives you a fixed moment that belongs to the two of you, even on days when nothing special happens.
• For the other person, it gives attention you can’t fake: a training nobody keeps up disappears within two weeks.
• For the two of you together, it gives speed. What’s worn in doesn’t need discussing anymore, and that makes room for the things that do deserve it.

Training changes behavior, not feeling. Someone can kneel flawlessly and feel nothing doing it, and no amount of practice turns someone into a submissive who isn’t one.

How people build training

Usually too fast, and that’s exactly where it goes wrong.

What learning psychology says about it is counterintuitive. Nicholas Cepeda and colleagues pulled together 839 measurements from 317 experiments in Psychological Bulletin and found that the interval that yields the most grows longer the longer you want to remember something. Translated to an evening: practicing a posture four times spread over a month yields more than twenty times in one evening, however serious that evening feels.

In practice: little at a time and often. Start three things at once and you usually keep none.

What training is not

“Training is something for a very small group.” The opposite is true. In Jennifer Rehor’s kink study, with 1,580 female participants, 69.56 percent reported doing “obedience/training” in some form. More interesting is the imbalance within that: 44.81 percent had received it and only 23.80 percent had done it to someone else. So of the women who know this, nearly twice as many are on the receiving side.

“After 21 days it’s a habit.” That number comes from nowhere. The research that actually measures how long behavior takes to wear in, with outcomes from 18 to 254 days, is laid out on rules. Three weeks is the optimistic end of that.

“Training is a polite word for punishing.” No, and that’s more than a nuance. Punishment is one of the things a discipline arrangement can hold, alongside rules and reward. Training is the building-up part: repetition, feedback, and only much later something that resembles a consequence.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years active in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. What strikes me most often is that women who bring this up arrive with a big plan and a short breath. Seven rules, three rituals, a schedule. Two weeks later none of it is left.

What does stick is almost always the smallest thing in that plan, and you recognize the turning point by something unexpected: she tells me on her own that it didn’t work one time. That’s where the habit became hers instead of mine.

The other pattern: almost no one asks how you stop. A training no one keeps up any longer stops being a training. It becomes a quietly broken agreement, and that feels bad.

What you can do yourself

• Pick one behavior, not three. Anything you can’t do every day is an intention, not a training.
• Attach it to a moment that already exists, like breakfast or bedtime, so you don’t have to remember it separately.
• Agree on how you give feedback, and do it positively more often than correctively. A training made only of corrections is one no one can sustain.
• Spread the practice moments instead of stacking them into one evening; in Cepeda and colleagues, spacing wins as soon as you want something to stick.
• Consider which side you’re on. In Rehor’s study nearly twice as many people receive this as perform it, and those two roles ask for very different things.
• Agree in advance on how the training ends, so that stopping is a decision and not neglect.

Further reading on training

Within this glossary, discipline explains the whole that training fits into, position training covers the posture side with its own research, and rules and protocol describe the written and the formal side.

Beyond that, the meta-analysis by Cepeda and colleagues gives the clearest picture of why spacing beats stacking, and Jennifer Rehor’s study is the one place you can see how often this really happens and on which side.

Where this fits on this site

Training takes time, and a one-off appointment doesn’t have it. If you do want to feel what it’s like when an act comes on a single word instead of after an explanation, that’s possible within one evening: the page on the BDSM date shows how such an appointment is built up and what we go over beforehand.

Sources

• Sensual, Erotic, and Sexual Behaviors of Women from the “Kink” Community. Jennifer Eve Rehor, Archives of Sexual Behavior 44(4), 825-836, 2015 (DOI 10.1007/s10508-015-0524-2, PMID 25795531, PMCID PMC4379392; full text read via Europe PMC). Questionnaire study with 1,580 female participants covering more than 126 behaviors, deliberately outside clinical and forensic samples. Provides the “Obedience/training” row from table 2 with 69.56 percent participation in some form, and the breakdown within it: 23.80 percent did it to another, 44.81 percent received it, 57.15 percent did or received it, and 41.65 percent watched it. On /en/term/domestic-service a different row and a different column from this table are used; the numbers above appear nowhere else on this site.
• Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Nicholas J. Cepeda, Harold Pashler, Edward Vul, John T. Wixted & Doug Rohrer, Psychological Bulletin 132(3), 354-380, 2006 (DOI 10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354, PMID 16719566; both checked separately). Meta-analysis of the spacing effect. Provides the scope, “839 assessments of distributed practice in 317 experiments located in 184 articles”, and the core finding that the interval that yields the most grows larger the further away the moment of retrieval lies. The study is about remembering word lists, not BDSM; applying it to building a posture or a ritual is my inference, stated here on this page.
• trainen (oefenen). Etymologiebank, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal, accessed 9 August 2026. Bundles the dictionary entries this page uses: the Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands (Philippa et al., 2003-2009) with the borrowing from English train “to instruct, to teach” (1542), the older meanings “to treat in order to get into the right or desired shape” (around 1440) and traynen “to pull along, to coax” (1375), the origin in French traîner and Latin trahere “to pull”, and the dated Dutch attestations from around 1636 about hunting dogs (“om dat se daer op niet en zijn getreent”) to 1893 and 1909 about people; plus Van Veen & Van der Sijs (1997) with 1898 as the dating of the sports meaning, and De Vries (1971) with “sedert de 19de eeuw als sportterm”.

Related terms

Training is the process; the pages below are about the frame, the parts, and the moments within it.

• Discipline. The whole of rules, training, reward and punishment that this is a part of.
• Position training. The same build-up, but only for postures.
• Rules. The agreements that give the training its shape.
• Protocol. The code of conduct in which trained behavior becomes visible.
• Maintenance spanking. What happens when an agreement is maintained apart from violations.
• Praise kink. The feedback that keeps training going, and where that comes from.