— This paper deals with throughput oriented Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC) techniques combined with cooperative protocols where terminals are constrained by half-duplex assumption and average total network power. We propose a novel hybrid cooperation protocol that switches from cooperative to non-cooperative transmission based on the momentary direct source-destination link quality. Then, we propose an hybrid cooperative AMC mechanism, which combines AMC with hybrid cooperation. Simulation results show that our proposal improves the average system performance and reduces the average cooperation signaling cost.