High School Wrestling: Off-Season and Summer Training

The popular high school style wrestling season is over. What are you doing now? Do you throw your wrestling shoes in the back of the closet and don’t look at them again until next November? Do you forget about weight training and conditioning until next November too? Do you spend all summer drinking sodas, eating ice cream and hanging out at the beach? I hope you answered no to all of these questions. If you want to excel in the sport of wrestling, you must train year-round.

Training all year

Very few high school state champions or NCAA champions wrestle only during the regular school season. Most elite fighters don’t just wrestle three or four months out of the year. Do you think Dan Gable or John Smith only struggled during high school folk style season or college season? No. They fought all year. They wrestled in both freestyle and folk style.

periodization

Periodization is simply planning your training for a specific period of time. There are different types of periodization, including linear, undulating, concurrent, and conjugate. Periodization consists primarily of three phases: the preparatory, competitive, and transition phases.

After the folkstyle season is over, you may find yourself fighting in some postseason knockdown tournaments. Also, you can start fighting in the spring freestyle season. Fighting in some spring freestyle tournaments can give you plenty of opportunities to work on your takedown skills. Freestyle season can be a time that seems a bit more relaxed. Freestyle offers a slight change of pace from the popular style, and you may not be as concerned about maintaining a certain weight.

You don’t want to get burned in wrestling. You also don’t want to overload your body. It’s a good idea to take a week or two off after folkstyle season to let your body rest. Try to take a week or two off your training at some point. Rest is an important component of periodization. You can decide not to fight freestyle. Maybe you’d rather just take a few weeks off and then start lifting weights and running a bit. Maybe your local school has open mat hours that you can go in and practice some moves. Freestyle is not everyone’s favorite.

summer camps

Summer camps do winter camps. You may have heard that phrase before. Attending camps and clinics can definitely help your fight continue to improve. My wrestling coach encouraged me to attend a wrestling camp over the summer. He thought a wrestler became too detached from wrestling and completely forgot about it until the following fall. I attended camps the summers after my sophomore and junior years of high school. I learned new moves and met some talented college wrestlers. I even heard Dan Gable speak and met him in person.

John Fritz (NCAA champion and former Penn State coach) used a quote in his summer camp brochure that read, “There will come a time when winter will ask you what you were doing all summer.” If you don’t spend some time wrestling over the summer or at least working on your conditioning, it will almost certainly have an effect on your wrestling success next season.

If wrestling or boot camps aren’t your thing or fit into your schedule, you might consider buying some technique videos to study over the summer. Maybe you could do some shadow fighting at home. Try doing some standing exercises and takedown exercises. Visualize and practice moves even if you’re not at camp or sparring with a wrestling partner. Some trainers have declared that your best training partner is yourself.

Summer can also be a good time to work on weaknesses. If you spent the season being muscled by your opponents, you may need to focus on strength training over the summer. If you ran out of “gas” in many of your games this season, you may need to really focus on improving your conditioning over the summer. Do some running, wind sprints and circuit training. Develop your work capacity and your GPP (general physical preparation). Fitting expert Matt Wiggins likes to talk about building a bigger “gas tank” so it can last longer and do more work over a longer period of time. You may want to investigate work capacity and GPP. You may also want to look into wrestling conditioning.

10,000 hour rules

Success in wrestling or any other endeavor in life may not have as much to do with talent as you think. Two books, The talent code and Outliers: The Success Story, both discuss something called the 10,000 hour rule. It takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve greatness or mastery in a certain area of ​​expertise. These books express the idea that even people considered “talented” by society actually practiced hard to reach their levels of greatness. Practice seems to be more important than innate talent. Even the famous composer Mozart put in years of practice to become an expert in his field of expertise.

Six-time world and Olympic wrestling champion John Smith has stated, “I think we use the word talent a lot. People say I had talent or this or that. I probably punched a million lower legs in my life. I probably punched a leg lace 40 or 50 times a day. I earned the right to be able to hit sharp techniques. It had nothing to do with talent.”

Basketball legend Michael Jordan is considered by many to be the greatest basketball player the sport of basketball has ever seen. However, Michael Jordan was cut from the varsity team during his sophomore year of high school. He hadn’t yet perfected his talent at that point in his life. He dedicated himself to practicing diligently to improve his basketball skills. That extra work and dedication obviously paid off.

Are you willing to put in thousands of practice hours to achieve your wrestling goals? Off-season and summer training is essential if you want to become a champion in the sport of wrestling.

I’m not trying to imply that you need to put in 10,000 hours of practice to become a state champion or even an NCAA champion wrestler. I am simply saying that the more you practice, the better you will be. Just make sure your technique is correct to begin with and then practice it religiously.

I have seen many elite athletes claim that they did not have as much innate talent. They were not special or gifted. But they put in several hours of dedicated practice to excel in their chosen sport. Therefore, if you spend the spring and summer fighting and practicing moves, you will have put in many more hours of practice compared to other fighters.

Commitment

Dan Gable continued to wrestle through the summer two to three times a week while in high school to keep the sport close. Even though he had summer jobs, he still found some time for wrestling. Masahiko Kimura, one of the greatest judokas of all time, sometimes practiced up to nine hours a day. Dan Gable worked out seven hours a day, seven days a week while preparing for the Olympics. Boxing legend Rocky Marciano was known to train year-round. Rocky Marciano is considered by many to be the best conditioned boxer the sport of boxing has ever seen. But it was not always like this. In an early amateur fight against a former Golden Gloves champion, he wore himself out early in the fight. He was ultimately disqualified. He vowed to never be out of condition for a fight again. He retired undefeated.

I mostly wrestled four months out of the year except for attending a week of wrestling camp over the summer. I always did some conditioning during the summer months, like running and lifting weights. I was a conference champion and a state qualifier my senior year. That’s not too bad considering the amount of effort I put in. However, he could have been much better if he had been more committed to training in the off-season. Be sure to dedicate some time to your wrestling and conditioning throughout the year. You can excel at wrestling if you don’t neglect training in the off-season.