High School Wrestling: What Elite Wrestlers Know That You Don’t

Many wrestlers focus on learning new moves. We are very focused on the movements in the United States when it comes to wrestling. However, wrestling is more than just knowing moves. Some wrestlers know the seven basic skills of wrestling: stance, movement, level change, drive, step back, back arch, and lift. But, elite fighters know certain concepts that you may not be familiar with. If you’re familiar with all of these concepts, great. On the other hand, if your wrestling isn’t as successful as you’d like it to be, hopefully you can employ some of the following concepts to improve.

Posture and maintenance of posture

The stance is one of the seven basic skills of wrestling. It’s probably the first concept you learn in wrestling. What constitutes good posture? Proper stance allows you freedom of movement, as well as the ability to protect yourself from your opponent’s offensive attempts.

You don’t want to be too upright. You don’t want to look like the plastic wrestler you see standing on top of the trophies. Your opponent shouldn’t be able to read your shirt. Usually you want to fight head to head. Your posture should be quite low. You want to be like a coil spring or sprinter ready to explode on your shot. He typically moves back and forth in a lead leg stance and in circles with a square stance.

Olympian John Smith talks about keeping your elbows in your pockets. He just says that usually you want your elbows tight to protect yourself. Also, you should not reach, throw or stumble. Sometimes you can just approach your opponent in good stance and wait for him to reach out and make contact first. Or, you can circle around and stalk your opponent until you’re face-to-face, then catch up with your opponent. Then, as former NCAA champion Tom Brands would say, you want to put on heavy hands, get into a commanding head position, and move your feet.

Olympian Dan Gable talks about turning your body into a block. Your arms are not easy to grasp because they are close to you. His head is tucked into his shoulders so that his head is not easy to grab.

When moving forward or back in your stance, you should continue with your lead leg or power leg forward so that you are always ready to shoot when the opportunity presents itself. Good posture maintenance is important. Ideally, your shooting hand should be free and protecting your lead leg.

Manual fight and movement of your opponent

What is hand wrestling? Hand wrestling is a bit of a misnomer. It’s kind of a misleading term. You don’t want to go out and start grabbing hands and wrists and slapping your opponent.

Former NCAA Champion Daryl Weber states, “Hand wrestling is basically knowing where you want to be, where you have the best chance to score, forcing it on your opponent, and also knowing how to unbind your opponent and get back to where you feel comfortable.”

Unfortunately, many wrestlers don a neck and elbow tie and just dance with each other. Or, wrestlers grab with their hands but don’t move their feet. You need to move your opponent. You have to push and pull and spin and really commit to it.

Elite wrestlers like Cory Cooperman and Bill Zadick will tell you that both your hands and feet need to move. When your hands move, your feet should move.

The Purler brothers will tell you that a good hand grappling creates a move that helps you unbalance an opponent and set up attacks.

Another benefit of proper hand wrestling can be tiring out your opponent. You can wear out his neck, back, and hamstrings. You can really take it out. Many wrestlers just don’t want to work that hard. If you can’t take down your opponent in the first period, you can get a takedown in the second or third period by wearing down your opponent with the right hand early in the game.

You also need to learn how to properly spread out, block down, and reshoot.

angles

When it comes to finding angles, Daryl Weber states, “The higher the competition, the tougher the competition, the more important this becomes. You don’t want to be just shooting straight at your opponents. That works a lot of the time, but when you’re competing against better competitors who know how to react, who have strong hips and good balance, it’s going to be important to know how to find angles.”

Henry Cejudo, Damion Hahn, and several other elite wrestlers have stated that wrestling is all about angles. For example, it’s important to learn how to execute a simple sweep and really cut the corner.

Drilling

Punching is one of the best ways to improve your wrestling skill. Rehearsing and repeating moves and techniques is generally not as fun as live wrestling, but it is extremely important.

When you practice moves over and over again, your body remembers how to do it so you don’t even have to think about it during a match. Drilling allows you to hone different movements and techniques. Don’t just practice a setup and finish over and over again. Practice various set-ups and finishes. Know how to handle the different positions and situations that can arise during a match.

You can also get a very good workout with hard exercises. Hard drilling can work just as well to get you in shape as live wrestling. But drilling has the advantage of being able to really sharpen your skills.

Former NCAA champion Cary Kolat says that drilling is the main component of elite wrestlers. He says live wrestling was a small part of his training and that 70-80% of his training revolved around drill practices. He says, “I got better training from drilling than from live wrestling.”

Piercing can allow you to find ways out of bad positions, which is extremely important.

Former NCAA All-American Jason Nase states, “Because you’re going to get stuck. You’re going to get stuck on shots. You’re going to be buried. It’s going to happen. Not everyone makes good shots all the time. You’re going to have problems to fight through. I mean, that’s the sport. What do you do when you’re in a bad position? How do you go from good to bad quickly?

chain fight

Chain fighting is just what the name suggests. It is joining movements in a chain. It is the ability to seamlessly flow or transition from one technique or move on to the next.

Sometimes we see wrestling in bits and pieces. We think about setup, takedowns, defense, driving, and other segments of the game. We look for a takedown and get stopped and then we stand up and start again. Or, we get the takedown and then start thinking about another piece, like riding. But ideally we should flow from one wrestling piece to the next.

Musical notes and patterns don’t mean much until they come together to form a complete, seamless song. Good dancers flow seamlessly from one step to the next. They have fluidity and grace. All the techniques and movements you know should not be considered separate parts. Ideally, each part of your fight should link seamlessly into the next.

Says former world champion John Smith, “We put two things together. That’s chain wrestling, that’s fluid wrestling. You can take this as far as you want. When you talk about chain wrestling, it can go on forever until the guy’s on his back and you pin him and raise your hand. That sequence of moves leads you to dominate your opponent, leads you to never let go of your opponent. That’s exactly what you want.”

Former NCAA champion Terry Brands states, “It’s endless. That’s what we love about wrestling. We just have to have that mentality that it’s not chunks. That’s not how it works. That’s why guys have problems. That’s why guys wrestle.”

Brands says that sometimes fighters are so excited to land that first takedown and so unsure of their abilities that it’s a relief to land that first takedown. So, we relaxed a bit. Or, perhaps, a wrestler just never learned to chain wrestle. He lands a takedown, lets his opponent get to the base of him, and then starts fighting again instead of going from a takedown to a walk or pin combo.

After a takedown we need to keep up the pressure and extend to reach an arm or maybe we could be looking for a Turkish or Navy trip.

Or maybe our initial takedown is blocked, but we automatically transition to a new offensive move and still end up scoring. Maybe I shoot one leg and he stops me, but then I immediately peek out and still come around to score my two points.

The chain fight is also important at the bottom. If my sit-out stops, maybe I can transition to stand-up and get out of there.

Leverage and being mean

Sometimes leverage is a big key to making a move work well. Run a half nelson or arm bar directly over the top instead of the traditional way and see what happens. Grab your opponent’s chin with a half nelson to make it really tight. Make your opponent uncomfortable and they will either move in the direction you want or just give up. Former NCAA champion Wade Schalles has covered numerous opponents during his career and knows a lot about leverage and how to make opponents uncomfortable.

Former NCAA champion Zack Esposito describes the top position, stating, “You know what? Wrestling isn’t a tickle contest. It hurts like a mother when a guy puts both legs on you. So why don’t we give him some shoulder strength?”

He also states, “Because that’s what the top is. It’s fucking bad. You’re bad on the top. Because if you’re not bad on the top, you won’t be able to ride. The best riders were the baddest.”

He goes on to say, “When I have a doll, I’ll try to break your shoulder. That’s the way it is.”

You can learn a lot from Wade Schalles, Gene Mills, Zack Espositio, Ben Askren and other elite fighters about leverage and using legal awkwardness to turn an opponent.

Conclusion

These are just a few examples of the knowledge elite fighters have that you may not. I hope you are already doing many of these things. If not, start incorporating these concepts into your wrestling and you will see many improvements.