If I were still coaching in college….

Long long time ago, in a wrestling room far away, I coached on the collegiate level (for 15 years).

So recently, thanks to an invite from my good friend, let’s call him John like his parents did, I found myself at the Ohio State Buckeyes wrestling match.

And of course, the coach part of me looks at it from a slightly different perspective.

My perspective was, based on observations from that meet, if I were still coaching in college, here are some things I’d make sure to do…

One:   Run Cradles.  Specifically, run cradles because the tripod standup is so prevalent today in college wrestling.  I would guesstimate that at least half the wrestlers that night were using it.
And countering with a strong cradle taught with the necessary skills – would be rather easy.
Tripod stand ups are BEGGING for the return of the cradle (Keaton Anderson says ‘Hi’).

Two. I’d especially teach the Ohio boys how to get off the bottom position.
It always disappoints me to see how many from our state wrestle poorly on the mat – which leads to PA still being dominant at the collegiate level because in college, they let you ride so much more.  In fact, in college, it is absolutely critical to be able to escape from bottom.

Three (related).  I’d encourage the Ohioans to attend a strong Mat Wrestling camp in the summer – like our Mat Machine Camp.  You possess an enormous edge over most of the state if you excel on the mat.

Four (also related).  For the love of all that is wrestling, learn the fundamentals of shutting down leg riders.  While I recognize that the finer details of beating elite leg riders can be quite complex for wrestlers to grasp, the basic fundamentals really don’t take long to learn and can be taught rather quickly.

Five.  Funk is fun but most funk is countered rather handily with a few core skills.  Every collegiate wrestler should master these core skills to stopping their opponent’s funk.  They could immediately elevate their game by doing so.

Them’s my observations. 

Winning the Alpha Wars

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Its time to start planning – IF you’re ready to have your best season yet,

Last night’s loyal crew at ACE got to experience first-hand how to squeeze the most out of a workout by embracing 3 simple habits:

#1. Snap to focus.   Also known as flipping the switch – as soon as practice begins.  Even better:  pre-planning your directed workout (a concept I talk about often in my room).

#2:  Close the gap, eliminate wasted time.  Getting the most out of your drilling time and your partner’s, means you are helping your partner improve, while your partner does the same for you.

#3:  Good reps – Every time.  Embrace the finer details of any technique – that’s where the magic happens.

Now’s the time you can commit to training that will take you further than ever before.

With this training, you get:

• As many as 10 trainings per month
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There’s one series the late great Wayne Woodrow “Woody” Hayes would NOT have approved of.

Woody was famous for this “3 yards and a cloud of dust” offense – running the ball with a full house backfield down the throats of opposing teams.

Woody did NOT like passing the ball.

He once said this about the forward pass…

“3 things can happen and 2 of them are bad.”

He would have disliked one specific turn in wrestling as well:

The guillotine.


With your typical guillotine leg ride, 3 things can happen there, too:

• You turn the opponent
• You get countered and reversed (possibly to your back)
• You get called for potentially dangerous

Today, more than ever before, referees are making more potentially dangerous calls from this position to protect your opponent’s shoulder.

That’s a bummer if you worked your way to a position of advantage, just to end up giving your opponent a “fresh start.”


Woody would’ve hated that.

I can see him paraphrasing Meatloaf now:

2 out of 3 ain’t good.


Well, I altered this classic move – and made it “Woody safe”.

This version completely eliminates those two negatives – the reversal and the potentially dangerous.

Unlike the traditional guillotine, your opponent’s arm is never in danger of injury….

making the referee’s job a lot easier.

No Potentially dangerous.

Also – NO possibility of getting reversed or going to your back.

Those who attend my leg ride camp can learn this variation on the guillotine (among other things mentioned on this page)

Randy

Here I am, blowing things up again.

Today, we blow up a common meme in wrestling, one that probably every wrestler has heard and been instructed to do, but that gets them broken beat and scarred (thanks Metallica) against the more skilled wrestlers.

That meme?

Explode off the whistle.

Those of you who are wrestling or have wrestled, be honest:  can any of you say you’ve never been told to explode from the bottom position?

Didn’t think so.

And yet, I learned from a young age just how effective that is(n’t) against a skilled top wrestler.

I’ll share this secret with you…

I train athletes to do the same and CRUSH the explode off the whistle wrestlers.

We just trained to stop it last week at ACE, in fact (and will undoubtedly review it this coming week as well).

This week, our focus:  Stop the Explosions, and adapt our Attack System ways, and approach, from the bottom position instead.

You can join us here if you haven’t already.

Randy

Last week I left this one out….


but ‘heavy hands’ is a meme in wrestling circles that is loaded with misconceptions.

For instance….

If you go for the head – get heavy – all the time and right away…

your higher level opponents can pick you apart.

Last week I previewed this briefly with a wrestler at ACE…

And this week, I will be covering it extensively.

You can discover the keys to exploiting every wrestler that gets “heavy” with hands, as well as learning how to safelywork your opponent’s head without leaving yourself open to their attacks.

If you haven’t done so already, you can join us here.

Somewhere there exists a video of this but for now I’ll just have to recount it for you….

Eons ago in a gym not-really-that-far-far-away…

I was wrestling in a college tournament against a bruiser.

This kid was big, strong, and athletic – and in the opening moments of the match, he grabbed me and threw me violently to my back.  It was all I could do to keep from getting pinned.

There’s a moment, and again, if I had the video you’d see it, that I look around and see that I am a mere foot away from the out of bounds line.  At the moment I started scrambling furiously to force us out of bounds (was I fleeing?  Meh.)

I survived it – got out of bounds – and earned myself a fresh start.

Now, way behind, I started the slow journey back.

Escape.

Takedown (I don’t remember how I got him down).

Escape for him.

Now I was closing the gap, but I needed another takedown to tie it up.

I tried the only thing I could think of at the time.

I STOMPED my foot.  HARD.

He didn’t budge.

Years later we would run the tape back over and over again and laugh at my set-up attempt, the big foot stomp.

But in the moment it was serious business.  Stomping my foot was all that came to mind.

I don’t know what I was thinking.  Maybe I was hoping that he would just disintegrate on the spot. 

I can assure you that he did not disintegrate.


Somehow I forced the match to overtime.

No score first period.

One quick escape in the 2nd period.

A quick escape in the 3rd period.

Overtime ends.

They brought us to the center (this was in the day when a match could be decided by criteria instead of a wrestling conclusion)…..

And raised his hand.

It would have been my 3rd title in 3 years at that tournament.

After a few minutes, a wrestler from a rival school came over to me.  

“My coach said you should have won by criteria.  They raised the wrong hand.  Tell your coach.”

I approached my coach and relayed the message.

He blew it off.

“You wrestled well but you lost.”

I told the wrestler what he said and he took it back to his coach.

Then that coach sent for me.

I  talked to him and he told me this:

You should have won on the 19th criteria.  You escaped 1 second faster than him in overtime.

He then huddled with another coach on the tournament committee….

They called me back to the center….

And raised my hand.

It helps to read the rulebook front and back.

Now for the point of this story…

If I had just had a more effective set-up than the STOMP….

when action happens fast, and you’re in the middle of the match, and there’s no time to think…

your quick instincts that you developed here must kick in.

Or, if you didn’t develop them here…

Maybe just stomp your foot.

Randy