Cutting Weight

There are healthy and unhealthy ways to cut weight. Eating well and exercising frequently are the healthy ways. Exercise and complete lack of food are bad approaches. I’ve tried both methods and though completely cutting off your calorie intake may not be good for you.  Even though cutting weight is really annoying, I still do it.

Mentality

Wrestlers, being one of the hardest sports out there, need strong willpower and motivation to accomplish anything. This is the most important part of wrestling. You need a strong mentality to keep yourself from eating junk food when cutting or keeping weight. A good mentality is key when wrestling in an actual match. Keeping your head up and not giving up are key parts of winning a match. To keep a clear head I try to keep calm before and during the match. People with weak mentalities will fail in almost everything. A good mentality will get you through the tough practices and through the rest of the wrestler’s life.

Practice

Practice is one of the hardest parts about wrestling. In practice we start with a warm up of running. Then we do a shooting drill where we take shots at the air until we get to the other side of the mat. Then we drill a move for five minutes and then drill a different move for five minutes. We repeat this for about 30 minutes. We next move on to live wrestling which is what it sounds like. We wrestle full force with our partner. Our partners are usually in our weight class or close to it. We finish with my least favorite part of practice, conditioning. Conditioning helps you have more energy for a longer time. Conditioning includes chopping your feet (sprinting in place), sprawls, shots, and if we are unlucky, sprints. By the end of practice I want to die.

Meets

Meets are the best part of the season. They are when you get to show how hard you work. There are many types of meets. There are dual meets which are just normal two team meets. Tri-meets which have three teams. Quads and quints are four and five teams.

Meets are won by which team has more winning wrestlers. There are different amounts of team points awarded for different types of wins: decision (winning by under eight points) = three, major decision (winning by eight-14 points) = four, technical fall (match is ended if one wrestler is beating the other by 15 points) = five, and fall/pin, forfeit, default, and disqualification all get six points.

Tournaments

Tournaments are the most stressful of the meets. In tournaments you can wrestle up to five matches a day. If there are more than five matches then it will be split into two days. In most tournaments if you lose one match you will go down to the consolation bracket where you wrestle for third place. Medals are usually awarded to the top three wrestlers, but some tournaments give a medal to 4th place wrestler as well.