Wrestling 101 - The Golden Rule

This is Kurt and I'm going to be writing a column about wrestling as well as any other anecdotal, opinionated and otherwise relevant things that pop into my head. Without any more babbling I present Wrestling 101.

Wrestling is one of the oldest martial arts there is, with reference to it as far back as the 12th and 13th century bc. Greco-Roman wrestling was a part of the first modern day Olympics back in 1896 with freestyle wrestling following in 1904. In MMA, wrestlers are know for their ability to control fights as well as their conditioning and their unparalleled work ethic.

If we break wrestling down to its core elements we find that it's about your opponents disrupting your opponents balance while maintaining your own. Balance is determined by two things, stance and posture. We need to think of our stance and posture as our foundation, without a good foundation no amount of moves is going to make you good. With that in mind we are going to look at the most important thing to remember about wrestling, the Golden Rule:

THE BODY FOLLOWS THE HEAD!!

This is the most important thing to remember about wrestling as 90% of our technique is based off of this principle. We are going to look at a double leg take down to illustrate my point. Now in a double leg we first change levels then drive into our opponent, looking where we want to go. It's important that we never look down on our take downs as we compromise our posture as well as increasing our chance of being stuffed or submitted. We are going to look at a clip from 2 time Olympian Barry Davis on how to do a double leg.




Wow, thanks Barry, I couldn't have said it better myself. Now that's a lot of information, especially for someone just starting out with wrestling, but it's important to note the things we've been talking about. Notice the good posture as well as his head position, those are the most important things for beginners to focus on. The other thing he stressed that we haven't touched on yet is the penetrating step. It's important that we step deep with our inside leg (the one that is between our opponents leg) so that we can get right underneath their center of gravity and make the lift easy. That also helps us knock our opponent off balance which brings me back to the start of the article, wrestling is all about disrupting our opponents BALANCE.

Some people think of wrestlers as bullies or even brutish but if I can knock my opponent out of their stance with that first deep step and contact, then they're already one step behind. They are thinking of defending and recovering rather than attacking like they should be. You will often hear wrestlers and coaches refer to this as imposing your will or setting the tone, and that's how you want to start a match. This sport, as well as most other sports, are 80% mental and if I can make my opponent believe that there is no way he can beat me, by setting the tone early, then my life will be easy.

Now we've gone over a lot in this article but it is important to remember that we can't build good technique without a solid foundation. Next week we will be going over some more technique and principles with a single leg and a sprawl, as well as discussing proper work ethic in the gym. Until next time, remember the Golden Rule:

THE BODY FOLLOWS THE HEAD!!