Summer’s just around the corner. For wrestlers, even the off-season is a time of workouts and staying in 
shape. But there will be free time too, opportunities to kick back with friends, go to the beach or the movies, and just chill. And if you like losing yourself in a good book, summer is the ideal time for that.
Here’s a book that might appeal to you: “The Fighter’s Mind,” by Sam Sheridan. The author’s well-received first book, “A Fighter’s Heart,” was about his adventures in muay Thai kickboxing and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. For “The Figher’s Mind” Sheridan met with and interviewed MMA fighters, coaches and others who have excelled in various martial arts.
Sheridan must be a good interviewer because he gets his subjects to say some pretty insightful and amazing things. The first guy he went to visit was legendary wrestler Dan Gable, whom Sheridan met on a freezing day in Iowa, where Gable also won a long string of national championships as coach for the University of Iowa.
Among the topics Gable addressed was how the habit of winning prepares a wrestler for success in big matches:
“It comes back to dealing with adversity. Too much adversity, too much losing, and it becomes the ‘same old same old.’ It becomes a habit – it’s not devastating. But if you only lose once in a while, at rare CRUCIAL times, you can build to a much higher level. You can use that as fuel.”
“My best wrestlers, most of them, were winning before they came here. They might not know any holds, or have a lot of skill, but they’d go all out, beat somebody up and run them into the ground. They knew how to win before they knew how to wrestle. That’s the critical thing. And then we take them and mold them and teach them and in a few years they’re amazing. It’s easier to teach the skills then the mentality.”
Another perspective about winning and losing comes from from Brazilian MMA coach Ricardo Liborio:
“You have to unnerstan’ you CAN lose. Somebody can beat your ass; but you can overcome, don’t get frustrated. You can’t be a quitter, you have to understand it’s not your time, it’s not your day. Just because you lose doesn’t make you a loser. It’s not the same fight every time. Be humble enough to understand—losing is part of the game. It doesn’t mean to let yourself get conquered, but to know that you can win again, at the right time you can be great. The key to doing well in competition is to accept. Accept you can lose, you can not perform. Take this big bag of rocks out of your backpack.”
And the following from Randy Couture, who was a Greco-Roman wrestler who failed to make the Olympic team three times before he started winning UFC championships at the age of 33:
“One of the things about being an underdog, there’s no pressure. Nobody expects you to win. It frees you up to go out and compete. We often complicate things with fear of failure, all that baggage of winning and losing. Being an underdog is freedom.”
“I realized I get way more nervous for wrestling than for fights. Way more keyed up. When I realized that, I thought, that’s odd. This guy could kick my head off, but I’m not worried about that at all. I’m having fun, I’m enjoying learning all this new stuff. I stopped and thought why the hell am I so nervous for the wrestling matches? I’d lost perspective, I was putting all this pressure on myself. It came down to one match, everything hinged on it, so I’d forgotten that I loved to wrestle and why I started wrestling—because it’s fun.”
“The first thing is perspective—I frame things in a positive way, and stay reflective. It’s almost a cliché, but in the grand scheme of my life, if the worst thing that happens to me is I lose a wrestling match, even if it’s the Olympic finals, then I’m doing pretty damn good.”
I’m not even done reading it, but the book is full of great stuff about the mental side of competition, and how to prepare yourself to win, on and off the mat, so I wanted to give you a heads up.
As Renzo Gracie said: “We’re all fighting something.”
If you find yourself fighting boredom this summer, pick up “The Fighter’s Mind.” Amazon has it in hardcover for just $10. Or maybe you can borrow my copy when I’m done 
