May 20, 2012

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The Fighter’s Mind: Inside the Mental Game

May 2, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

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.

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Giving yourself your best chance to win

February 14, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

“The one piece of advice I have for you is this: Give yourself every possible chance to win.”
- Willis Reed

Willis Reed is an NBA Hall of Famer who won two championships with the New York Knicks.

For a basketball player, giving yourself every chance to win means keeping the game close so that you and your team have a shot at the end. Play defense, sink your foul shots, get the ball to the tall guy, blah, blah, blah.

What about for a wrestler?

To the average person watching, you have a 50/50 chance of winning any given match. And it’s true. At the end, the ref is going to raise your hand or his.

So how do you increase the odds in your favor – really give yourself “every possible chance to win?”

I want your input in the comments, but here are a few ideas to get it rolling:

  • Listen to your coaches. Listen during the match, when they’re yelling specific tactical instructions. Listen during practice, when they’re teaching you those moves. You have an amazing coaching staff. Don’t waste your access to all that knowledge.
  • Fuel yourself well. You don’t have to cut whole food groups from your diet. But you don’t want to make a habit of sugary snacks and salt-laden meals. It catches up with you.
  • Believe. Way more than any team sport, wrestling requires not just the belief, but the conviction that you, on your own, are going to prevail. Without that certainty, what are your odds?
  • Keep it light. You have a goal. It might be to win or place in league, CIF or even state, or maybe just to have a winning record. You also have a lot of pride, or you wouldn’t be wrestling. You’re probably harder on yourself than anyone else is. You’re going to lose sometimes. It’s not the end of the world. Find ways to enjoy the day-by-day journey to your goal, whatever that is, and you’ll insure that you don’t burn out along the way.

So, what do you think? Can you actually tip the odds in your favor – from 50/50 to 80/20, or even 90/10?

And what’s your best advice? Share it in the comments!

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What’s your pre-match routine?

February 9, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

How nervous do you get before a match? What do you do with that energy – and how can you use it to prepare for your match?

From deep in the vault at Sports Illustrated, here’s a story about Dan Gable, who lost only one match over his career at Iowa State and is on everyone’s short list of the top collegiate wrestlers of all time.

Check out Gables pre-match routine:

Gable’s metamorphosis into Super-wrestler begins five hours before a bout, when he shows up for the weigh-in, scaling a few ounces under his 137-pound limit. In the previous 48 hours he has suffered off 10 pounds by not eating and by working out in the wrestling room, where Coach Harold Nichols keeps the temperature at 95 degrees. Then he undergoes three hours of volcanic final preparation. It starts in his room, where he begins to pace like a restless cat, pausing only to go through an elaborate series of exercises. An hour before the match he arrives in the Iowa State dressing room. There his pace becomes almost frenzied. In quick succession, he runs in place, pushes against his locker as if to drive it through the wall, tugs at the coat-rack, flops to the cement floor to do pushups, rolls on his back and touches his toes behind his head, bounds up and paces back and forth. Then he tugs at his uniform, pushes against an oversized wastebasket, loosens his wrestling robe, jiggles his hands as he does a dance step, ties his robe in place, straddle-jumps, jogs in place, bends over to touch his toes and exhorts his teammates to “Be ready to give it all you’ve got right from the start.”

Explains Gable, “It’s my way of getting psyched up. I like to get really nervous. I’m not ready unless my hands are icy. My Dad gets nervous, too. He used to take movies of all my matches, but he got too nervous and always wound up taking a lot of pictures of the ceiling. He even hired a professional photographer to take movies of me and he got pictures of the ceiling, too.”

Such shots are entirely understandable once one has seen Gable perform, for when he gets those icy hands of his on an opponent the opponent usually winds up flat on his back, gazing at that oft-photographed ceiling.

Read the entire story here.

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