Average day of wrestling in America

Muaythaifighter

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Can someone describe to me how a day of highschool or College wrestling would look like? How often a week are the trainings? How long are the trainings? How much is spent on S&C and how much on skill?

Anything you guys could tell me about HS/College wrestling in states would be appreciated. I'm very interested in the subject.

Thank you everybody!
 
In high school kids (generally) tend to train or compete 5-6 days a week, one 2 hour practice per day or compete in a dual meet or tournament. With occasional morning workouts. Out of season, some kids don't train at all or do other sports, or train wrestling 2-5 days a week it just depends. (there is so much variation in how high school wrestlers train)

College is a different story at the Division I level, even out of season when NCAA regulations say workouts are "optional", you usually train 5 days per week. With S&C being more prioritized in the off-season. During the pre-season and season you are doing something 5-6 days per week with the volume varied by the coaches to peak the athletes. My college was a mid-tier DI school in and out of the top 25. During pre-season and season I expected to be doing at least two workouts a day. Usually 2-4 days a week we had either a lift or a drill/spar(flow-rolling) practice. The afternoon in the pre-season was either open mats or conditioning. during season we had a 2-3 hour practice depending on the coach and how close to nationals we were. In - between the morning and afternoon workouts at least twice a week you did an individual with a coach working on specific positions or fine tuning technique or addressing problems areas. Everyone got extra workouts in on there own. And you usually showed up an hour before or stayed after to do things like rehab, prehab, foam-roll, air-compression sleeves, or ice bath
 
I wish i knew. I chose not to wrestle in HS because the coach was an absolute dick. Hated the guy. He was roided to the gills & literally insisted my buddy take steroids for wrestling.
 
I wish I had wrestling back in highschool (Canada). A friend of mine was interested and sought out an actual wrestling gym, he did pretty well competitive wise. I'm surprised he found one, finding wrestling here (outside of university) is like finding a 4 leaf clover

I wish i knew. I chose not to wrestle in HS because the coach was an absolute dick. Hated the guy. He was roided to the gills & literally insisted my buddy take steroids for wrestling.
in high school? wow
 
In high school kids (generally) tend to train or compete 5-6 days a week, one 2 hour practice per day or compete in a dual meet or tournament. With occasional morning workouts. Out of season, some kids don't train at all or do other sports, or train wrestling 2-5 days a week it just depends. (there is so much variation in how high school wrestlers train)

This

My high-school we typically did some warm up drills like sprawling on command, or shooting in on your partner and driving them across the mat while they lightly sprawled on you, or something like that (conditioning drills involving a wrestling technique/movement). Then we would drill some techniques and then at the end usually go live for a couple of rounds and then at the end do sprints.
 
Yes in HS. Another gym teacher was roided out of control too.
 
I wish i knew. I chose not to wrestle in HS because the coach was an absolute dick. Hated the guy. He was roided to the gills & literally insisted my buddy take steroids for wrestling.
That sucks. Wish you had a better coach
 
I wrestled throughout high school so heres my experience/schedule:

Practices: Monday-Friday (and yes even through winter break)
So you go to school, school ends at 2:25. Practice starts at 3 (mats have to be clean BY 3 and everyone has to be in the room BY 3 or else we get punished). Practice would always start off with some jogging around the room, duck walks, shooting (without a partner across the room), sprawl & circle around, cart wheels, bear crawls, seal walks, army crawls, then we would get together in a circle and stretch and do some push ups, sit ups, mason twists, leg lifts, all the core stuff. Water break. Overall this took about 30 minutes.

Now the real practice begins. Grab a partner, do two take downs then the other partner does two take downs (with setups of course). Coaches would walk around the room and point out any flaws in the technique. Then take down defense, working sprawls, whizzers, cross face, 3 quarter nelsons, spinning and scoring. We would drill this for about 20-30 minutes. Then we would drill bottom, each partner drills an escape and either gets a reversal or an escape and you would reset and the other guy gets his turn. Then returning your partner to the mat. This usually took around 20-30 minutes as well. Afterwards we would drill top, break downs, tilts, pins for another 30 minutes. Now the fun part. Live wrestling! Grab a partner and start neutral and you stop when the coaches blow the whistle (the length of time between gos varied). After a lot of reps at neutral you'd get into situational wrestling where one guy starts with a leg, one guy starts on bottom, one guy is in a cradle (these are all live gos). Afterwards, we line up on one side of the room and we ran pyramid sprints up to 4 and back down to 1. Sometimes practice would end here but 3/4 of the time the coaches would add in more conditioning to build mental toughness such as up downs, more bear crawls, etc. Our coaches also ran a "no mercy" clinic where you could stay an extra 30 minutes after practice where all you would do is condition and they get to torture you :)
Also, sometimes we would run over new technique or if the coaches see a lot of us getting caught in a technique, we would go over the defense to it.
Some guys stayed later after practice to go over technique, (I usually stayed to go over leg riding).



For match days:
Weigh ins were usually around 5 (if my memory serves me right), so you had to make sure you were on weight or lose that weight before you hit the scale. Don't be like me and miss weight by 0.1 (the first and only time I missed weight). You'd wrestle and go home to prepare for tomorrow's practice.

Tournaments:
Wake up at 6 am on saturday, get to school to check your weight, bus together as a team to the tournament site. Wrestling all day and smell like shit. Get home by 9 pm. Basically a long 12 hr day.

Tl;dr:
Practices were usually 2.5-3 hours, Monday-Friday, Tournaments on Saturday, same schedule everyday, you knew you had conditioning after live wrestling everyday (it wears on you mentally but that's why its called the grind), would do it all over again 10/10



Edit: Forgot to include some answers to your question. I'd say we focused about half the practice on strength/conditioning and the other half on technique. My training partner (who is a year younger than me) had a different coach who focused 75% on conditioning versus technique, so it is entirely dependent on your coach. We would also lift and condition during the off season usually 2 months before our wrestling season started. I also wrestled freestyle in the off season (as do a lot of guys) but it isn't required.

Not sure if you needed this detail ,but SHOWERING IS MANDATORY. Some guys will say "I'll just shower at home", but our captains didn't let anyone leave without showering (please shower, so you don't get ring worm and infect everyone)
 
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Thank you everybody for your replies!!! Wow 2 to 3 hours of practice 5 times a week??? Don't most guys get burned out? What would be the repercussions if you didn't show up at a practice without any reason? (basically just being lazy or being too tired)

I read that fight often break out in wrestling classes. I trained muay thai for a decade now and I witnessed (only) 3 times in 10 years that a real fight broke out because of training. But maybe because wrestlers are more competitive in general.
 
Canada; Freestyle.
Wrestled and judo in HS. Ours was a club team, slightly different than HS team in terms of where we were allowed to compete.

Judo 3 days a week, 2 hour practices.
Wrestling 3 days a week, 2 hour practices.

Wrestling had a warm up/workout which was 15-30 minutes depending on where we were in the season.
Lots of technique, drills, situational drills, takedowns and tilt practicing/pins. Thursdays was scrimmage only. So, only situational drills or full on matches, no technical instruction.

Tournaments were every weekend or every other weekend once they began until they ended. So we'd get on average 8-14 tournaments from mid October to early April (factor in Christmas and march break holidays). Most tournaments had weigh ins morning of, larger ones might do night before, the shitty ones had no weigh ins at all, you just sent your weight in and hoped opponents were honest (this part sucked, and many times i've had to wrestle guys 1-2 weight classes up).

I've never seen fights break out during practice. I've seen almost scraps occur at tournaments.

Best experience of my life athletically. If i could turn back the hands of time i would.
 
Thank you everybody for your replies!!! Wow 2 to 3 hours of practice 5 times a week??? Don't most guys get burned out? What would be the repercussions if you didn't show up at a practice without any reason? (basically just being lazy or being too tired)

I read that fight often break out in wrestling classes. I trained muay thai for a decade now and I witnessed (only) 3 times in 10 years that a real fight broke out because of training. But maybe because wrestlers are more competitive in general.

Yeah you get burned out, it breaks you down mentally as I stated because it feels like a grind, you do the same thing everyday, condition everyday and it just gets harder as the coaches want you to peak around mid january. If you were honest with the coach and told him you were sick (really sick, no bs sick) you were allowed to rest that day ,but if you had a bs excuse or were a no show, the entire team had to run sprints for your lazy ass. Basically, the team paid for it. We've never had a fight break out.
 
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Santa Ana High School 2006ish. Notable Alumni: Gilblert Melendez.

I didn't wrestle here long but one of the toughest but enjoyable places i've trained.

Wrestling was actual your last period and replaced P.E. during class we either did drills learning new moves, did sprints, ran stairs, ran a mile, and/ or hit the weights.
After class/ school, it was like an open mat. We just wrestled a shit load. It was a pretty small room so it got very hot in there and you'd lose pounds by the hour.
 
Thank you everybody for your replies!!! Wow 2 to 3 hours of practice 5 times a week??? Don't most guys get burned out? What would be the repercussions if you didn't show up at a practice without any reason? (basically just being lazy or being too tired)

I read that fight often break out in wrestling classes. I trained muay thai for a decade now and I witnessed (only) 3 times in 10 years that a real fight broke out because of training. But maybe because wrestlers are more competitive in general.
Burnout is a huge issue especially at the lower levels because most youth wrestling coaches are incompetent. The better coaches either read their athletes or vary intensity and throw in games .to mitigate burnout. Good coaches also incorporate more intense high rep technical drilling and play wrestlingto mitigate injury.

And yes practice is 5 times a week during season not necessarily year round, all American sports do during. Someone not showing up means suspension, not getting to compete losing starting time and depending on the circumstances cut from the team.

Fights usually don't break our in high school mostly in college
 
Thank you everybody for your replies!!! Wow 2 to 3 hours of practice 5 times a week??? Don't most guys get burned out? What would be the repercussions if you didn't show up at a practice without any reason? (basically just being lazy or being too tired)

I read that fight often break out in wrestling classes. I trained muay thai for a decade now and I witnessed (only) 3 times in 10 years that a real fight broke out because of training. But maybe because wrestlers are more competitive in general.

I wrestled for a premiere national championship team. We had 50 guys on the squad a year, 90% of them were state champions or multiple time state champs. We never went a year with less than 5 All Americans.

Most guys dont get burned out. Most guys live to wrestle, myself included. I trained 15 hours a week plus competition. I wanted more. My team wanted more. I would have to call guys at 10 pm and yell at them to come train. This was after they wrestled a few hours a day.

At my weight my junior year, I had 15 back ups. When I was at the Olympic training center, all 8 top guys in the USA were in the same room every day. Both places, fights happened every week. Its part of the deal. A fuckload of alphas fighting for the top spots which equals a lot of money. I fought at least 10 times in college or at the OTC. Some weeks a fight would break out twice a day. Its hard. Competitors who are lumped in, they fight. Lesser teams, teams with 20 guys, teams with very few backups, they dont fight.

This is where you learn "check your ego at the door" doesnt apply to highly competitive sports where money is on the line for winning in practice.

That being said, it was the best time of my life and I am closer to those guys I fought with and trained with than any human alive.
 
What would be most likely the difference between a guy that's an ok wrestler and stops when HS ends and someone that will continue to wrestle in College? Is it discipline, talent, athleticism, hard work...? Or is that different for everybody and too hard to answer?
 
What would be most likely the difference between a guy that's an ok wrestler and stops when HS ends and someone that will continue to wrestle in College? Is it discipline, talent, athleticism, hard work...? Or is that different for everybody and too hard to answer?
The only real difference is one guy decided wrestling wasnt a priority in his life, the other guy decided it was.

Its the same reason why some guys will reach black belt, and some guys will quit at purple.
 
What would be most likely the difference between a guy that's an ok wrestler and stops when HS ends and someone that will continue to wrestle in College? Is it discipline, talent, athleticism, hard work...? Or is that different for everybody and too hard to answer?
The majority of college wrestlers and all of the successful ones are almost always the absolute best in both their state and the country in high school. And you have multipld time state champs who don't make it

As far as who does well and lasts more than a semester or year. It comes down to several factors. It requires more types of mental toughness than just handling training. One of the reasons I did better than MUCH more talented and accomplished wrestlers is that my high school coach who wrestled DI made very clear to me, no matter how much you love wrestling. Division I wrestling is a JOB not just a sport or hobby. So even on days you don't feel good, you need to be able to get up and go to work and not slack off or coast. This feeds into the next reason kids quit. Except for the top 1%.freshman who come into a college room get their asses kicked for at least a semester if not longer. Not just by the starters but by the backups.
And there's no sympathy or letting up because that would be wasting the starters mat time. So imagine a blue belt getting all out torn up by black belts who aren't taking it easy with the one rule of don't "deliberately"hurt them

And because the kids who come in were the top 1-5% in high school. A lot of them can't handle having to be low on the totem pole again. And quit mentality even if they were actually good/talented enough

EDIT: Holt said it better
 
Can someone describe to me how a day of highschool or College wrestling would look like? How often a week are the trainings? How long are the trainings? How much is spent on S&C and how much on skill?

Anything you guys could tell me about HS/College wrestling in states would be appreciated. I'm very interested in the subject.

Thank you everybody!


Well....
When I was in HS/College I was typically terrorizing wrestlers with my boxing skills.
So the standard protocol for grapplers by me was to run and hide into the nearest hilly area or a copse of trees. Then they'd wait a few hours until my passion for jabbing and uppercutting grapplers had passed. At that point they'd slowly (yet cautiously) descend the hills or emerge from the wooded area from where they were hiding out. On a good day a grappler might get a solid half an hour of training (fearfully training.... unaware of when I may come forth make them unwilling sparring partners).
 
Thank you everybody for your replies!!! Wow 2 to 3 hours of practice 5 times a week??? Don't most guys get burned out? What would be the repercussions if you didn't show up at a practice without any reason? (basically just being lazy or being too tired)

The way my coaches did it, you miss a practice (assuming you were actually in school that day and not sick or injured) you miss your next match. If it becomes a habit you're off the team.
 
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