Discussion

Folkstyle

G-R and Freestyle

Teams

Rankings

2019 UWW Senior World Championships
2019 Final X
2019 Junior Greco-Roman National Duals
2019 Junior Boys' Freestyle National Duals
Division changes for 2019-2020 OHSAA Dual Championships
2019 AAU National Duals (Disney Duals)
2019 Yasar Dogu International Tournament
2019 Junior and 16U National Championships (Fargo)
Division changes for 2019-2020 OHSAA Individual Championships

Forum Home

Forum Search

Register

Log in

Log in to check your private messages

Profile

► Add to the Discussion

Page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4

Discussion Topic: Developing College Wrestling Skills
Rex Holman added to this discussion on February 13, 2008

Mark-
I checked out Simon Birch from the library but have yet to watch it.

Regarding Attitude

The way to get the most out of yourself is to wrestle competition with the goal of being at your best for the conference and NCAA tournament. If you wrestle matches without a destination or goal, then you are not effectively or efficiently using your time. To quote from the Bible, “As ye thinketh, so shall ye become” describes the cognitive process of this pursuit. I really like tOSU’s poster a couple years back of training for the third day as so much is expressed in those words. It reflects the right attitude needed for the end of the season.

Competition is a reward. This is a central theme to many successful athletes. This encompasses a way of thinking that gets the athlete excited about the opportunity to display their talents while having their skill-set, toughness, and preparation tested. Using test analogy (for those that took the SAT) : Child is to Christmas as Athlete is to NCAA Championship. Syllogism: Competition is a reward. All rewards are great. Competition is great. The implication is that you are excited and looking forward to competition. This mind-set allows you to bypass all of the little distractions that can skew focus. In effect, you are living in the moment.

Some examples of competition as reward are an interview with Chuck Liddell, an excerpt from The Iowa Way and a scene from 300 . I recall Chuck Liddell describing his excitement for an upcoming fight once his training camp had concluded. He talked about it like it was a gift at the end of a process. In The Iowa Way , Ed Banach talks about getting through the practices that lead up to the event as the toughest part of the process. He says that training was the hard part, so the actual match was viewed as a reward. In the movie 300 , there are two scouts of the Spartan force that are talking about the Persian Army. Back in that age, mortal combat was competition, albeit a life and death competition. The basic idea conveyed was “I will see if any man is worthy of killing me on the battlefield.” The scout approached the idea with great enthusiasm as that was his mind-set. In effect, he was a warrior whose ideals allowed him to think about competition in terms of a reward. Fighting in and of itself was a reward. Competing at the best of one’s abilities was a reward. A win meant glory and a loss would be a tribute to the quality of his opponent. Humility allows the warrior to never forget that he could be on the opposite end of the outcome. Hence, there is no stigma associated with losing in his mind.

I realize that 300 is a Hollywood movie that displays the Spartan Army as operating under the ultimate of ideals and virtue. The important thing to realize is that ideals and virtue allows us to think in those terms. Consequently, they influence our actions. I believe that sport can be about ideals, although it is all too often not. It quickly becomes about more primitive drives that are immature or self-preserving in nature. I wrote down an affirmation to improve my thinking regarding competition because I was struggling with it at one time. It goes like this, “look at your opponent as a gift that will test your skills, toughness and resolution. Be thankful as he will reaffirm what you do well and allow you to learn where you need to improve. This competition serves notice of who you are and is testament of your will.”

Being that competition is largely a mental process, it stands to reason that the right attitude is central to successful self-application. A lot of athletes get caught up in life’s distractions. Distractions can be just about anything. When this is the case, your attitude is compromised and so is self-application to your mission.

Developing the right attitude is a process. The process takes into account the training, competition, school, friends, family, etc. One must have a semblance of balance. Not outright balance of a normal individual, but balance that makes sense to the wrestler under conditions of extreme duress. As long as you are productive and there is no psychic turmoil regarding your situation, then the right attitude may be cultivated. If you let situations upset and distract you, then the attitude will correspond to that state of mind. A lot of wrestlers that wash out do so because they get caught in the proverbial spin cycle. They feel like they are doing the same things repeatedly without gains or are regressing. Both individual and environment are to blame. An environment does or does not provide the mental and physical needs necessary for growth. Also, the individual is accountable for his attitude in that environment. The dynamic of the person and the environment in disjunction leads to failure. When individual and environment are in conjunction, the environment begets success. An environment that is right for one individual may not be right for another. It is so important to get into the right environment out of high school as there are many distracting forces that can derail the best of intentions. You really have one shot, maybe two to find a workable situation for you as the clock begins once you start.

Wrestling is a privilege, not a guarantee beyond high school. Wrestling is a business post-high school. Wrestling gets a lot tougher post-high school. Thus, the college wrestling experience is not always positive. The experience can act as baggage for the rest of one’s life or it can be the impetus for personal responsibilty and change.



Add to the discussion and quote this      

Discussion Topic: Developing College Wrestling Skills
Cliff Cahill added to this discussion on February 13, 2008

If you wrestle matches without a destination or goal, then you are not effectively or efficiently using your time.

Rex, question. I interpreted your thoughts on competition-is-a-reward and the testing attitude and the third day goals as all methods for keeping your focus on winning every time out. To win. The Spartan force. Find a way to get it done is the popular saying of today. It sounds like to win is the only way to win. The only value of losing is to ID what you need to work on is in your message.

Rex, let me add a different prospective for your edification. Development is a complex function often labeled a progression process. On the other hand winning is the simplest form of a binary function where you know there are many functions that make up a process. Remember the title of the book - Developing College Wrestling Skills. The win to win seems to fit into the gotta-work gotta-work gotta-work song, the fighting and the mental toughness you have talked about in past chapters of your book draft. I became very interested in this thread mainly because of the title and the author. What a great match up. But it seems you and I kind of go around in circles from time to time. Maybe it is me wanting something that is not there and is not letting it go. But I hope not for the sake of the sport. The Sport. Developing College Wrestling Skills is not the same subject matter in my mind as Developing A College Wrestling Mind Set where mind set covers attitude, mental toughness, will to win etc - the mystical unmeasureable aura of the beholder. Where wrestling skills implies to me the development of physical skills, balance skills, and as you said so well in your chapter on Body Position skills, and to enhance technique to a college level. All skills are quite measurable without looking at the final score.

So the question Rex. You said competition gets the athlete excited about the opportunity to display their talents while having their skill-set, toughness, and preparation tested. How can a college wrestler develop in the room under close observations with the experts of the coaches an improved wrestling technique skill or even a different strategy and then take it to competition to test this new package with a warrior kill or be killed attitude. Does not this methodology of all about the winning attitude and mental toughness and all the other grunt type stuff , does not this methodology prohibit the thinking mind process improvement type stuff. So is it simply that once at college level all that is available to develop is but all the types of toughness while all the skill sets simply are an inheritance in the high school recruiting process?

What you say Rex about environment control, focus, privilege etc of college wrestling could just as easy be said about college studies. I suggest you have just started a sequel to your first book on development of college wrestling skills.



Add to the discussion and quote this      

Discussion Topic: Developing College Wrestling Skills
Rex Holman added to this discussion on February 13, 2008

Cliff-

I took the liberty of including attitude and common themes under this topic. I could have labeled the thread as developing into a college wrestler. I write about stuff that I think is relevant. I like being part of a forum where ideas can be discussed. Please don’t take my reference to 300 too seriously. It was a real event, but I chose to include it because I think it illustrates a point. Ultimately, a wrestler wants to be very good at his craft and develop an understanding of what it takes to do so. I am just providing some general guidelines based on my experience. FYI. I do plan on writing a piece on systematic improvement.

I think that might answer your question but I would not bet on it. Some of your sentences are not clear to me.



Add to the discussion and quote this      

Discussion Topic: Developing College Wrestling Skills
Cliff Cahill added to this discussion on February 16, 2008

Rex,
I enjoy reading your book. Yes my grammer is not good. Your dad might understand. In high school we had an English teacher fresh out of college who would set on her desk with her legs crossed in skirt. Some could stay focused and some could not :-)). Then the environment of a discussion can be a problem for people like me who is visual and likes to use images and examples as the examples are then easy picking for anyone wanting to attack or take discussion off subject so a direct discussion is avoided and thus confusion since my discussion skills are not good enough to be effective with this manorism. And to make it even worse I love to be creative which used in grammer with my skills is not too good unless someone knows me and thus this little profile.

So let's for this one time throw away all of this and come directly to a point using real examples that carries images. You chose "systematic" which is truly at the heart of my interest in your "book". It implies more process than craft although you refered to craft type methodology several times in your book. In your systematic chapter you chose the improvement vector. I suggest instead in your chapter you choose "change". One can ID a systematic change that might be called an improvement by some and others would label it a degradation. For exmple, I see Reese not shooting in past few matches where in the beginning he was none stop initiating every attack to such a point the opponent seldom attacked. Now at the end of the season, I do not think he attacked once at Edinboro and he won. So the behavior to not shoot is rewarded with a win. I am sure a review of the matches you will find over the season this steady trend direction. I saw this seemingly systematic change in a pretty progressive pattern from one end of initiating the attacking to another end of needing/wanting/happening to work off of an attack to attack. He still has the warrior fight on display. However, a change is noticed. Rex, what are some reason for this change? I look forward to reading your Systematic chapter and hope you cover this question. You could get creative and connect systematic with systemic from a warriors empire prospective :-))



Add to the discussion and quote this      

Discussion Topic: Developing College Wrestling Skills
Mark Niemann added to this discussion on September 7, 2011

This is BY FAR one of the greatest threads in the history of threadendom.

I am fortunate enough on certain days to have very low requirements of responsibility. Today is one of those days. So, I get to read this entire thread. Awesome.

And I'll say it again... AWESOME!



Add to the discussion and quote this      

Discussion Topic: Developing College Wrestling Skills
Lou Demas added to this discussion on September 7, 2011

Great read Mark. Thanks for bringing it back up to the top.

One of the many things that came to my mind in reading some of the post is that all coaches correctly emphasize maintaing great position, I have found that many wrestler's try to maintain what they think is great position to the point it gets them in trouble or inhibits their wrestling. A great wrestler maintains the best position relative to that of his opponents position.



Add to the discussion and quote this      

Discussion Topic: Developing College Wrestling Skills
Brian Nicola added to this discussion on April 22, 2017

Deep bump.

WHOA!



Add to the discussion and quote this      

Discussion Topic: Developing College Wrestling Skills
Mark Niemann added to this discussion on April 22, 2017

Quote from Brian Nicola's post:

"Deep bump.

WHOA!"



Amen.



Add to the discussion and quote this      

► Add to the Discussion

Page Previous  1, 2, 3, 4