Nobody's Looking

For elite wrestlers, there truly is no off-season, but the month or so between now and school is the slowest point of the year in wrestling.  Most summer camps and club practices are already over, and for those wrestlers who qualified to compete in Fargo, the last of any off-season matches ended yesterday (Team Illinois dominated, again).  A few schools may be throwing some informal practices together, but the majority of people are scrambling to get things done before summer ends.

But that doesn't mean that you should put your training routines to the side, just because there are no sanctioned events in August.  In the weight room at my high school, there is a sign on the wall that reads: "Character is doing what you're supposed to do even when no one is looking."  Your coach isn't watching to make sure you work out, but he's still expecting you to be in decent shape come fall.  Your teammates aren't there to push you, so you have to motivate yourself.  Yesterday I completed round two of my summer fitness test, and I improved, doing 15 pullups, running 3 miles in 19:17, and doing 150 crunches.  However, I was tempted to stop running around the midway point of the three miles, simply because there was no one watching.  It is so easy to do that when you're working out on your own, so you have to keep yourself accountable.

For years I complained about not having a brother that I could toss around in the basement when I wanted to wrestle during the off-season.  Using that excuse, I didn't work on my technique much outside of practices and camps.  But there are excellent ways that you can improve your wrestling without a partner: shadow wrestling and visualization.  There's no reason why you can't work up a good sweat shooting and sprawling against an imaginary opponent, performing your moves as if there is another body in front of you.  You can even use mental imagery to rehearse your techniques over and over in your mind, either in first person or third person, to enhance your muscle memory.  If you vividly imagine the moves, you'll find that your muscles tend to twitch and fire just as they would in a match, but to a lesser degree, of course.

Keep yourself accountable,
Jeff