Less Drilling and More Situation Wrestling in Practices

A coach recently asked for advice on using situation wrestling effectively. 

I was hoping that you could give me some of the main lessons or key points you’re stressing in situation wrestling. Which situations you have found the most effective to practice?  What do you recommend in terms of duration and frequency of the situations wrestled in practice?

Here was my response:

                Your choice of which situations to use, how often to do them or how long they should last are based on two things:

1.       Your objective for using the situation

2.       The experience level of the athletes

                I believe that every time you teach a move, you should teach the counter at the same time.  Use drilling (where the drill partner is giving little or no resistance) only to teach wrestlers how to execute and enhance their timing.  After that, I don’t believe it is very effective to drill a move against a partner who is not offering significant resistance.  I think the main reason we drill is to use it as a form of wrestling-specific conditioning. 

Think about it for a minute.  We drill a lot of takedowns, but we don’t typically hit 30 cradles in a row in every practice or 30 tilts in a row.  Why not? Because they don’t have the conditioning effect of takedown drilling, therefore, we feel like it is a waste of time.  But when you watch a match, most of the takedowns don’t look very much like the way we drill them, unless the offensive guy catches an opponent with his head up his butt or he or she is wrestling a poor wrestler. 

  This isn’t to say we shouldn’t be drilling.  However, it should be done mostly to reinforce the movements prior to situation wrestling.  Do we need 50 reps on a move each day or even 15 for that matter?  I don’t think so.  After athletes get their timing down, I think 4-5 reps might be sufficient, if effective situations follow and we coaches are paying attention to helping kids improve the technique during the situation.

  How long your situation lasts will depend on your goal for the situation.  If your objective is to teach kids to score or simply dominate, then situations will be longer with an emphasis on winning.  In these situations, you may start with a head-inside single leg, for example, but you don’t really care what techniques positions evolve after you start the athletes, because the goal is to teach them to fight for the win.  Give a specific amount of time (20 seconds, for example) and maybe add some common scenarios:  “You are down by one point, with 20 seconds left and you are in the top position with a crab ride.”  Most coaches see to do this already.

 If you have inexperienced wrestlers and the goal is to help kids improve in positions in which they are reluctant to try or have limited experience, then use shorter durations, and stop when someone scores from the position or the wrestlers get too far from the position you are trying to work on. 

For example during a situation that starts with the wrestlers in the referee’s position, if you want the bottom wrestler to primarily work for a stand-up, you may only have them fight for 4-6 seconds initially.  This would help the bottom wrestler focus on moving off the whistle quickly and possibly teach him or her how to put moves together to get an escape.   

When a wrestler is inexperienced, you don’t want him to get discouraged if he gets broken down to his belly.  Often, we leave inexperienced wrestlers on the bottom for a minute or more to try to figure things out when we may not have effectively taught them what to do or given them enough chances to be successful with it.  As you see the wrestler’s confidence improving and his or her ability to stay in good position for longer periods of time, then increase the duration of the situation. 

The length of a situation may also depend on which position you are focusing on at the moment.  Using the same situation as before (referee’s position), you can use a longer situation and put an experienced wrestler in the top position “ride the bull” for a longer period of time.  This will help the top wrestler develop the confidence to ride a very motivated bottom wrestler in a close match when there may be 15-20 seconds left in a period.

                I believe that a lot of early season situation wrestling should not be timed.  Rather dedicate about 5 minutes to working each position and let the athletes start themselves for each repetition and wrestle only until a score or they get out of position.  (This self-directedness may not work for younger kids.)  Let them catch their breath between each rep while you as a coach emphasize why they scored or failed to score and have them start again.  I call these “feedback situations” and I blogged about it on an earlier post.

The moves you select to use in situations will be dictated by trends you seen in matches, but here are a few that I believe should be stressed regardless of what is happening in competitions. 

·         Fighting off back from various pin holds—top guy will be about 70% intensity, so bottom guys learns how to move

·         Building up to a base from the belly

·         Getting out of a leg ride and crab ride

·         Leg attacks: finishing/countering inside and outside singles (high crotches)

·         Referees position: trying to get a fast stand-up and escape and trying to keep the guy down

·         Front headlock

·         Tilts-when first using the tilt let the top guy be in tilt position, he has to try to hold the defensive wrestler.  As the wrestlers get more experienced start them with less control until they are starting with only wrist control, for example.

The tilt situation above suggests and important point.  There are numerous positions that evolve as a wrestler completes a move.  When wrestlers are first learning a move, give the wrestler on whom you are focusing a lot of advantage.   You may start by giving an inexperienced offensive wrestler a crossface cradle where the partner starts on his or her back and the offensive wrestler must learn to hold the opponent there.  As the wrestler gains more experience, start the situation from a more even position (cradle locked up, but defensive wrestler not on his back) until eventually the offensive wrestler is starting with very little such as only having a crossface.

The most important thing about incorporating situation wrestling into your practices is to think about what you want to accomplish with the situation and then set it up in such a way as to facilitate that outcome.