Practice planning is crucial part of developing an effective training session for youth and high school wrestlers. When you don’t have a plan you will end up having a less productive workout and over time this will not yield the best results. It’s important that people understand that you can’t become great in one practice. It takes many practices, strung together over time that will make someone great. It is because of this that you need to think of practice as a workout that improves specific skills and technique a little bit each and every day.
For example, a typical high school season starts in November and ends in February, totaling about 16 weeks. The competition dates take up roughly 25-35 days, leaving roughly 50-60 practices over the course of a season. Athletes and coaches need to understand that practice planning is an opportunity to create routines that improve as you do them over the entire season.
A good example of this is the warm up. When you first get back into a wrestling room after taking time off your balance, coordination, endurance, and muscle memory isn’t fully back to optimal. So, when you engage in the warm up you should be engaging the same you would for technique.
Here’s an example of what a warm up could look like every day and would allow for athletes to progress over time.
Practice Planning: Warm Up (Roughly 10-15 minutes)
- Jogging,
- Gymnastics (cartwheels, round-offs, forward rolls, backward rolls, square-ups, head/hand springs),
- Penetration Shots (Duckwalks),
- Frog jumps, 1-leg hops,
- Bear crawls (slow & fast),
- Knee sprints,
- Walking on hands
After finishing the warm up a good way to further warm up the body as well as develop important skills and endurance is with Stance and Motion Drills. Here are a few that I like to do before getting into the drilling aspect of practice.
After implementing some Stance and Motion Drills I also like to incorporate drills for the bottom position as well. This is a great opportunity to further warm up the shoulders and work on the skills for a successful bottom wrestler.
The Hip Heist Drill is a great way to accomplish this. One of the major factors for success on bottom is an athlete’s ability to hip heist through positions. Whether that be to a Change Over or to cut out from the crab riding position. This drill has helped me develop my ability to move on bottom and I know it will help others.
The warm up should take up about 25-30 minutes of the beginning of practice.
After finishing this is where you should go into what I refer as “Intentional Drilling”. Except for a few athletes who are just getting started the majority of wrestlers know the basic techniques to wrestling. This includes the high crotch, single leg, and front headlock positions.
Athletes should drill these positions at a minimum 15 quality reps. I typically instruct to perform 3 sets of 5 reps for each wrestler.
Here are a few of those drills that can be implemented.
Following these core drills its extremely beneficial to work shot defense. Head Inside Single Leg Defense and Head Outside High Crotch Defense are crucial skills to develop. So much of this position has to do with feel and reaction time, and when you do it every day it will start to become instinctual.
Here are those drills.
Another aspect of shot defense is basic reaction time when opponents take bad shots. As a youth or high school wrestler you should always be prepared to capitalize off of someone’s bad shot because even good wrestlers will take them. The Bad Shot Drill is a great way to teach reacting to someone’s shot and teach athletes how to move when defending them.
Check out the drill below.
After drilling your offensive shots and how to defend those shots another important skill is learning how to clear someone’s ties. When wrestling an opponent you have to be able to get out of bad positions and wrestle to good positions. These drills help athletes accomplish this. Whether it is clearing the 2-on-1 from your feet or wrestling out of the front headlock, athletes who want to be successful need to be able to wrestle out of these key areas.
Check out the drills below.
Practice Planning: Technique Breakdowns
After drilling for an extended period of time you really have two options; to break down new techniques or transition directly into live wrestling. This will ultimately depend on the season practice plan and goals for the training session. For example, in the beginning of the year you might focus less on live wrestling and more on breaking down positions.
For instance, maybe you want to break down getting out of legs or teaching new turns from the top position. In this case you would transition into further technique breakdown. At this point your athletes will have drilled the crucial areas of wrestling and now have opportunity to learn something new. The reason I don’t like to start with technique is because so much of wrestling is getting yourself into the right state for learning wrestling. When you don’t warm up properly or get focused intentional drilling in, kids tend to be easily distracted.
Live Wrestling
Whether you go directly into live wrestling or you finish with live wrestling, you should make sure the kids wrestle. This is where athletes get to test their abilities and directly implement the areas they’ve previously drilled and worked on. Sometimes your live wrestling session could have a focus on endurance and other times it could be focused on strategy. There is a variety of ways to implement live wrestling.
Strength and Conditioning
It is always beneficial to incorporate some aspect of strength and conditioning to a practice. Even if it’s only 10 pushups and 10 pullups, those are valuable reps that will add up over the course of the season. Creating a routine for this is crucial for making sure you consistently develop in this area.
Some examples of this could include:
- going into the weight room after practice for endurance reps of squats
- sprint miles on the treadmill
- pushups and pullups
- execution drilling – when athletes repeat the foundational drills at a high pace
- airdyne bike workouts
- rope climbs
Finally, after every practice athletes should go through some routine of stretching. This area is often neglected and because of it contributes to a lot of preventable injuries. Stretching the muscles after a wrestling workout is vital for recovery and future performance. Making it a priority will help any wrestler improve.
Hopefully this practice plan can help you better understand the practice and how you can develop consistently over time.