Wrestling Workout

Not sure if this has been posted before, just after your opinion on the workout. Its summarised from www.naturalstrength.com/weightroom/detail.asp?ArticleID=129

Manual Neck - we always train our neck. If you have ever seen a wrestling match you know why this is a main point of emphasis.

Any Shrug - whether they choose dumbbells, barbells or machine shrugs, I don’t care. Just train HARD.

Any Shoulder - pick any shoulder exercise you want. You MUST get 20 reps. I try to get them to pick a weight that they can get for 10 hard reps and try to get 20 unassisted reps. It may take 2 or 3 attempts to get to 20.

Chin ups - a set of 20 rep chin ups. Now if you have ever told an athlete to do a high rep set of an exercise the first thing that breaks down is form. NOT AT MICHIGAN! Every rep starts form a dead hang, no swinging of the legs, you must pause at the top for a full second in order for the rep to count. The athlete does as many perfect reps as possible, and continues until he gets 20 unassisted reps.

Hammer Flat Bench - Using a double progression you must get at least 8 reps. Once we get to 10 reps the weight goes up. One set, a few forced reps until momentary muscular failure is achieved.

Rope Climb - 4 sets. We have the benefit of having 2, 15 foot ropes hanging from the ceiling in our wrestling room. Climb until you touch the ceiling, that’s 1. Some of our kids can climb using no feet, while our heavier guys need an extra pair of feet to get to the top. But they all GET IT DONE!

Hammer Incline - one set must get at least 8 reps. Once they get 10 weight gets jacked up.

Straight Bar Curls - by this time their grip is pretty fried. Wrestling comes down to grip.

Rope-a-Dope - we use a 40 foot tug of war rope. Standing in a good athletic position you must pull your partner the length of the rope, TWICE. If their grip wasn’t fried before…I think I smell smoke. This is a great exercise for core strength.

Ground Base Push/Pull - again concentrating on core strength. We usually vary the reps but during the season we use higher reps with heavy weight to make the workout a little more metabolically challenging.

Dips - 20 rep set. Concentrate on perfect form, one second pause on the top and bottom of the movement. Do it the hard way!

Any Bicep - 20 reps, last upper body exercise…finish strong!

We have now concluded the upper body portion of our program. Our leg routine is very brief and intense.

Hammer Leg Press - 30 reps. We don’t do many forced reps, but concentrate on perfect form.

Wall Sit - I like this exercise because it is hell on the psyche. Upper thigh parallel to the floor, feet shoulder width apart. I like to get a little bit of inner thigh involved by having them touch their knees together. The key to wall sit is to get them IMMEDIATELY on the wall from the leg press.

Blocks - I have a nice collection of about a dozen pieces of 2 by 4s. They are cut into about 6 inch long blocks. I have the kids get on all fours similar to a bear crawl position. With their hands on the blocks they must push the blocks the length of the hallway. Down the hall and back is one, they must do 6.

Calves - we usually just do these on the Hammer leg press. 20 reps to finish off a nicely roasted pair of legs.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of doing many exercises for each body part. If you do grueling wrestling practice, compound movements are sufficient, with some extra grip work added in. I’ve managed to overtrain my biceps with a lot of wrestling, deads, pulling movements and curls thrown in together.

My background is in judo and submission wrestling, and we do A LOT of rope climbing on our training sessions. Usually this is done as a “finisher” after practice. All climbs are done without legs. Even for heavier guys like me (260 lbs) it results in a dramatical increase in the max number of chins/pullups.

We also do the following complex with a partner:

the parter assumes the turtle position on the ground, but with arms pressed tightly against his body. You stand over your partner (he is between your legs). Grab him by the waist and snap with your hips forward into a starting position for a suplex. So this is actually a no equipment version of the clean. Especially useful for suplex/ure nage and te guruma throws.

This is followed with squats (partner lying across your shoulders), BW pullups for reps and DB military presses. All done for 5 reps in a circuit fashion. Brutal.