Dan Gable's 7 Essential Ingredients For Good Wrestling

State champ, All-American, World Champion, Olympic Gold Medalist, coached Iowa to 15 NCAA titles, and was voted NCAA coach of the year three times. These are a few of Dan Gable's accomplishments. If anyone should be studied for wrestling, it should be him.

Thankfully, the legend himself is already a strong promoter on growing wrestling, and has a lot of educational material out there. One of my favorite knowledge gems he has given us are his 7 ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS FOR GOOD WRESTLING, and here's why:

It's so easy to mentally and spiritually fall asleep during the season.

Many wrestlers come into practice everyday just "going through the motions" or their goal is to just survive the practice. This may not be all their fault, especially for younger athletes. It's difficult to pin down areas to work on and set goals in with a huge sport like wrestling. Unlike in football or basketball, a wrestler must master each aspect of the sport instead of a specific position or role.

So what must be done is that an individual wrestler must break the huge sport down into pieces, and focus on each aspect one by one instead of coming into practice with the general goal of "getting better at wrestling". Good goals are specific and detailed goals. Dan Gable's 7 Essential Ingredients gives us a great starting point to define our specific goals. Baby steps make champions.

“I’m a big believer in starting with high standards and raising them. We make progress only when we push ourselves to the highest level. If we don’t progress, we backslide into bad habits, laziness and poor attitude.”

- Dan Gable

7 ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS FOR GOOD WRESTLING

Here are the ingredients Dan Gable details in his book Coaching Wrestling Successfully.

1. Standing Wrestling

Also known as wrestling from neutral. This ingredient includes offensive leg attacks, defending your legs, sprawling, hand control, hand fighting, head and shoulder positioning, blocking skills, a good stance, keeping good motion in a stance, snap downs, shrugs, and go-behinds.

2. Underneath Wrestling

In folk style this is commonly known as wrestling from bottom. The elements here are stands ups, escaping with correct hand control, sit outs, switches, rolls, defending from leg riding, escaping leg riding, hip heisting, and scrambling.

3. Strength

Often overlooked but extremely important, strength is an essential aspect for a wrestler. It is, however, greatly determined by genetics and body type. This doesn't mean the you can forget strength all together. A wrestler should know his body type to build it into his/her ultimate wrestling machine, and that's going to mean a different workout and regimen for each person. When it comes to strength training, there are a few elements that do apply to everyone such as power/explosion, strength (as in how much weight you can move), and muscle endurance. Strength also plays greatly into developing mentality, and preventing injury.

4. General Conditioning

Can you perform at your highest intensity all match long with a clear and calm mind? Or are you desperately gasping for air? If not, some things you may want to work on are your short burst stamina, long term stamina, and stamina recovery. Breathing exercises can do wonders.

5. Flexibility

From my experience, this has to be the most underrated ingredient for the sport of wrestling. You can see why it's so important and how you can improve flexibility in our Flexibility Article. Are you doing good stretching? How is your agility on defensive and offensive positions?

6. Nutrition

This is so important to us, that we wrote an entire guide to a champions diet. Where flexibility is the most underrated, nutrition is the most uneducated. A wrestler must know and understand how food and water consumption works. The elements here are weight control before an event, nutrition education, balanced dieting, BMI understanding, hydration, and replenishing sweat loss.

7. Attitude

Last but certainly not least, attitude will affect every single area of your wrestling. Consider the following elements of this ingredient: goal setting, motivation, competitiveness, productivity, initiative and doing work without being told, leadership, focus, and excitement.

GOAL SETTING

Now that we have the sport of wrestling broken down by a wrestling legend, we can set more specific and better quality goals. These goals are not going to mean anything though if you do not have an ACTION PLAN to execute them. So here's what a wrestler should do after absorbing the information above.

1. Make a table and rate yourself from 1 to 10 in each ingredient. Anything above 7 is your strength.

2. List 5 weaknesses you need to work on this week

3. Determine what exactly you are going to do to tackle each weakness. Coaches can certainly help.

4. List 5 strengths you can capitalize on this week.

5. Determine how you are going to capitalize on these strengths. Coaches may teach you specific advanced moves or put you through advanced training.

6. Come in to every practice with one weakness and one strength to hammer every practice in addition to the training you will already be receiving that day.

7. Don't leave unless you have made progress on your goals

Being awake and conscious in your work will lead you to a happier season, no matter what reason you are wrestling for.

“When you finally decide how successful you really want to be, you’ve got to set priorities. Then, each and every day, you’ve got to take care of the top ones. The lower ones may fall behind, but you can’t let the top ones slip. You don’t forget about the lower ones though because they can add up to hurt you. Just take care of the top ones first. In 25 years as a head coach and assistant, I think I might have missed one practice. Why? Because practice is my top priority. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t accomplish something in my family life or my profession because those two things are my top priorities.” - Dan Gable

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Stand Up. Defy Defeat!

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Reflect Before You Wrestle

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The moments before a match can be nerve wracking. All your life has accumulated to this point. Every practice, every day, every breath. Past this moment is something so incredible and terrifying: The unknown. If the whole of creation came together to tell the story of the next 6 minutes of your life, they would still get it wrong. Those next 6 minutes... it’s on you. The pressure is on.

What’s so exhilarating about any big performance is that it puts life into that perspective. It makes us face who we are, and I’ll argue that no “performance” does that more effectively than wrestling. In wrestling, you’re really against yourself on that mat; your opponent is only there to push you to excel.

You can either face yourself and become better- or try to ignore the situation and regress in your progress. Since we are all human beings, we cannot afford to miss out on the mercy and blessing of self transformation. When we transform for the better, that’s the true victory in life. That’s fulfillment. Fulfillment is being alive.

“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” - Abraham Lincoln

See this match, these feelings, and this moment as the opportunity to live a fuller life. Here are some points to help you get to that mindset.

WHY?

As you go on through life, you will notice more and more folks avoid answering this question because it is a lot of hard work. Well hard work is something we wrestlers are not shy of. Take this question seriously, and don’t expect to have it all figured out in five minutes. “Why” is a lifelong pursuit that you will be revisiting again, and again, and again. Just as soon as you feel like you figured it out, BAM! Life slams you, and tests your convictions, just like in wrestling.

“Once you’ve wrestled, everything else in life is easy.” - Dan Gable

Do not be afraid to ask yourself:

• Why am I going to wrestle this match?

• Why am I right here? Right now?

• Am I doing this for me, or is this match greater than myself?

• Why is my opponent here?

• Why is this match important to me?

Going through these questions will lead to thinking about your goals, and thinking about your goals will lead you to realizing what aspect of your wrestling, yourself, and your life that you have to improve on to reach those goals.

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REMEMBER!

Our lives, if we’re paying attention, should be filled with lessons we’ve learned and values we’ve developed. Pop culture motivates “forgetting the past” and having no “regrets”. I strongly disagree. Remembering and regretting is the only way we’re going to stop ourselves from making the same mistakes twice. So remember:

• How did you get here?

• What did you do in the last practice? The last few weeks of practice?

• What were your greatest victories?

• What were your greatest defeats?

• Your opponent is another human being just like you- nothing more...

“My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.” - Abraham Lincoln

Remembering will this will sharpen your focus on the task at hand, which is to wrestle your best. This kind of reflection also helps a great deal in recognizing what truly doesn’t matter: like a referee’s bad call, what negative things the crowd is yelling at you, or what kind of record your opponent has.

“A wolf in the hunt doesn’t stop to scratch fleas” - Unknown

BELIEVE!

People say it over and over, and you may be getting tired of hearing it. I’m talking about the phrase “you have to believe in yourself!" Some roll their eyes just hearing it.

The people who are telling you to believe are absolutely right, though. You must believe that you have a chance, no matter who you are and who your opponent is. Ask any coach and they’ll tell you how many matches they’ve seen that left them astonished because the wrestler they were rooting against was not supposed to win.

History has proven that morale is one of humanity's greatest weapons. I am a bit of a history geek... this list of “10 Amazing Military Victories Against The Odds” get’s me excited.

Belief is real. You just have to find it in you.

Here is an excerpt on page 174 from Dan Gable's Coaching Wrestling Successfully.

You Gotta Believe

Down by five points in the last 50 seconds of the NCAA title match, freshman Lincoln Mcllravy begins to think that the end is near. Lincoln remembers it like this: “I’m ready to quit or at least start thinking defeat, but I look over to my coaches in the corner and they’re still encouraging me to score. So I think, if they still believe I can win, why shouldn't I? After a couple of takedowns, a stalling call, and a takedown with two seconds remaining, I had come all the way back to win. My opponent had been ahead the entire match, except at the end, when it counted! I have to give my coaches the credit for believing in me when I was doubting myself.”

Watch Lincoln Mcllravy's epic comeback on the video below:

I hope that you can see now that belief is no joke. Take it seriously and it will take you above and beyond.

GET OUT THERE AND WRESTLE!

One of the greatest things a coach said to me was when I was really nervous before my first match of my senior year season. He told me that, “that nervous feeling you have is just the way your body prepares to do something incredible.”

I won that match, against a 4th place district qualifier. It was only my fourth year wrestling, and it was his sixth.

From then on, I welcomed the nervousness, the calm before the storm, like a close friend.

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I hope this information has helped you begin your journey to become a better wrestler, athlete, and person for striving to do your best. If you want to access more help like this, please be sure to subscribe to the blog to not miss out on the next content.

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Don't Stay Down.

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