"Once you've wrestled, everything else in life is easy." - Dan Gable
Wrestling. It's a sport. It's a lifestyle. When people ask what sport you play? You say I wrestle. Not I play basketball or play soccer, but that I wrestle. This is simply because it's not just a sport, but it's also a lifestyle. When you're on the mat, you're running, conditioning, grappling, and sweating. When you're off the mat, you're watching what you eat, maintaining your weight, and getting enough sleep. There are very few sports like wrestling. It takes extreme amounts of determination, dedication, and responsibility.
From this sport, I learned a great deal about myself and about life. Such ideas that I learned my freshman year of high school have helped me become who I am today and have helped me get to where I am and, hopefully, to places where I want to go in the future.
One of the greatest things I learned was power of self-determination. When conditioning, practicing, and wrestling, you have to fully rely on yourself to accomplish anything. If you want to win a match, you push yourself to extremes either during the match or during your practices leading up to the match. Before high school, I played all types of sports like basketball, soccer, baseball, but in all of those sports you have to also rely on your teammates for you to win. However, like I stated earlier, in wrestling it is just you and your opponent on the mat and nothing else matters for the next 6 minutes.
During those next six minutes, there are multiple positions that a wrestler encounters. When the match starts, both competitors are in neutral position, which means they are both standing in their stance. After the two minutes, the second period starts, and you are either on all fours which is bottom, or top which is on top of the wrestler who is on bottom. Then the third period is the opposite. There are multiple ways you can win a match. Most common is by pinning where your opponent has his shoulder blades/ back on the mat for approximately 3 seconds. The next is winning by point where you have more takedowns, pinning combinations, or escapes than your opponent. Because the wide varieties of wrestlers, styles, and moves these athletes must be very adaptive in order to be successful.
6 minutes does not seem like a long time, but when you're wrestling it feels like an eternity. Every second requires attentiveness and energy in order to win your match. By the third period, both wrestlers are extremely exhausted and the wrestler who has greater drive to win will become victorious.
(Note: Dan Gable is a famous American wrestler who was an icon for college wrestling and won the wrestling gold medal in the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, Germany. Later in his life, he was the head wrestler coach of University of Iowa. He is a legend in the wrestling world.)
From this sport, I learned a great deal about myself and about life. Such ideas that I learned my freshman year of high school have helped me become who I am today and have helped me get to where I am and, hopefully, to places where I want to go in the future.
One of the greatest things I learned was power of self-determination. When conditioning, practicing, and wrestling, you have to fully rely on yourself to accomplish anything. If you want to win a match, you push yourself to extremes either during the match or during your practices leading up to the match. Before high school, I played all types of sports like basketball, soccer, baseball, but in all of those sports you have to also rely on your teammates for you to win. However, like I stated earlier, in wrestling it is just you and your opponent on the mat and nothing else matters for the next 6 minutes.
During those next six minutes, there are multiple positions that a wrestler encounters. When the match starts, both competitors are in neutral position, which means they are both standing in their stance. After the two minutes, the second period starts, and you are either on all fours which is bottom, or top which is on top of the wrestler who is on bottom. Then the third period is the opposite. There are multiple ways you can win a match. Most common is by pinning where your opponent has his shoulder blades/ back on the mat for approximately 3 seconds. The next is winning by point where you have more takedowns, pinning combinations, or escapes than your opponent. Because the wide varieties of wrestlers, styles, and moves these athletes must be very adaptive in order to be successful.
6 minutes does not seem like a long time, but when you're wrestling it feels like an eternity. Every second requires attentiveness and energy in order to win your match. By the third period, both wrestlers are extremely exhausted and the wrestler who has greater drive to win will become victorious.
(Note: Dan Gable is a famous American wrestler who was an icon for college wrestling and won the wrestling gold medal in the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, Germany. Later in his life, he was the head wrestler coach of University of Iowa. He is a legend in the wrestling world.)