all i can do is laugh at what im reading in here. for number one, if it was easy, everybody would do it, thats what makes wrestling an elite sport. as many of you know i did wrestle heavy and played football at lcc. from MY firsthand experience, i wouldn't have been as good as an athlete as i was while there. football gave me my strength and explosiveness where wrestling gave me my endurance and agility. if you ever saw me wrestle you wouldn't think i was a heavy. i was constantly moving, taking shots, being aggressive like a `89lber. this whole thing of sports becoming year round is a friggin joke. i chose to play football after high school in college, not because i couldn't "suck-it-up" or worrying about the whole "weight" issue. my senior year after football i was 285, literally two weeks after going into full wrestling practice i dropped to 245, not because i was "cutting weight" but because the demands on the body in both sports are very different. i wanted to become the best heavyweight and worked my butt off for it. you can ask any of the coaches and they'll tell you that they saw a difference. football, as a lineman, is about quick short explosive bursts. the average play lasts just 6 seconds, and that nothing compared to the 6 minutes of what happens on the mat if no overtime is needed. when i was in a transitional period between playing football and schools, i took a year off from playing and helped out Buth for that year. from the time that i was there helping out, i would talk to the football coaches and other prospective wrestlers, and i never got that feeling of just play football year round. there are some football coaches there that know the benefits that wrestling has on their athletes if you can call some of them that. of course the football lifting there is a "joke." with so many kids in that small weight room its hard, and i know just from coaching the lifting for wrestling while there, its hard to keep every single kid on track. there will always be those kids that just don't want to do it. frankly i dont care about those kids wether football or wrestling, since all they are doing is hurting themselves in the long run. i can remember way back in 2004, all of us seniors knew what we were capable of and worked harder than anybody else in the county. the whole thing about football "heavies" not wanting to wrestle, is because they cannot hack it. it's not that they are afraid of losing weight, it's that they are afraid of the hard work and the sheer dedication it takes to become a starting varsity wrestler. my freshman year i was a pure practice dummy for shabram. of course i didn't like it but practicing with the varsity is what helped get me into my mindset, "if your going to beat me, im gonna put you through hell." there are very few kids out there that can play varsity their freshman or sophomore year in either football or wrestling. those kids are the ones who know what is needed from themselves to become a bigger and better athlete. for every kid with huge potential and talent, you will always find those who just don't care and think everything will be handed to them. thats one of the reasons why i left a div 1 football program to play in a div 2 program. i have seen a lot in my sports career so far, from football and wrestling in high school to having my football season cut short from an illegal cut block that forced me to have reconstructive knee surgery. pretty much to sum it up, its not the coaches who are telling the kids not to wrestle, its the parents. when you look at it nowadays the parents push and push their kids into certain sports hoping that they can attain the "lucrative" full scholarship in college. i've seen a lot of parents forcing, either consciously or not, their kids to play one sport to become the best at that sport, it wont work. it wasn't long ago that i was in those shoes, but i wanted to play baseball, football and wrestle. for my major in college out here in minnesota, i can write a thesis on the "self-serving parents" on the west coast. as mentioned by my father, capt hook, out here in the midwest you will never find a single sport athlete. almost every player on the winona state team here have wrestled, especially us dline and oline. i showed one of my football coaches out here what everybody was talking about and he couldn't understand. he prefers players who have wrestled and in his words "they are most constant, reliable, dedicated young men." i just wish that a lot of the parents out there would come out here to the midwest and see how its really done.
so this whole thing in all is a double edged sword. you have the kids who are too scared to even try wrestling and the parents who want their kids to get a scholarship in football. a very stupid mistake the parents make that the kids pay for in not only physical means but in the social sense. put and let your kids into an array of sports and let them play the ones they want. once they find those sports, like i did, you become willing to sacrifice to become better. i can literally write a 15 page paper on this topic because of my firsthand experience. what the football team is trying to do is get those kids that they have who do nothing else besides to be active year round for a reason. a lot of the parents and kids view that as PLAY FOOTBALL ONLY, hell NO! i'll leave ya'll with these last thoughts.
1) what is it called when you peak? 2) what happens when you peak? 3)how do you get past it? most importantly, 4) how do you avoid over training?
1) maxed out. 2)the body has reached is max for what stresses are put upon it. 3) CROSS TRAINING gets you past your max. 4) variation is key if the body only uses certain parts, they will hypertrophy while the others will atrophy. in the world of young athletes, multiple sports will promote overall body strength, performance, and health via the prevention of injuries from over trained and stressed routines thus forming what is referred to as the "total package" in slang terms.
