I saw a lot of these threads go by a few weeks ago, and thought I would chime in. I wrestled for all 4 years of high school at a prep school and for 2 seasons at a Div III college. This is all collegiate (or folkstyle) wrestling, though I know some things about the basics of freestyle, and even less about greco roman.
Go ahead, what do you want to know?
Tell us horror stories about making weight.
I wrestled for a few years in high school, and my forte was Greco-Roman, although many of the tournaments I was in were dubbed “Funstyle”, which was one period GR, and one period freestyle. I can chime in on any of those types of questions.
Mm, I actually never had any myself, mainly because I was a bit lazy about my weight class, especially in college. As I mentioned in another thread I used to lose about 5 pounds every practice through water weight, but I was wrestling at around 170. All I really had to do was not really eat dinner the night before a match (Tuesday and Friday nights). Not so bad, but going to sit in dining hall with my dorm and have people around me eating big meals whereas I had my 2 glasses of water and an orange was sort of depressing. My teams were actually fairly good and safe about cutting weight, though at tournaments you’d see the occasional guy puking (on other teams). It’s kind of funny, but I actually went through a phase about halfway through HS where I would throw up before every match. I had already made weight just fine, but somewhere not too long before my match I would get keyed up and nervous and be unable to control myself. I always felt much better afterwards and wrestled fine. Sometime toward the end of junior year I became much more comfortable and it just went away on its own.
Anyway, I never actually saw anyone do the garbage bag thing, but people would routinely put on extra layers of clothing. The worst heavy clothing that I saw was from the 130 pounder in HS. Our prelim weigh-ins were at 7AM for a match later that day at say 2. If you were overweight, you’d have to come in early and hit the exercise bikes in the weight room. Well, that morning I came in at about 6:45 and was a bit over, so I went up to work off the extra few tenths or whatever. The 130 guy was already up there on a bike, wearing a winter jacket. I went back down to weigh in with the rest of the team, and he stayed up because he knew he was still over. When he finally came down, I saw him take off his winter coat, then a sweatshirt, then the hoodie sweatshirt under that, and then 2 t-shirts. He then stripped off his pants and long underwear and toweled the sweat off, and got on the scale to just barely make weight.
Between weigh-in in the morning and the match we were allowed to gain 3 pounds. This might sound like a lot, but when you consider that a little 8 oz glass of water is half a pound, it’s really not, especially considering that when you’re that thirsty your body retains nearly all of it. At the end of the season, right after the last tournament, we would usually hit up McDonalds or something on the way home. The 130 pounder, after we got home after that last tournament, weighed 138, and by the next week was back up to his usual weight of 147.
Do you has cauliflower ear?
Ever get whacked over the head with a folding chair?
No, but our captain my junior year had to get fluid drained from his ear and had to wear an ear button (to hold the hole closed). This was the same guy who contracted facial herpes. Dirty teams are gross.
I do remember reading an article about a few olympic wrestlers who were out at a diner, and their waitress asked if they were all brothers because she thought they their ears’ deformity was the same birth defect.
Nope, although when I was a substitute teacher one of my students picked up a folding chair and hit another student with it. Ah, middle school…
I have a bit of cauliflower ear, but it’s more from playing tighthead (and it’s only my right ear) than from wrestling.
The funniest story I have about making weight was before a tournament, when a guy was over by a couple pounds. He made a big show of putting in a wad of gum, spitting out all his saliva, jump roping, taking off his clothes, and toweling off. Then, he stepped on the scale, took his gum out, and put it on the scale’s balance beam! It tipped the scale in his favor, so he grabbed his gum back, and put it in his mouth, and got dressed again!
Our school’s scale was one where you just got on and the needle read your weight. At least that was the scale we used in the morning-- we may have had the balance beam one for the match. By the time I got to college, almost all the scales were digital, accurate to a tenth of a pound.
I’m pretty glad I avoided any permanent injuries (including fungus), although I did have a couple of rashes. One was called folliculitis, and the other may have been eczema, but that doesn’t sound right at this point. I managed to avoid ringworm the whole time.
What’s tighthead? And do greco wrestlers wear headgear?
Ever have one of those moments that you’ll remember forever, like the time the 130 pounder suplexed the opponent in the crowded gym?
I remember in high school, they’d perioducally have wrestling matches during school (all boys’ school, by the way). I always wondered why any other school would jump out of class early and come to the other school in front of the other school to wrestle.
Anyways, I remember a guy that nobody knew giving his opponent a perfect suplex in a match when the rest of the school was watching. The crowd went bonkers and a star was born at school.
Boy do I have questions.
My son started wrestling last year as a Freshman. No previous experience, not much in the way of sports before that. Slightly overweight. He lost every match but never quit.
Now he is a Sophomore and will wrestle again this winter. He is doing strength training at school but I want to know what specific exercises he should stress to help him out. Also, is there a training routine you found worked best?
Did you have any problems with herpes/lice/ringworm? There was an outbreak recently at a nearby school’s wrestling team all catching it from the mat.
Thanks. I’ll probably come back with more questions as I think of them.
I remember in one of the JV tournaments I was knocked to my knees away from the guy I had been tied up with. He saw this, and basically charged at me across the mat. By the time he got to me, I had recovered enough to meet him-- I dipped my shoulder and got a huge fireman’s carry where I threw him and stuck him.
There was this time in college where we were at Coast Guard, and so many fans came out to cheer for them. The gym had a raised track, and people were hanging off it and yelling. We decimated their team amidst all of the yelling (my middle school song used the word midst).
One of the most memorable matches for me was actually wrestled really badly on both my part and my opponent’s. But it was a very intense, high energy match, with reversal after reversal (which was unusual in itself). For people who might not know, a reversal is going from the bottom position to the top position without first going to the standing (neutral) position, usually accomplished by either pulling the opponent off you or a quick hip twist, so it’s kind of a crowd pleaser. We had been going back and forth with having our shoulders/back exposed, and it was toward the end of the match. I was exhausted, and knew he was in the same condition, and I knew that the next person to get turned to his back would lose. I ended up on top and hit a half nelson.
A lot of teams (in HS anyway) are taught to throw this crappy half, where you are basically riding parallel to the guy and put your arm under the other guy’s shoulder and across the back of his neck. This is completely useless because you’re trying to shift the entire body weight of the other wrestler with just your arm muscle. The better coaches had their wrestlers come out to one side, so that you’re almost perpendicular to the other wrestler. This allows you to throw the half with the same arm positioning, but the power behind your arm comes from your entire body pushing in the same direction.
Well, I did some fake move to get this guy worried about his right side, and then jumped out to the left and jacked him up with probably the most powerful, coordinated half nelson I ever threw. It was along the same lines of the guy who threw me in college by stepping in the same direction as the move I was doing and absolutely tossed me over his hips. I was literally heels over head, the biggest air I’d ever gotten in wrestling. Anyway, this was sort of the same thing, and I turned this guy. We were both so exhausted that I knew there was no recovery. He made some feeble attempt to get out and then just flopped for the pin.
The other thing that really made this memorable for me was that I borrowed a teammate’s CD player during my warm-up before the match. I hadn’t really used music as a psyching method before. In fact, I feel like I came into musical tastes fairly late into my life. It wasn’t until 8th grade that I really began getting into bands and such. The first CD I liked was Aerosmith’s Get a Grip. But this was a really new experience for me, feeling an upbeat track pumping through my chemistry, getting me more keyed up for a match than I ever had been. It really affected my performance.
Anyone else experience such a drastic alteration in mood or state of being because they discovered music? Did this apply to something you were trying to accomplish at the time: art, sports, studies?
Tighthead, in full “tight-head prop”, is a position in a rugby scrum. The two packs of forwards form up opposite each other with three in the front row and engage on the referee’s instruction. Alternate heads interlock, being ducked below the shoulders of the opponents so that the front rows are pushing shoulder-to-shoulder with torsoes horizontal. It looks like this in plan view:
V V V
A A A
Notice how the right-hand A is between the points of two Vs. That’s your tight-head prop, his head sandwiched between two opponents’, as opposed to the loose-head prop on the other end, whose head has nothing “outside”. The rest of the forwards form up behind the front rows, by the laws of the game. Tightheads tend to get banged about the ears a fair bit, although mine always stayed uncauliflowered (I also kept all my teeth).
I started new as a freshman as well. Hadn’t even seen the sport, let alone had any interest in it. And boy, was I a bit chubby for my freshman and sophomore years (well, it was sophomore year that I really started getting in shape). I did play a bunch of sports beforehand (soccer, football, a bit of tennis, the swim team), but even with all of those, wrestling was a whole new level. To my mind, there are maybe 4 other sports that are going to work a HS student like wrestling will (in no particular order): water polo, cross country, crew, and possibly squash. I wouldn’t worry about the weight; it’ll simply drop away in the normal course of wrestling. I don’t know what your son weighs, but I came into my sophomore year at 184, and ended up wrestling at 171 without much of a struggle.
I hope he’s not discouraged about the losses. I don’t remember much about my HS career at the beginning. I was doing well at the end, but I lost all but 2 college matches, so I know what he’s going through. It can be discouraging, not necessarily because of the losses themselves, but because if you keep losing it’s hard to feel like you’re improving at all. Maybe it’s sort of like Texas Hold 'em, where you can play all the right moves, but still lose to that dumbass who catches the river card. You just have to know that you’re doing well, and making the right plays, and in the long run it will pay off, or in the case of wrestling, soon it will come together.
I didn’t have a specific strength routine in HS. It wasn’t until college that it became really important, though if you do want a specific routine that worked for me drop me an email and I’ll lay the one I used out for you. In general, though, I’d just stress the major muscle groups: bench, lats, squat, delts. My college coach was also the school’s strength/training coach, so know it was good. In HS, it was good enough just to be working hard on the mat every day, though I know practices vary in intensity. The hardest practices I ever went through were actually in HS, not in college, though both coaches really stressed the importance of conditioning.
In terms of the skin diseases, there’s unfortunately precious little you can do. If the refs see something before matches, they will disqualify wrestlers, but if I recall correctly the only close scrutiny we got was before tournaments. The refs are generally just checking nail length and cleanliness of shaving before matches. It’s really up to the coaches of the individual teams to police their wrestlers, and though it was never really a problem for my league, I can see how it might easily be. As I mentioned before, our captain one year did get facial herpes, but other than that one case I never heard about that being transmitted. The fortunate thing is that the majority of skin diseases are easily treatable and go away in short order.
In college, we mopped the mat before every practice, but in HS I think someone did it for us. Infections can be communicated from the mat, but from my understanding I think it’s much more communicable from direct contact with wrestlers. Hopefully your son’s school had good standards for cleanliness, but to be honest I wouldn’t worry too much. In my experience, most coaches are conscientious about their teams, and have high standards about skin diseases. I never actually heard anything about lice. You’d think that would go along with the rest of the infections, but I never encountered it, in either HS or college.
Malacandra explained tighthead prop beautifully.
You’re not required to wear headgear in Greco or freestyle, and I never did. I always had too many problems with it going over my eyes (which isn’t that much of a problem, you don’t need to see anyway. Our high school coach used to take in strips of truck inner tubes, and have us use them to cover our eyes and wrestle blindfolded. It’s the weirdest thing, it’s almost like you can “see” them mentally.)
We did, however, have to carry a “blood rag”, tucked into our singlets. Because the rules allow for much higher amplitude throws, blood is slightly more common compared to Folkstyle (aka scholastic).
Make sure your son’s team mops the maps. We used to unroll them, mop them, run, practice, mop, run, and then roll them. It’s very important that you mop the mats with bleach before every use, and preferably after, too. Mats with cracked vinyl allow microbes to breed in the foam rubber, and are not nearly as safe. They also sell a disinfectant foam specifically for wrestlers, that I’m sure you can find online. They can be ordered by the case and are probably only necessary when wrestling against said school.
I only got ringworm twice from wrestling, but it’s fairly easy to treat if you don’t ignore it. I would get a gallon of bleach, and pour a little bit in the cap. Then I’d use use that to get the cotton ball real wet, and dab it on the sore. It burns like hell, but it’ll get rid of the sore in 24-48 hours. They won’t let you wrestle if it’s somewhere you can see it, so this can be “necessary”. If it’s over a larger area, the doctor will prescribe Tinactin, Lotrimin, or a similar anti fungal athletes foot spray or cream.
I’ve never heard of lice or herpes being a problem.
Wow, blood rag? Where was it tucked in to the singlets? When someone bled, they just stopped the match and administered cotton balls on the sidelines (while someone else cleaned the mat). I remember one match where I was feeling particularly lazy, so I just kept hitting a cross-face over and over, causing his nose to bleed repeatedly. You only have 5 minutes of blood-time (different from injury time) before you forfeit, and even though it didn’t get to that point, it did let me rest nicely (that may be the most evil I’ve ever felt in a match, though I wasn’t hitting him or anything-- the guy was just a bleeder).
I know what you mean about wrestling blind. When riding on bottom, you of course couldn’t see where the other guy was going to go or where he was going to attack with his hands, but you eventually learn to figure it all out without seeing him at all.
There was this one guy on the team senior year who hadn’t wrestled before (he was also a senior). He was pretty athletic, just didn’t have any wrestling experience. One match he ended up with a kid who was legally blind (hell, I am without my contacts) and had to use the touch start in the neutral (standing) position. This is where your hands are locked the entire time except when attacking. Anyway, the coach was explaining to him beforehand about what the touch start meant, and how even though this kid was blind, he wouldn’t hesitate to catch our guy if at all possible, so hold nothing back. So they get on the mat, the ref blows the whistle, and the first thing our wrestler does is slap his opponent’s hands down. 
He ended up beating the kid soundly, and we all ribbed him a bit about beating up on the blind guy.
BTW Pygmy, innertubes? Where the heck did you wrestle, and why couldn’t the team spring for a bit of cloth?