My 14 year old son has just started wrestling in his High School. The coach said he needs to get shoes and headgear. He suggested going to www.eastbay.com to get stuff but I want to make sure what I buy isn’t crap. Any current or former wrestlers have recommendations about good wrestling equipment? And, no, we do not need T-shirts he can rip apart, extra large belt buckles or a supply of folding chairs to whack across his opponents.
I’ll move this to IMHO, where you can get informed opinions about your quest. Good Luck.
samclem GQ moderator
Thank you kindly! I wasn’t sure which way to go with this.
I do submission wrestling and I don’t wear shoes or headgear, but I do know some guys who wear Adidas wrestling shoes who are very pleased with them. Does your son’s coach have requirements for headgear?
Whoops; I actually meant Asics wrestling shoes, not Adidas, although Adidas makes them as well.
I am not a wrestler, but don’t skimp on the headgear.
I have a good friend who was a Div. II All-American - wrestling paid his way through college, but man, his ears look like a dog tried to chew them off.
I don’t know yet. Yesterday was his first day and he came home sweaty, stinking, exhausted and excited as hell. All he said was he needs shoes and headgear. Hopefully he’ll get more details.
BTW, the coach is giving them the workout routines he’ll do at school but what can we do to help him at home? Weight bench with free weights? Special diets? Cheerleaders? Kidding! Any suggestions that will help him to succeed? This is the first sport he has every expressed an interest in and we want to do everything we can for him.
Headgear is very important at the high school level. These guys spend a good deal of the time on the mat and injuries to the outer ear (sorry don’t know the correct term) are common without headgear. Basically the sections of cartilage can become seperated (Cauliflower ear )
I have gotten other sports equipment (baseball/footbal spikes and basketball shoes) from Eastbay and have had no complaints. The equipment that they sell there is pretty much the same thing you can get from any sports store. I don’t know about wrestling equip. but the rest of their stuff is good.
Endurance training. If you’ve never wrestled you don’t understand how EXHAUSTED you can get in just 6 minutes. Add to that strength training.
But the most important thing in my opinion is practice. The more moves you know, and the more instinctive they become, the more successful you’ll be.
This is IMHO, right? 
They are going to have practice every day so he is going to be totally worn out. Because a lot of the Freshmen have never wrestled before they are going to start on the basic moves along with the workouts.
Can you recommend a training routine (books, magazines, DVDs, whatever) we can get to help him? Since he has never shown interest in any other sport, I want to help him in any way I can.
Thank you all for your suggestions.
Again just my 2 cents, but I don’t think he’ll learn a thing from books magazines or DVDs. It takes time on the mat to become good, there’s no substitue.
If he has time in the evenings and it’s OK with his coach, I’d suggest he run a few miles each night. As I said endurance is a huge factor.
Another thing you migh consider is a good pair of hand grips, the ones with the spring you squeeze. Being able to get a good strong hold of your opponent is also critical.
In the end, to be honest, the coach should be best able to point out his weak areas and tell him where to concentrate his efforts.
Good Luck! I hope he sticks with it. It’s hard but it’s fun.
All good advice. I agree you should spend on quality headgear, but I’d also talk to your son’s coach to see if he (or the UIL) requires or recommends any models or brands. Califlower ear is pretty much irreversable, and having your ears ground on the mat is common in freestyle and Greco-Roman.
Asics shoes. Don’t bother getting the fancy ones that have a zipper - taping laces builds character.
With a headgear, you can’t go wrong with Brute or Cliff Keen. The headgears that look like two discs tend to be more popular with the young’ns than the ones that look like two triangles, be advised; as I recall, prices are similar, and the two-disc style is more comfortable in my experience. Don’t worry about anything too gimmicky. The classic styles are perfectly useful, and anything those two brands make will be legal for any tournament he’ll ever compete in. (Sometimes you’ll see wrestlers buy two headgear, one in each of their school’s colours, and reassemble them so they have two headgear that each have one panel in each colour.)
Keep an eye out for striped rugby socks in the school colours. A lot of high school wrestlers wear one sock of each colour and pull them all the way up. Alternatively, they’ll wear two socks that match the main colour of the singlet. The point is that it tends to irritate referees for no good reason as well as make it slightly harder to grasp the legs. (One of these is much more important than the other.)
The grip-trainers zoid mentioned are very useful, especially for younger wrestlers where cradles are going to pop up more often. With young wrestlers, a great grip can make the difference between a pin and a match he has to fight out for points.
~ Ace, wrestling official
It’s all about mental toughness.
Is this a hackneyed, cliched, borderline-meaningless term? Yeah. Does it apply to wrestling? Yeah.
I was a shitty wrestler in high school. But I spent 3 hours of practice every day with some amazing ones - several state champs and decorated AAU veterans. These guys had been doing it since they were 10 years old, or younger. Therefore, starting in high school puts you at a disadvantage right away, and it will need to be compensated for. There will be other wrestlers on that team that are used to the grueling, nauseating workouts, miltary-style workouts that give basic training a run for their money. (One wrestler on my team went on to be a Navy SEAL, another an Annapolis-trained Navy officer, still another an Army Ranger.) I realize here that not all wrestling teams are as rigorous, but from everyone I’ve talked to, it has the toughest training of any high school sport. So your kid has got to be able to take this if he doesn’t want to wash out.
You have to just keep going, and keep pushing at it, through the sweat and nausea. A lot of people quit wrestling teams because they can’t take it. It takes that “mental toughness,” the idea that you need to use the mind to push the body to keep going.