When I was on the wrestling team in high school, our coach (who bore an uncanny, possibly deliberate resemblence to Adolf Hitler, including the mustache) did not allow us to drink water during our practices. He didn’t let us bring our own water in; he did not provide water for us; he forbade it.
And these practices were, on a typical night, two and a half to three hours long in a rubber-lined mat room with the heat turned up.
When I started wrestling, I accepted this fact without question; having never wrestled before, I assumed it was common practice, and that the guys on our team would retain too much water weight and not fit into their weight class without it. I didn’t bitch about it and within about a week I got used to the practices.
However, people were always shocked when I told them that our coach didn’t allow us water during practices (even people who had wrestled in high school before.) They thought that it was either immoral, or illegal, or simply bad coaching. (Since a lot of guys half-assed through the practices instead of concentrating due to their dehydration and being tired, retrospectively it does seem like a bad idea.)
Has anyone here wrestled, and if so, did you encounter the same situation?
I can’t imagine any school would knowingly allow a coach to do such a thing nowdays, just out of concern for legal liability.
And quite rightly! This is absolutely foolish. As for people thinking it was either immoral, or illegal, or simply bad coaching, I’d say it was all three!
P. S. I remember that it was fairly common for wrestlers to go on very strict diets, including limiting their intake of water, and some harsh purging routines to reduce their weight enough to get into a specific weight class for competitions. But this was done by the wrestlers themselves, not something forced by the coaches.
And even that may not be effective any longer. I’ve heard that now team doctors or competition officials can assign wrestlers into classes based on the ‘proper’ weight for their height and body muscle mass, so starving yourself to get into a lower weight class doesn’t always work any more.
Well, he is still doing it “nowadays” because the experiences I described happened three years ago. He’s still the coach at that high school, and I wouldn’t expect him to change his ways.
We did the same thing in wrestling, along with jumping rope/doing pushups in the steamroom and other fun stuff. I went heavyweight in my junior year, and didn’t have to do that stuff anymore, but still had the water restriction.
Weight loss wasn’t the real purpose of the water restriction, from what I recall. It was try to keep you from puking all over the place because you chugged too much water. Wrestling is a damned tiring sport, much more so than football (at least on my teams), and it takes no stretch of the imagination to see kids training hard, drinking too much water, and blowing chunks.
When at the gym on ‘legs’ night, I still don’t drink any water. Way too exhausting, and anything in the stomach sometimes makes a bid for freedom halfway through a set of squats. Not fun. (except to watch!)
Having just completed 4 years as a father of a high school wrestler, I can testify that things are a little better. My son was never denied water at any practice. At the start of the year, they get tested for body mass and fat ratios using calipers and they are each given a weight that they cannot fall below for the year. So at least you don’t see kids losing 40 pounds during the preseason. They do tend to eat a lot less than normal, especially the day before making weight. Right after making weight, they eat like pigs. This alternation between eatling little and gorging isn’t terribly healthy, but compared to years past it’s a lot better. Plus you no longer see kids wrapping themselves in saran wrap and exercising for quick weight loss- that has killed wrestlers in the past.