The wrestling season begins long before you step onto the mat for your first official match. How to be a better wrestler starts with preseason workouts that are crucial for preparing your body and mind for what could be your best season yet. If you’re asking yourself how to get better at wrestling or even how do I get better at wrestling, the answer begins here.
Every technique weakness your opponents might exploit becomes an opportunity for bettering ourselves through dedicated training. When you're stuck in a rut and feel like your hard work isn't paying off, remember that wrestling goes through cycles of growth. The key is focusing on the small things that make a big difference through effective ways and consistent training time.
Building Mental Fortitude and Champion Mindset
Mental toughness in wrestling requires discipline that directly impacts your performance and confidence in pursuing your goals. Your motivation and mindset play psychological roles during competition, especially when facing pressure and potential failure in matches and practice.
Maintaining focus while staying aggressive against opponents without tying your self-worth to wins alone shows true progress and helps you succeed and dominate when you need to score points and win. Mental issues often limit athletes more than physical toughness, which is why kids need a coach with the right approach to building a mental fortress. During a slump, keeping a journal or listening to a motivational podcast can help any successful wrestler avoid limiting their physical tools.
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Mastering Fundamentals and Basic Technique
The basics of wrestling start with proper stance, smooth motion, effective level change, correct head position, and strong hips. The depth and breadth of progressing in shot defense, hand control, and escapes becomes evident when watching NCAA national tournament competitors who rarely attempt wild, crazy moves without mastering hand fighting from the bottom first.
Building a solid foundation prevents weaknesses in basic moves like the Penetration Step, efficient movement to score on your opponent, and maintaining proper stance and posture on the mat, whether staggered or parallel. Level Change involves lowering and raising your hips strategically for takedown attempts or to defend from Neutral Position.
Optimizing Training and Practice Sessions
Effective practice and training are essential for how to be better at wrestling because they require improvement with clear direction and purpose rather than just getting sore with minimal progress. Identifying weaknesses with your coach, especially in bottom wrestling, helps set goals for learning to turn, maintain control, use proper grips, and engage your hips for an escape or reversal in any challenging situation.
Developing your unique style through bad position drills and live scenario work, combined with solo drills with a partner under an experienced Coach in small group or private sessions, improves technique more than large group sessions alone. Private wrestling practice and dedicated workouts during the off-season keep you sharp on the mat while working technique at practice or camp sessions.
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Recovery, Nutrition, and Physical Conditioning
Resistance training and proper recovery help every athlete manage weight effectively, as resistance training builds muscles that fill out your singlet while developing strength through a comprehensive conditioning program. Getting stronger improves endurance and flexibility while reducing the chances of getting injured by strengthening joints and reducing impact through proper stretching and muscle contraction.
Adequate rest, proper nutrition, and smart weight-cutting practices prevent wrestlers from unsafely losing weight during the season. Crucial nutrition, quality sleep, and focused recovery help wrestlers avoid neglect that leads to subpar training and poor results. Quality Rest remains critical during training as your body repairs itself while asleep and your brain processes techniques.
Video Analysis and Film Study
Watching videos of your past competitions helps identify specific things to work on by analyzing what you won or lost and what lessons you learned. Video analysis might reveal that your head inside single leg needs work, so your goal becomes finding ways to set up that front headlock position or brush up on front headlock technical details to increase your chances of scoring when you get behind on points and need to score quickly.
Studying a shuck by to score, perfecting a roll to score from a standing position, or working transition moves from a single leg to score improves through learning and watching videos of high-level wrestlers to get better. Watching high-level wrestlers like Kyle Dake and J'den Cox proves beneficial for learning new moves for your arsenal.
Cross-Training and Sport Diversification
Should kids wrestle other sports year-round or spend more time on the mat in wrestling? While I'm obviously bound to have a better, biased opinion about why kids should wrestle year-round, let's be realistic - kids are people with interests outside of wrestling. I've coached kids who played football, soccer, ran track, or did gymnastics, and here's the cool thing: getting in shape in one form can help your wrestling, and vice versa.
Wrestling is a physically demanding sport at the high school and collegiate level, so I'm confident that the work ethic wrestlers develop will help them excel in any sport they choose. Cross-train to enhance overall athleticism, prevent burnout, and engage in non-wrestling activities like swimming, stretching, lifting weights, running, and jumping.
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Self-Assessment and Skill Development
Take inventory of your strengths and weaknesses instead of being like wrestlers going a hundred miles per hour through drills and learning endless techniques without slowing down. Slow things down to understand common positions where you're struggling. Develop a plan to improve these positions over the months of focused work until you understand scoring opportunities against good competition. Learn new setups and finishes that make your strengths even better through deliberate practice and honest evaluation of where you need the most improvement.
Being A Good Teammate
Most people think being a good wrestler or good athlete in general relies solely on athletic prowess and winning ability - they're wrong. Being a better wrestler involves many ways of leading by example to help your teammates push the pace in practice.
If you want something done a certain way on the team, become known as a class act who's a pleasure to host by leading by example - pushing the pace, mopping after practice, shaking hands with opponents whether you win or lose, and picking up food and drink trash at tournaments. Find ways to help struggling teammates and keep going so teammates know you have their back. Wrestling creates a brotherhood you'll never forget.
Bilateral Skill Development
Most wrestlers know different moves, but usually favor doing them on one side only. Like hitting an outside sweep single to the right, they rarely hit it to the left side. Knowing a move and having it drilled are two different things, and it's common for wrestlers to drill certain moves on one side only.
The likely way to improve your wrestling skills involves drilling moves on both sides, which adds more options from different positions, while actually adding new moves proves beneficial to your wrestling. Guys who like to switch up their lead legs create flurry and action when an opening becomes available, making them able to hit takedowns and pinning combinations from both sides - essentially doubling their offensive arsenal.
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Positional Dominance Strategy
Wrestling is essentially a series of different positions, and while you cannot know every possible position, you must know as many as possible to step up your wrestling. To start breaking down matches into a series of positions, focus on what you need to dominate most effectively.
Too often, wrestlers go through the motions during a match. For example, if someone gets a collar tie on their opponent, they often just collar tie right back, which does not give either wrestler an advantage. Always try to put yourself in a better position than your opponent. Focusing on dominating positions instead of going through the motions will really take your wrestling to the next level.
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Advanced Drilling Techniques
One way to improve your wrestling is to drill each move further along in the sequence. For example, after shooting a double leg, don't immediately stop - practice breaking your opponent down flat and going right into the turn.
It's easy to get in the habit of drilling moves, especially takedowns, and only finish 90% of the technique. The problem with hitting the same move on the mat is that sometimes 90% isn't good enough. Learning to chain wrestle by stringing moves together will dramatically help your wrestling by creating multiple scoring opportunities from single setups.
Mental Approach and Individual Development
Too many wrestlers have different strengths and weaknesses, yet develop physically and mentally at different times. Comparing yourself to others often leads to frustration and burnout. Realize that your wrestling journey is unique - you may develop differently from others around you. Commit to the process and trust your training rather than measuring progress against teammates who might be at different stages of development.
Live Wrestling and Sparring Practice
Drilling and learning new techniques are important; however, learning to spar or play wrestling properly will help you wrestle transitions on the mat and develop creativity in your technique. This helps develop your own style by using your specific body type and physical attributes effectively.
Sparring may be difficult for inexperienced wrestlers, but it's an essential tool to break through plateaus and reach a higher level of wrestling performance.
Coaching and Feedback Systems
The quickest way to improve is simply to ask your coaches, parents, or training partners for input. Talk to your coaches about your goals and ask what they believe is holding you back from achieving them. Keep an open mind and utilize the resources around you to develop a more effective plan for reaching your wrestling potential.
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Competition Rules and Scoring
Competing is a big part of wrestling, and you'll likely go to your first competition while still learning the basics. Understanding how matches are scored allows you to draw up effective game plans for competition. The goal of any wrestling match is to defeat the other person. If either competitor gets a pin, the match is automatically over.
Points are scored for different moves successfully executed during the match. The most important scoring rules include: successful takedowns score two points, escapes score one point, successful reversals score two points, unsportsmanlike behavior leads to a point for your opponent, and stalling leads to a warning, then disqualification.
Conclusion
Learning how to be a better wrestler isn’t about shortcuts or magic moves; it’s about building a complete approach to your sport. From mastering fundamentals and training smarter to strengthening your mindset, recovery habits, and video analysis skills, each step adds up.
Consistency in practice, honest self-assessment, and being a supportive teammate all help create lasting progress. Whether you’re refining your stance, drilling on both sides, or developing mental toughness, the process defines the outcome. Commit to these principles and you’ll steadily transform into the wrestler you want to become.