Response to a Comment from Age of Enlightenment or Avoidance Great post Mike. I love the things you talk about here and the only question I have is what mirror do we use to look at ourselves (& more importantly our kids) when trying to evaluate our shared process. Every coach has different advice & […]
Starting off an article by telling you that I’m a child of the enlightenment won’t win over any new readers, but if you’re a regular you won’t be surprised by my thought process. Let me explain. If you have a goal and a current assessment based on evidence, reason will generally give you the straightest […]
How you prepare for a workout can either enhance or take away from the exercise benefits. If you are a serious athlete or just want to improve yourself you want to make sure that you’re maximizing your workout effects, not detracting from them. Choosing the proper fuel is important, but so is the timing of […]
It makes sense that as life gets easier (less physical) the weaker our muscles become. Children become physically weaker from inactivity and a team of researchers who measured handgrip, arm-hangs and sit-ups found a dramatic decrease in fitness in the last generation of kids. What most parents and coaches might not realize is just […]
General Guidelines- Prepare your child for contact and lifelong body health. Warning! Driven wrestling parents won’t think that this is enough. I disagree. My goal with this is to protect a kid’s body and have them ready for serious competition around puberty. Disguise the workouts as fun or competition with friends. Under 10 boys love […]
Get back on your workout routine for strength, conditioning of the body and mind and dial-it-in to be lean and mean. Learn from previous years’ failures. The harder you train the harder it is to give up on a goal. Get more recovery time than you think that you need. Don’t even think about dieting. […]
If you want your strength to increase you need to grow your muscles. To grow your muscles you need to put them through stress. Wrestlers want strength with as little bulk as possible unless going up a weight class. If you are a wrestler or just an athlete you want the exercises you’re doing to […]
There has been a lot of talk about strength training in the wrestling world spurred on by Kyle Snyder showing off much of his training on social media. Many old school wrestlers and coaches were brought up with the idea that lifting weights tends to make you slower. That may have been true with the […]
Have you seen the stats? Kids aren’t enrolling in contact sports like they used to. When parents wrap their sons in bubble wrap it is hard to get those same kids interested in a sport that requires rough physical contact. A young coach called me just the other day to talk about a problem that […]
I see some many high school and college kids that want to get better but they are making decisions that won’t help them get better. I promise you that staying up late, playing hours of Fortnite (or any video game) and otherwise living a sedentary life style, punctuated by a couple hours of working out […]
Heal up the body and mind. If you have had any injuries go see a doctor of osteopathy (DO), a quality physical therapist (myo-fascial release) or sports psychologist to ensure that they really heal up. The mind is just as important as the body. The next step would be to strengthen the formerly weak […]
Make the Changes necessary to reach your goals. I promise that it won’t be easy. So you can dive into the pain of growth or delay the pain of failure until next season. The choice is yours. Good luck. Be a multi sport athlete. Take a competitive break from wrestling but still get some […]
I recently had a long talk with Stuart McGill. Nearly 2/3’s of Americans and north of 80% of athletes suffer from low back pain at some point in their lives. Serious athletes are especially susceptible to lower back troubles. McGill has worked with many of the top athletes in the world. We mainly talked about […]
I’ve seen the college recruiting process of boys from almost every angle. The rules of the game are complex and changing all the time. This can be the hardest part of getting to the next level. It is filled with NCAA regulations, most of which don’t help the student athlete. The path is rocky and […]
It’s not about getting taken down or knocked down. It’s about getting back up and what that teaches you. Quitting is a behavior learned early in life. There are many causes but almost everyone that really examines quitting sees its incubation in childhood. Showing children how to work hard and persevere through a challenge […]
