By Ben Askren

“High school” season is over and the “real” season is just beginning for “die hard” wrestlers.

How can you spot “die hard” wrestling warriors?

They were probably the ones winning state high school titles in dominant fashion.

Even in the state finals these wrestlers make it look easy.

There are many reasons for this. First, they have dedicated much more of their life to wrestling than most other people. They spend countless hours in the gym each spring, summer and fall. Second, they have found better competition. They find this at national tournaments and wrestling the best people from other states. Doing this, one realizes how good the competition in their home state really is. Lastly, they’ve developed more confidence. They now believe they’ve “out trained” everyone and they were beating much better people only a few months ago.

“Off season” wrestling will allow you to increase your level of wrestling exponentially, and take you to a new dimension of wrestling. There are so many opportunities. Take advantage of them.

For me, on a personal level, I loved wrestling and was always on the mat, even on days when I was “down”, I went in the room and worked hard, because I knew it was needed to accomplish my goals. In high school I can count on my hands and feet the days I didn’t wrestle, and on 2 fingers the days I didn’t work out. This is the kind of dedication that is needed to make it to the next level.

In the off-season I also made sure I got the best coaching and competition possible. From fifth grade on I went to Ringers Wrestling Club. I can thank Ringers for a lot of my freestyle and Greco success. Stefan Ivanov, Jim Schmitz, John Harms, and Matt Abad were just a few coaches I was fortunate to have. They all emphasized great technique, so early on, that is how my wrestling developed. Wrestling at Ringers meant I always had great partners. Some of the wrestlers that went there were Ryan Lewis, Erick Swick, Brandon McNab, Rudy Ruiz, Brad Russell, OB Mungon, Jack Jensen, Glen Pero, etc., etc. etc.

There wasn’t a better collection of wrestlers in the state anywhere and all of them fed off each other to become better. I don’t see the same collection of great wrestlers getting together today. I was lucky so many great wrestlers were gathered at Ringers and at Steiners Advance Wrestling School when I attended. In my later high school years these were some of my most important practice opportunities In order to have those opportunities today, the great Wisconsin wrestlers need to get themselves to Ringers and Steiners to better one another.

Another part of my off-season wrestling was done in my basement. I was very fortunate to have a father that realized a wrestling mat might pay off. He brought one home when I was in third grade. It isn’t huge, but it definitely gets the job done. It started out as 12’x12’, but after much use was expanded to 24’x12’. In junior high and early in high school, when I didn’t have lots of good partners, I would do lots of shadow drilling. Drilling for hours by myself. Practicing my moves over and over again. This is one thing NO wrestler can claim they did not have the opportunity to do. All you need is yourself.

From my sophomore year on, I had a consistent wrestling partner. After my sophomore year he’d come over, usually, 3 days a week. My junior and senior years it was everyday. Most workouts would consist of 40 minutes of drilling and about 30 minutes of wrestling. We would go hard, but always had fun. It wasn’t too much. It was just enough to get the edge I needed. We went freestyle from the day state was over until the day high school season started. Alternating styles was more fun and then high school provided a good change.

Besides that partner, I had a ton of drill partners, who would call me a couple nights a week and drive in to wrestle with me. The two I wrestled the most were Brian Meier and Joe Milburn, it provided a good change of pace and I always liked helping them. Teaching others about wrestling is a really great way to learn it better yourself. If you want to learn something, teach it! I also had lots of friends from across the state who would come in for a weekend and hang out and wrestle. The Crass brothers, Josh Wagner, OB Mungon, Matt Pell, the Blumenthal brothers, Jack Jensen, Chris Johnson, etc. were all great partners.

The last option for wrestling in the summer is camps. I did not go to very many camps, because I was wrestling at home. I always went to Junior National and Cadet National camps and had a great time. I learned a lot at these camps. I encourage everyone to attend them. Other options, for the off-season, are lifting and cardio work. I always lifted, but not very hard, in high school. You can become well conditioned and technically skilled enough so that tremendous strength really isn’t necessary to beat most high school opponents. However, I now realize spending more time on strength work would have been helpful. Being stronger would probably have made my college red-shirt year, here at Missouri, unnecessary. I do encourage lifting, however NOT instead of wrestling. Always wrestle, before anything, if possible. Conditioning really isn’t an off-season thing unless you are competing. If you aren’t competing, then it really only takes 4-6 weeks to get in shape so you won’t have to do it until October or so.

“The importance of off-season wrestling” (Part 2 of 2)
By Ben Askren
Now that I’ve given you a look at what my training was like, I will try to give you a jumpstart by showing you all of your options up front. If you are anywhere near the Milwaukee area ringers is a great club and you would gain valuable experience from going. Here is a link to there website http://www.ringerswrestling.com. If you are around the Madison area, Troy Steiner is running a great club called advance, again I would encourage you to attend, a link to his website is http://www.advancewrestling.com

If your between Milwaukee and Madison, why not attend both? The more wrestling the merrier. If you live in the northern part of the state a good option is Northern Exposure. I believe it is based out of Merrill and run by Cadet national team coach Scott "Arnie" Arneson. Although I have never been there, I have heard very good things about it. Another option, if you don’t want to join a club, would be the WWF “regional training sites”. The “RTC’s” are a very good idea. However, they are under utilized by many wrestlers in the state who could benefit. This goes back to my idea of gathering the best competition to train with, if everyone goes to the ones close to them, you will get some pretty tough kids in the room and remember “iron sharpens iron”. The website for RTC’s ishttp://www.wiwrestling.com/news2002/skeds/wwf/RTC.htm. Don’t be afraid to attend. All of them have good coaches in charge. 

Another possible option is the Milwaukee North Central YMCA, Ben Tomes, the coach at Milwaukee Custer, started this a few years back and it has been very successful. A lot of good kids form the Milwaukee area go there and wrestle. Plus a bunch of tough old timers attend. If my memory serves me correctly, the schedule is weeknights starting sometime in March and running through the summer. If you want to go to camps, every major university has them, and I would like to recommend the Missouri tiger style camps. They are put on by the University of Missouri and are held In Columbia, MO. More information can be found at The Wrestling Mall websitehttp://www.thewrestlingmall.com/uploads/CampBrochures/br125/I would also recommend the Wisconsin Wrestling Federation Junior National or Cadet National camps. Info may be found at http://www.wiwrestling.com/WWF/Main.htm

If you decide to lift weights, most high schools have a decent weight room, and if your school doesn’t, then “hit the floor” and start doing pushups. If you want to do some conditioning, I like elliptical machines and aerodynes, but if those aren’t available, put your running shoes on and hit the road. Now, come next season, there shouldn’t be any reason why you didn’t train your butt off over the summer to get ready to dominate at state. 

Training can be fun sometimes, however I find it very difficult to stay motivated to train if I can’t compete. I love to compete. I love to compete against the best people. Although I hate losing, it is always a part of the game when you try to find the best competition. You can’t learn to like it, but sometimes (not all the time) you have to accept it. 
My most memorable example was Junior Duals my sophomore year. I went 3 wins-7 losses. I thought I was a stud going down there. I mean, I whipped everyone in Wisconsin so why not? I got beat bad sometimes, but I never got "teched" or pinned and always kept coming at the end of matches. I wrestled two 4-time state champs and I went after them. In my mind, I didn’t give them any respect. You can’t, or you lose before the match has started. That is enough rambling on other topics. I will write about those later. Let’s get back to off-season tournaments.
There are a lot (not as many as there should be after season) of little round robin tournaments. I never really went to them, however I would like to see better numbers there, because it is a good learning experience. 

I believe you can find a lot of those on the wiwrestling.com website. Also, the Illinois Wrestling Federation runs a series of folkstyle tournaments from spring into summer, almost every weekend for about 3 months. I went to a few of them with other wrestlers from the North Central YMCA. The tournaments in Illinois are fun and provide a good change in competition. I believe a complete schedule of these can be found on the IKWF web page. < http://www.ikwf.org/start.htm >

I always liked going to the bigger tournaments, because, as I have said “the better the competition, the more the fun”. A good place to get started is the State Greco and Freestyle Tournaments. I always got about 8 solid matches in at both of these tournaments. I rode along with Chris Borchardt and his dad Dale, to a lot of the tournaments when I was younger. I understand, many people don’t like to wrestle Greco, but give it a try. Greco is fun and who knows, you might learn something. Greco helped me out a lot, even though in folkstyle I never wrestled upper body. I knew I could, if I wanted to, which just made everything else more solid. 

After that you might want to try the Junior Regional competition. We are lucky to have one of them right here in Wisconsin. It is in La Crosse, for those of you who haven’t heard. You wrestle there and may get 8 matches in each style against real good quality competition. If you just go to those three tournaments, you could get over 30 matches. That gives you a whole extra season of wrestling experience. 

Other options, for those of you who like to compete more, are FILA Cadet and Junior World team trials. FILA Cadets is ages 15-17 and held in Evanston, Illinois, just a short drive from Wisconsin. University Nationals are also wrestled alongside the FILA cadet tournament. It is fun to watch the top college guys go at it. FILA Juniors are held in Chattanooga, TN, which is also driving distance (I believe 10 hours). FILA Juniors is for ages 17-20. Most wrestlers there are younger colleges guys, so this tournament gives you a good look at the next level. 

Also, USA wrestling holds regional national tournaments all across the nation. So if your family likes traveling, it would be fun to stop by and wrestle. My family always took our vacation to Las Vegas to wrestle at the Western Regional, held along side the US open. Not only is the US Open a blast to watch, the Western regional is probably the toughest tournament in the nation next to Junior Nationals. Last year my Western Regional bracket had the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th, and 8th place kids from my Junior National bracket. It is a real battle. 
If you are good enough to win the State Freestyle or State Greco Tournament you get the chance to be on the Junior Duals team. Don’t miss this opportunity! It was my favorite tournament of the year and a great experience. There are 10 mats set up and 32 of the best teams in the nation going at it for 5 days straight. It is just awesome. 
To wrap up the year, wrestle at Junior Nationals. Junior Nationals is by far the toughest tourney in the nation. If you are good enough to stay in a few rounds, you will get 10-12 matches against nothing less than studs. If you are a high school state runner up and you think you are tough, you might just go “2 matches and out” like I did my freshman year. Then you’ll see where you really are and how far you really have to go to reach your goals. 

All the information for the USA wrestling tournaments can be found at http://www.themat.com , go to the tournaments section and then to the USA wrestling section. I believe it lists them by month. I wrestled 100+ matches every “off season”, which is 400 matches in 4 years, which is equal to10 additional high school seasons. Think how much tougher that made me. Saying all of this, I realize I was fortunate enough to have a family that loved wrestling and didn’t mind driving through the night to go and wrestle at a big tourney. I know all of you might not have the resources needed to make it everywhere I did, but try your best to get everywhere you can and wrestle as many matches as possible. IT WILL MAKE YOU BETTER. 

I hope I have outlined a good plan for the off-season that will help you improve. I don’t really expect many of you to do what I did in the off-season, but any wrestling you do will make you better. The recipe for success is easy. Practice more, wrestle more matches and get better. 

So like I told my high school team one time; “We just got our “butts” kicked and I didn’t like it. I work hard and I want to win. You guys haven’t been putting in the time. So if you want to keep getting your “butts” kicked, keep doing what your doing. If not, you can come with me, bust your “butt” and be a champion. The choice is yours.” 

So now the choice is yours. I have given you all the weapons to succeed. If you want to be in the stands at the Kohl Center, keep doing what you are doing. If you want to dominate your opponent in the finals, get working. Have fun this summer.