Ben Askren on Josh Wagners Inside Cradle Technique
Ben Askren illustrates a pretty lethal technique utilized by Mizzou Tigers’ NCAA Championship contender Josh Wagner.
Posts
Adding Dimensions
Most of the time insomnia is a thing of the past for me, but here and there it catches me. Fighting doesn’t work too well, so this past week during an episode I sat down to my computer and started watching matches. I started by finding ranked wrestlers first and watching opponents and then their opponents so I didn’t have to keep going back and forth. A majority of the wrestlers still had holes in their wrestling which limits the guys they can compete with. Seeing kids inept in such important positions pains me. Kids with so much athletic potential lack the technical knowledge. Holes ranged from small things such as not being able to return someone to as big as having no mat wrestling skills. Reasons for not developing these aspects are many. Environment is lacking in competition or knowledge, the philosophy of only working one thing is maintained, etc. Ultimately though, we need to be accountable for ourselves, strengths as well as inadequacies.
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Freestyle, Why Not?
A conversation I have every year at the end of the folk-style season is, “Why wrestle freestyle?” The answer is plain and simple. Freestyle promotes attributes that greatly help folk-style wrestling. This is why the best folk-style wrestlers wrestle freestyle. I have different thoughts on why this is and what freestyle does for wrestlers. I think the change to freestyle helps not only technically, but has a profound effect for the mentality of wrestlers. Freestyle helps folk-style wrestlers by developing “mat awareness” and refining technique in neutral, providing a low stress environment necessary for kids to learn, changing scenery keeping wrestling new and fun, and making the biggest tournaments in the nation available creating another focus to motivate young wrestlers.
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Push It
This week choosing just one topic was a hard thing to do. Big tournaments bring deficiencies front and center and require analysis. Hundreds of ideas and questions ran through my head and with only three wrestlers entered in the tournament I had plenty of free time. I decided on writing about a dilemma I had when choosing what order to teach… What should be taught first? What is essential? Though I never reached a conclusion, it lead me to reframed my schema for pushing the pace in matches. Condition is one of the greatest tools that you can possess as a wrestler, but it seems too often the ability to use it escapes us.
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