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Someone please explain…

It’s a freaking message board. Who cares if he’s being hypocritical? The point of the board is to discuss wrestling, which he was doing by talking about Brands. Stop making things political on here. There’s several of you who engage in it constantly. It’s like you just can’t help yourselves.
For the most part, I agree. But please stop equating criminal acts with politics. I’m not into politics. And it’s a shame that criminal acts are now seen as political stances by some around here.
 
I made one comment calling out blatant hypocrisy and double standards. The 10 people who were triggered by that and have come out of the woodwork to take issue with that all contribute to thread derailment.

To be clear. Every single time I read a @MAGAman post hypocritically condemning someone for a personality trait that Trump exemplifies, I will call it out.
you know i was just screwing with you, you been on here a while and i have no say over what you post. now let's get back to taking tom brands to the train station
 
You need to self reflect. You aren't following or comprehending the conversation and are lashing out because I've criticized hypocritical and inconsistent standards. That shouldn't be triggering.
Lashing out? Let's try not to over exaggerate on this point too. You seem to miss my original point that yes, some people can have a variety of opinions and it's the true cult member that cannot.
 
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For the most part, I agree. But please stop equating criminal acts with politics. I’m not into politics. And it’s a shame that criminal acts are now seen as political stances by some around here.
Believe me I fully agree. But regardless, none of it has any bearing on the Iowa wrestling program
 
you know i was just screwing with you, you been on here a while and i have no say over what you post. now let's get back to taking tom brands to the train station
I think suggesting taking Tom to the Train Station might be just a bit extreme, eh? Even for the cesspool. Some might actually take it literally.
 
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I can't speak to what the practices/training are in fact like now, but I do agree with your thesis here. And to it I would add that it only works if you recruit people who have the athleticism, 'mind wiring', and natural instinct. You can't use a bulldozer to navigate an obstacle course, a nimble heli-drone works better (unless said bulldozer is named Spencer).
Great post. Thanks for pulling all of that together. However, I do wonder if there are some coaches out there who may actually have a better process, but have worse results due to being at schools who don’t draw the same caliber of recruits that we do at Iowa. If so, would it be worth seeing if they could improve things here?

I say this because it feels like we’re stuck in this distant second position, much closer to third than first. I don’t trust that Tom can get us unstuck from this spot because we’ve watched this story play out every year but one over the past 12-13 years. The risk is that we get worse. I get that. But I also think a new direction at the top is our only chance of spoiling PSUs party. Gotta risk it to get the biscuit I think.

I talked about process and practice structure on one of these recent threads. It just seems that you should practice how you want to compete. The structure and process should clearly facilitate your aim. And I think you need to figure out how to facilitate that aim from a mental standpoint as well.

Example:
If the aim is to score a lot of points in a short amount of time (7 minutes) against even wrestlers ranked in the top 20, then you’ll probably want to encourage creativity and risk-taking in the practice room. Why? Because that’s how you develop more ways to score points. More ways to score points means less likelihood an opponent can gameplan to slow you down.

Then, how do you encourage creativity and risk-taking in the practice room? You’ll probably want to keep the live goes short, with enough time to really recover in between them. This allows for wrestling at a higher pace without getting punished for doing so. And by punished, I mean that wrestling a high pace early in the live go in a practice structure with long live goes (or very short breaks between several fairly long live goes) opens yourself up to the risk of getting walloped the rest of practice, or just toughing it out and hanging on for dear life, because there’s a very good chance your opponent didn’t expend all that energy early on like you did so now he can grind you down for the remainder of the workout.

But you want to be able to go higher pace because a higher pace increases scoring rate in general and builds the habit of wrestling a high pace for the matches. You might also want to mix a lot of play wrestling in, as this lessens the stakes of each takedown. This allows wrestlers the feeling of freedom necessary to risk trying new holds, put themselves in positions they usually avoid (as the positions are outside their comfort zone), and spend more time in scrambles or otherwise engaged in the action rather than mostly just pressuring until a shot opens up.

There’s more you can do for this and that’s just one example. I could flesh it out even more, but this post is getting long and you get the idea. Point is, I don’t think our practice structure or training environment (not talking about the physical environment) facilitate the type of wrestling we’re all longing to see from our guys. Quite the opposite actually.




Good point Trapper
This got me thinking about the physical stature of our coaches and team. compact and tough, grinders. PSU has length and leverage. Typically good scramblers have length, Think COBE.
When Carl wrestled he had technique which would “wow” you.
Gable had length and legendary work ethic.

What is the proper amount of rest between short live gos? What is the definition or process of play wrestling (stop it you sick bas***ds) I’ve heard the term just not sure what the end result is,
Other than getting someone knocked up.
You mentioned being in wrestling positions your not comfortable in,

There may be coaches out there with better process and less success, how do you evaluate this? If you’re wrong it’s not worth going the way of what has happened at ISU and MN. Zeke Jones comes to mind and he has facilities, financial support and Sunkist kids he’s not getting it done. Tom Ryan ditto. I like your ideas. It’s a risk/reward scenario. My life’s work has been in finance. Bulls and Bears make money and pigs get slaughtered.
With that being said plenty of adjustments had to be made along the way because status quos don’t cut it in a highly competitive environment.
You do have to have core values while being open to competitive change.
 
Good point Trapper
This got me thinking about the physical stature of our coaches and team. compact and tough, grinders. PSU has length and leverage. Typically good scramblers have length, Think COBE.
When Carl wrestled he had technique which would “wow” you.
Gable had length and legendary work ethic.

What is the proper amount of rest between short live gos? What is the definition or process of play wrestling (stop it you sick bas***ds) I’ve heard the term just not sure what the end result is,
Other than getting someone knocked up.
You mentioned being in wrestling positions your not comfortable in,

There may be coaches out there with better process and less success, how do you evaluate this? If you’re wrong it’s not worth going the way of what has happened at ISU and MN. Zeke Jones comes to mind and he has facilities, financial support and Sunkist kids he’s not getting it done. Tom Ryan ditto. I like your ideas. It’s a risk/reward scenario. My life’s work has been in finance. Bulls and Bears make money and pigs get slaughtered.
With that being said plenty of adjustments had to be made along the way because status quos don’t cut it in a highly competitive environment.
You do have to have core values while being open to competitive change.
Haha. Knocking someone up aside, play wrestling is sort of difficult to define but is essentially wrestling at about 80 percent of your strength and, when done well, places an emphasis on creating action and creativity. And there's at least two applications of play wrestling. You have open play wrestling, where either person can score and either wrestler can attempt any offensive attack at any time. You also have positional/situational play wrestling, where you're working a certain attack or position (i.e. one wrestler starts with a single leg).

In positional/situational play wrestling, you could leave it open to either wrestler scoring or you could mandate that one wrestler is going to score and the other wrestler is tasked with making the scoring wrestler work through different defensive maneuvers/counters. An example of the latter would be mandating the wrestler with the single-leg be the scoring wrestler (or vice-versa). What's great about this, is you can encourage the non-scoring wrestler to get creative in the types of defensive maneuvers they do. So, the person defending the single-leg might first sprawl, then hip in, then throw the head to the outside, then attempt an Abas or Rico roll before finally conceding the take-down (provided the scoring wrestler with the single-leg works through these different counters to the finish).

Looking at open play wrestling, when it comes to the creating action component, you might mandate that a scoring hold must be attempted within 5 seconds or so. In neutral position, someone should be attempting a scoring hold/attack within 5 seconds or so every time you're on your feet, as opposed to prolonged hand-fighting, standing around, or just pressuring in for extended periods of time. The same thing applies in top position, where you're always attempting a turn within five seconds or so. On bottom, always an escape attempt within 5 seconds. If any of the scoring attempts fail, mandate/encourage the next scoring hold should be attempted within 5 seconds or so.

The creativity piece comes from encouraging/mandating more risk-taking, willingness to go to positions you're not comfortable in or that you don't often find yourself in (getting outside your comfort zone), and attempting different moves/holds/maneuvers/attacks than you typically would when live wrestling. It also comes from wrestling at 80 percent of your strength, as this creates an increased likelihood of prolonged action (scrambles). For example, wrestling at 80 percent of your strength decreases the odds of just stuffing someone's shot with a hard sprawl and go-behind. Hard sprawl and go-behind is great, but executing this doesn't teach either wrestler how to continuously work through new and/or changing positions to get to a score.

You can also facilitate action, creativity, and faster (and more varied) positional mastery during play wrestling by encouraging the wrestlers to allow for their partner to create action in positions where one wrestler has dominant control. For instance, you instruct that when a top-position wrestler breaks their opponent to their belly, they either quickly find a scoring hold or give up the position a bit (give space, reduce pressure) to allow the bottom wrestler room to create movement so more action can continuously be created. In this way, you ensure more action which facilitates faster learning.

Final note: When play wrestling, you place much less emphasis on winning each position/hold and much more emphasis on learning/mastering each position/hold, as compared to live wrestling.

As far as the proper amount of rest between live goes, it really all depends. First, what is your aim? I mentioned one aim might be to foster the ability to score loads of points against any opponent (even the AA level opponents). If that's the aim, I'd start with limiting the amount of live wrestling in a practice to 20 minutes or so in total. Not every practice, as creating mental/physical toughness via the occasional grueling practice is another good aim. But, most practices should limit the live wrestling to 20 minutes or so at most. This places a premium on creating action quickly because time is relatively short. Next, I'd limit the length of each live go to 10 minutes or less (usually less, like 5 minutes or so) in order to avoid discouraging risk-taking, creativity, and a high offensive pace, as I mentioned in the previous post.

With those foundations in place, I'd say proper rest time between live goes might be around 10 minutes. That probably sounds too long, but it avoids discouraging the willingness to take risks, be creative, and wrestle at a high offensive pace, which is necessary for achieving the stated aim of facilitating the ability and eagerness of your wrestlers to score a lot of points in a relatively short amount of time (7 minute match). But, you can get creative and alternate between live goes and play wrestling so that you only actually rest for 3-5 minutes after a live go, but still get the benefits of a longer rest (encouraging our stated aim) by next reducing to around 80 percent of your strength when play wrestling during the next go.
 
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Be carful or wrestling might actually become F*N. That would necessitate a transfer to F*N State.

Where do you think Nolf came up with all his wild stuff. It was the play wrestling and experimenting that led to the WinDixie. Get into scrambles and see what happens.
 
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