Wrestling Blogs - Mike Tamillow

Hard work is a cure all. When I have problems I don't talk about them, I work out. That's what guys do.

But seriously, hard work is definitely not a cure all. In fact sometimes working hard just creates more problems. There are tons of hard workers in sweatshops. The harder they work the more they get trapped in helplessness. When I face difficulties, I come up with a good well-planned and well-timed solution. But usually I cry them out before doing that.

What I want to focus on is working smart. What exactly is working smart? Well it encompasses everything- Technique, Position, Motion, Relaxation, Recovery, Scheduling, mental skills, and the list goes on. It even includes hard work, which should be incremented in different periods of time to enhance training not diminish it. I'm going to talk about what I have learned about working smart not only in this blog entry but also in most of them. Any other entries of mine will consist of incoherent babbling and ranting about 'the good old days' when I had to run a marathon and wrestle a bear just to make the starting squad because our guys back then were that tough.

What I’m going to talk about often gets mistaken for hard work, which is why I want to debunk the myth of hard work. I want to show that hard work won’t solve all your problems or make you any better than the day before. Something that gets mistaken for hard work far too much is the reaction to pressure.

Pressure comes from only one source, other people. The fear of failure, uncertainty, and embarrassment, all come from having an audience or thinking someone important is watching. Even when you start thinking ‘what if I get injured?’ It is simply a natural mental process you go through to try to avoid your fears. The one goal I need to be focused on is winning, which means I need to create optimal pressure in training and competing to succeed.

Studies of people’s reactions to an audience show that more skilled people perform better when being watched than when not. The opposite is true for less skilled people, when being watched they perform at a lower level. Another study shows that simple habitual tasks are performed better under pressure, while new and complex tasks are performed better when there is little pressure to perform.

What does this mean for wrestling? While if you are anything like me than you have mixed answers for the questions is “Is wrestling a simple, habitual task, or a complicated one.” And “Am I an expert, or am I a novice?” How do you make sense of these when skill is relative and wrestling movements are so diverse?

Yes and No, Yes and No. Wrestling is a complicated task; until you train it in so much that it becomes simple. At that point you become an expert. But beware; you are only an expert in those certain positions you have gotten into over and over again. Wrestling is so diverse there are hundreds of positions to get into and you can never be sure of which positions you are going to get into over and over again, although you will tend to get into the ones you are comfortable in the most.
For your training, you should use your practice time as a chance to perform wrestling as a complicated task. Go slow; get into new positions over and over again until they become habitual. Bend your body in ways you wouldn’t feel comfortable doing in a match. Don’t stress out, don’t feel the pressure to perform, don’t be concerned with results, and most of all don’t try to impress anyone, in practice. There are many people who make the practice room the highlight of their career. To takedown a national champ really means nothing; anyone can be a national champ with some improvement. Don’t let pressure to impress your teammates and coaches force you to take the same shots over and over again and do only what you have always been doing. No matter what level you are at, you must be thinking that in the practice room you are a novice and there to improve on what you can.

On the other side of things, in matches, change your mentality 180. Try to impress people, tell yourself your invincible and a killing machine. That people will see the real you when you step out there. Don’t try to relax yourself. Feel the pressure and absorb it. When you get on the mat, go initially with what you are most comfortable with. If you have been practicing without much pressure than this repertoire of moves will have a lot of variety. When you go for what usually works for you and it doesn’t, you will be able to naturally go right into the next move. No matter what level you are at, you must be thinking that at this point you are an expert, and use what you are good at.

There are some trends to how people react to pressure. As novices, people seem to put too much pressure on themselves, in the practice room or otherwise. They should spend most of their time at a slow pace to improve. This can cause a lot of wrestlers to stagnate. On the other side of the coin wrestlers who have been around a long time should be spending more time in pressure situations. Often times these wrestlers actually talk themselves out of the pressure they feel and relax. This can force them to perform under what they should.

Since you have read this, from now on you are only allowed to worry if that worry will help you in some way. Remember there’s no pressure, just results, and you can only change them before they happen.