With the month of August rapidly approaching it’s a good idea to start thinking about the upcoming wrestling season and getting the most out of your training…

Typically, I like to divide training for wrestlers into 3 phases:  Offseason, Preseason and Inseason.

Here are 3 tips to get the most out of your Preseason wrestling training:

1.  Get Strong FIRST, then get fast One of the biggest mistakes I see wrestlers make with training is trying to jam everything into a couple of weeks before the Season and expecting results.

The Offseason is the time where you want to maximize your strength.  When the Preseason training phase is entered, your goals become staying strong but increasing power and speed.

But there’s a catch…

You Can’t Train for Increased Power and Speed If You Haven’t Made Your Muscles Stronger First!

Now I’m sure many wrestlers are having a good time with their Summer.  Some might be playing other sports.  Some might be traveling, going to the pool, hanging out etc.  For these wrestlers, there isn’t much training going on…

So here’s what I recommend…

Add the amount of time between TODAY and the start of your season.  Perhaps you start in November, so that would be 3 months until the start of the season… or roughly 12 weeks.  If you divide that 12 weeks into both Offseason and Preseason training, you will have roughly 6 weeks for each.

The Offseason can now be a phase of strength training, concentrating on the wrestling muscles.  This would last the next 6 weeks.

After the 6 weeks of Offseason strength training you can then make a switch to Preseason training where you focus on “speed and power exercises.” (more on that in a minute)

2.  Begin each Preseason Workout with a “Speed and Power Exercise” As I mentioned, the Preseason is when you transition from raw strength training to a more curtailed approach that will “flip the switch” from strength to strength/speed.  You do this by using Plyometric exercises such as Box Jumps, Standing Long Jumps, Staggered-Stance Long Jumps, Plyometric Pushups, Power Cleans, Hang Cleans, Snatches etc.

By performing these “fast” exercises when you are fresh, you are most likely to encourage results that carry over to the wrestling mat.

3.  Strength and Speed Should Be Trained Differently When you enter the Preseason phase and want to increase your speed and power with Plyos and fast exercises, you need to hold back on the weight and intensity.  With these exercises you are better off performing more sets with lighter weights and LOW repetitions.  Let me explain…

I was in the gym this Summer and I noticed some High School athletes training Box Jumps.  They each did as many reps as they could until they could no longer jump up onto the box.  They were exhausted…

But guess what?  They did NOTHING for increased speed.

They would have been much better off doing 6 sets of 3 jumps, rather than trying to do 18 jumps in a row to pure exhaustion.

By keeping the volume higher but repetitions lower, you can attack each repetition with maximal explosive speed.

Give these tips a try and let me know if you have any questions!