Wrestling with Pain

Pain and wrestling go hand-in-hand. The sport is very physically taxing and requires a lot from your body. It will beat up your body and put a lot of stress on you.

While pain isn’t necessarily a reason to stop, it should not be pushed off to the side. Usually wrestlers will simply avoid certain moves and positions that aggravate their shoulder or knee. They will avoid practicing anything associated with that pain, but there are some problems with that.

1. You can’t completely avoid a position in live wrestling. Unless you are willing to just give up takedowns, there is no way you can plan every scramble that happens. You will be in those positions whether at some point during live wrestling. You are lowering your ability to score points. If all single leg takedowns hurt your shoulder, then now you are limiting your ability to score points. Against good guys, you will need everything your opponent is offering to you.

2. Simply just resting the injury a little more might not solve the issue. Usually a little bit of a change to lifting or even some rehab work is needed. Getting stuck in just avoiding a certain move and live wrestling is just delaying the healing process.

Here is where you can use the gym to improve movement quality and help yourself get back to wrestling at your full potential. You can train positions and perform exercises that challenge you in positions that you are not comfortable in. You can use the gym to work better ranges of motion so you can wrestle with all scoring options available to you. Try some exercises off of my list of go-to exercises for before and after practice, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_vgd56Ggzsaz7PwmEuQpXOuTp1zwIuVMOhPZQ0u_v1g/edit?usp=sharing.

This is not medical advice, but just considerations for dealing with pain in wrestling. It's annoying to deal with but try to understand where you are in the year, and when you can afford to rest and rehab vs. when you have no choice to but to wrestle.