20 Reasons Your Football Player Should Wrestle Once Football Season Ends

Ask his football coach

Don't take our word for it. Ask any football coach. They love wrestlers: balance, footwork, hips, hand-fighting, conditioning, toughness.

Then ask him which kids on the team never seem to get hurt and always seem to get up. Then ask where those kids trained in the off-season.

I loved recruiting wrestlers. I never had a wrestler ‘not pan out’ on any team I’ve ever coached in college. If they weren’t a starter, they at least played and contributed. Never had one wrestler not pan out. Who else can you say that about?

— Watson Brown, former head coach, UAB, Vanderbilt and Tennessee Tech

Low man wins

Every football coach your kid will ever have is going to yell the same two words: pad level. Get low. Stay low. Drive through.

A wrestler can't stand up straight for six minutes, because the second he does, he's on his back. Wrestling trains the non-traditional athletic movements that fill the gaps: footwork, core strength, mobility, proper breathing. Level changes aren't a drill in our room. They're the whole sport. By February, staying low isn't something he has to think about.

Wrestling in high school made me a much better football player. Learning leverage and how to use it.

— Mark Schlereth, three-time Super Bowl champion offensive lineman

A double leg is a form tackle

Head up. Hips in. Wrap. Drive through. That's a double leg. It's also exactly what his position coach is trying to teach him in August with a tackling dummy.

A wrestler hits hundreds of them a week, on a live partner who's fighting back, with no helmet to hide behind. He learns to put his hips through a man and keep his head out of the way. Ask any coach what that's worth.

Tackling is about form and technique. Using your hands. Wrestling teaches that.

— Jared Abbrederis, wide receiver, Green Bay Packers

Shedding a block is a hand fight

Linemen and linebackers win or lose on their hands. Inside position. Getting the first grip. Pulling, pushing, and getting off a block before the ball gets there.

Wrestlers call it pummeling and hand fighting, and we do it every single practice. The kid who wins the hands wins the position. That's true on a mat and on the line of scrimmage.

The balance and leverage has transferred well. You also have to keep your hands inside, kind of like pummeling for position in wrestling.

— Stephen Neal, Patriots offensive lineman, three-time Super Bowl champion

The sprawl is a goal-line stand

When somebody shoots at a wrestler's legs, he sprawls: hips down, legs back, chest heavy, and the shot dies at the line. We teach it as a goal-line stand. You can't let him past this point.

That's the same body a running back meets when he tries to go through a kid who wrestles. Hips first, then everything else.

Balance when somebody's trying to knock you down

Nobody learns balance standing still. A wrestler learns to control his own body while somebody else is pushing, pulling, and twisting it the whole time.

That's what keeps a running back on his feet after the first hit, and what keeps a lineman from ending up on the ground when the man across from him gets his hands inside. Balance under pressure is a skill, and wrestling is where it gets trained.

Physically, wrestling has helped me with balance and leverage. Mentally, I think it has really helped me with my work ethic.

— Nick Hardwick, Pro Bowl center, San Diego Chargers

He learns how to fall, and how to get back up

Football is a sport of getting knocked down. Nobody teaches kids how to do it. We do, on day one: fall safely, tuck, protect your head, and get your feet back under you.

Ask a dad who roughhouses with his boy every night how many times his kid has learned to stop when he says stop. That’s body control, not chaos. Then he does it a thousand more times. The kid who gets up fastest usually isn't the toughest kid on the field. He's the one who's practiced getting up. Ray Lewis was a Florida state wrestling champion before he was a Hall of Fame linebacker.

Six seconds vs. six minutes

A football play is about six seconds of contact. A wrestling match is six minutes of it. Nowhere to sub out, nowhere to rest, and somebody is trying to break him the entire time.

After a winter of that, the fourth quarter feels short. Wrestling teaches kids to handle stress and fatigue, and that pressure doesn't scare them anymore.

Football training is not even close to how hard I had to train to get ready for wrestling matches. Just to get ready for a six- or seven-minute match is grueling.

— Roddy White, three-time Pro Bowl receiver, Atlanta Falcons; two-time South Carolina state wrestling champion

He won't lose it in December

Here's what happens to most football players in December: nothing. Three months on the couch, and the kid shows up to spring ball slower, softer, and a step behind the kid who did something.

Wrestling season is November through February. He keeps his conditioning, keeps his edge, and shows up in March ahead instead of catching up.

You go to wrestling practice for two weeks, and it makes football look like a breeze.

— Roddy White

The calendar fits like a glove

Football ends in November. Wrestling runs November through February. Spring ball and baseball start in March. No overlap. No choosing.

And let's be clear: we won't push your kid to quit football. We'll never ask him to pick. Some of our best wrestlers went to college on a scholarship that wasn't for wrestling. We want him to be a better football player, and wrestling is how.

Ask Bill Belichick. Asked the best non-football athlete he ever coached, he didn’t hesitate: Stephen Neal, a two-time NCAA champion and 1999 World champion wrestler who never played a down of football in junior high, high school, or college, then won three Super Bowls on the Patriots’ offensive line.

Poor Steve didn’t know where the huddle was… all day tough.

— Bill Belichick, on Stephen Neal

Fewer injuries than football

Parents picture kids getting slammed. Here's the number: by exposure, wrestling's overall injury rate is about a third lower than football's. More contact, more time under tension, and still fewer injuries.

How does that math work? Because the danger in sports was never contact. It's collisions. Wrestling has no full-speed collisions.

Two-thirds fewer concussions

Concussion is the fear that keeps moms up at night, so here's that number too: a wrestler's concussion risk is about two-thirds lower than a football player's.

No helmets launching at head height. No kickoffs. No blind-side hits. Kids are matched by age, size, and weight, and the first skills we teach are how to fall, tuck, and protect the head. At Ironclad HQ the mats are double stacked, which dramatically lowers impact.

Matched by size, every time

In youth football, your 95-pound kid gets hit by the 160-pound kid who hit puberty early. In wrestling, he only wrestles kids his own weight. Every match, every time.

And if your kid is the big one, he finally has a home too. There's a weight class for every body. Nobody is too small, and nobody is too big. Think of a young kid like a plant: you build a strong root system before you take on any storms, so we scale the intensity to his age.

Wrestling is a big sport of leverage. You have to know how to control the person across from you… a lot of big people leaning on you and pushing you different ways, and I feel like it helped me become a better defensive lineman because I had a wrestling background.

— Dalvin Tomlinson, Alabama defensive lineman and NFL starter; three-time Georgia state champion at heavyweight, 169–2

No cutting weight. Not for kids. Ever.

Somebody's going to warn you about wrestlers cutting weight. Here's our stance for youth: no cutting, ever. If he's over the line, he moves up a class and wrestles a bigger kid. Let the scales be balanced.

He'll learn what food and water do for his body, because he feels it the next day. That's body literacy, not weight management.

No one to hide behind

There are eleven kids on a football field. If one of them takes a play off, the team can still win. Everybody who's coached football knows which kid that is.

On a mat, it's just him. It's just me and you, and all the excuses are taken away. A kid who learns to show up when there's nowhere to hide shows up on the field, too.

In wrestling, you are the only one competing. You make one mistake and it can cost you the entire championship. You are not under the microscope so much in football.

— Stephen Neal

He learns to lose in front of people and come back

In football, a loss is shared by forty kids. In wrestling, he loses alone, in front of everybody, with his hand not raised. Then he shakes hands, walks off, and comes back next week better.

What matters isn't the hard day. It's whether he comes back the next one. Most kids never learn that. Every adult needs it.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.

— Theodore Roosevelt, 1910

Human chess

Wrestling is human chess. You must think AND do. Wrestlers learn to think two or three moves ahead, weigh risk against reward, and hold ten things at once, under stress and the temptation of fatigue.

That's reading a defense with the clock running and your lungs burning. There's no other classroom like it.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

— Mike Tyson

"I can do something I couldn't do when I got here"

Every day at wrestling practice, a kid leaves able to do something he couldn't do when he walked in. A new tiny skill, every single day, and the lesson that if he focuses and works hard, he can learn it.

That's a growth mindset, built by hand. It carries straight back to the weight room, the film room, and the classroom.

We’re not going to focus on the outcome… focus on that particular play as if it had a history and life of its own.

— Nick Saban, on the origin of The Process

Cheap, simple, and on your schedule

Shoes, headgear, and a pair of shorts. One time. No pads, no helmet. No tryouts and no cuts, so nobody is told he can't be on the team.

And we believe families should schedule practice, not practice scheduling families. Practice isn't required. Can't make Saturday? Don't sweat it. Take a night off whenever your family needs it, with no guilt and no consequences.

He comes home a better kid

Football will always be football. We're not here to replace it. We're here to send a better kid home to your dinner table: stronger, calmer, more confident, and harder to knock down in every way that matters.

A body that can do hard things. Five kinds of strength at once: physical, mental, social, emotional, and knowing Whose you are. If it doesn't send a better kid home, it isn't worth your Tuesday. Come see if it does.

You have to have confidence, but not be cocky. You have to respect the opponent and be prepared for every play. You have to do the best you can every time.

— Stephen Neal