Conditioning is an important factor in wrestling however, sometimes too much emphasis is placed on conditioning to the detriment of the athlete.

In our training center we only condition our wrestlers once a week in the off-season and its probably only for 10 minutes. We essentially pre-fatigue them, only during one out of the 3-4 sessions per week, before doing some dynamic and explosive strength work. This gets some high intensity conditioning in and it also forces them to be explosive when fatigued.

This isn’t to say that we couldn’t add more conditioning or won’t for a specific athlete or specific reason but most of our athletes wrestler year round and they don’t lack conditioning.

Conditioning is also easy to build in a month. Strength and explosiveness is not.

The fact is that many wrestlers will have bigger “tanks” when they get stronger because of an improved strength to bodyweight ratio. The strength will also fatigue their opponent.

If you have a wrestler or are a wrestler watch this video: