We can't thank Ohio Northern University enough for allowing us to use their space and work with their team. Besides having an outstanding staff that loves and cares for their wrestlers they also have the foresight to make sure they are taken care of. Nowadays the future is uncertain, universities are closing, and the country is in disarray but ONU is looking to expand because all their ducks are in order. Beaschler has spent 3 decades honing his team into a well oiled machine. Originally we wanted to talk about the various methods we tried with their kids but I wanted it noted that Ron and Kyle are the reasons our part is possible. We learned a lot directly from the coaches themselves and were able to prefect a lot of what we do because of them.
For starters we had a lot of fun with the ONU team. We've tried a variety of methods and settled on a few that stuck. The kids and us had a great time experimenting with new toys. Below is a video of two wrestlers playing a game of toe touch. The goal is to touch your opponents toes before your opponent can touch yours. The catch is we added a layer synaptic sensory training to the exercise by introducing a strobing light. It was originally best out of 3 but all the games we played ended up going to the best of 5.
The purpose of this added measure is to strip away the wrestlers sight in increasingly frequent intervals to train their brain to fill in the gaps of information which consequently makes reaction times faster. The idea is that your brain will naturally compensate for the lack of visual behavior be analyzing the data it has already received to make assumptions about what will come. During a normal drill you brain wants to be lazy. It will take as many short cuts as possible to achieve the desired result. What this means in practice it is harder to address flaws because your brains assumptions have made you blind to your flaws. The idea works the same in magic tricks. The reason magic works because your brain automatically makes assumptions to not have to work as hard focusing on the presentation.
For more examples of synaptic sensory training watch the video below for a MMA drill.
We didn't just focus on the cutting edge training techniques. We went back to the basics and helped with their over all healthy and fitness. For example, yoga is the ban of most wrestlers. They hate stretching for more then 10 seconds at a time. Unfortunately it takes about 20 seconds for your brain to tell your nervous system to totally relax so these short stretches aren't as effective as they could be.
Many wrestlers complain about tight legs but can practically put their nose to their knees stretching. Why is that? because the body is comprised of more then 8 muscles so just doing 8 stretches isn't cutting it. For this situation many wrestlers may look to stretch their glutes not hamstrings or IT bans not hamstrings. Either way a loose hamstring and tight glute creates lower back problems.
Over all the last two years were great and our staff holds ONU in high regards for anyone who may be considering them. Our favorite 2 quotes from Ron Beaschler is "we recruit kids that want to see how good they can become" and the 5 P's Prior Planning prevents Pitiful performance.
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