Students get more than traditional clinic

Every summer there are hundreds of wrestling clinics throughout the state of California. While Valdez Wrestling recognizes the value in learning from an accomplished clinician, we also recognize that most wrestlers will not retain much, if any, of what was taught as soon as they leave the clinic. The reason for this is that most clinics have several clinicians come in and show hundreds of moves over a course of 2-3 days. This is not enough time to learn this many moves.

With this in mind, if Valdez Wrestling was going to spend 2-3 days working on new techniques we wanted to make sure that when our students left, they not only were able to remember what was taught but actually felt confident that they could execute these new techniques. This is where the idea of Summer Workshops came to fruition. If we could bring a small number of students in for 2-3 days and instead of throwing hundreds of moves at them, we could work on only one core area of wrestling at a time, our students would get much more out of a focused workshop than they would a traditional clinic.

This concept of workshops proved to workout much better than we expected. Our first set of workshops focused on two very specific areas. Workshop I focused solely on bottom wrestling and escapes, and Workshop II focused solely on leg riding. Our students spent three days learning, drilling, and committing to muscle memory either bottom wrestling techniques or Leg riding techniques (depending on which workshop they did) and nothing else. By the end of the third day we were shocked at how well our students had developed in these specific areas.

In comparison to the results of a traditional clinic, we are confident that our students got much more out of the three days. In talking with our students it was clear they were a little surprised as well. One student’s response after the third day was, ” I really didn’t expect to learn so much. The fact that we were able to spend so much time one just escapes makes such a huge difference.” Another student responded by saying, “I got more out of these three days than I have at any other clinic I’ve ever been to… I can actually go back to my wrestling room and continue to work on everything I’ve learned.”

With such tremendous success, Valdez Wrestling will definitely have more Summer Workshops in the future. Keep an eye out, we may even have a couple of Winter Workshops as well.