Dips and Leg Raises for Wreslting with Zach Even-Esh
Strength and conditioning is a big part of wrestling training. In comparison to pretty much every other combat sport or martial art, wrestling for sure puts the most emphasis on this aspect of training.
When your goal is to physically move around, manipulate and dominate your opponent with takedowns, throws and proper position with only your body, being strong is for sure going to help.
Technique is always going to be important but technique is just an efficient application of strength and body mechanics. This means the more strength that you have, combined with proper technique, means that your techniques are only going to be more effective.
However your exercise selection should reflect the sport you’re competing in. For wrestling this means a lot of pushing and pulling, as well as core work to help maintain balance.
Luckily for us, we have one of the best active wrestling strength and conditioning coaches to give us a few pointers.
In this video, Zach Even-Esh goes over how you can use dips and leg raises to help build strength for wrestling.
Who Is Zach Even-Esh
Zach Even-Esh is a sports performance coach and the founder of The Underground Strength Gym and creator of The Underground Strength Coach Certification. He is also the strength and conditioning coach for the Lehigh University wrestling team. The man has even written his own book on strength and conditioning “The Encyclopedia of Underground Strength and Conditioning.”
Dips And Leg Raises For Wrestling
The video starts off with Coach Zach talking about how he generally doesn’t use dips with his younger, highschool aged wrestlers. He says that it is because those wrestlers haven’t finished developing their connective tissue and the pressure that dips put on them can lead to some bad muscle development when they finish growing.
He does use dips on his older athletes. When it comes to dips, what you want to do is keep your swinging to a minimum or to have none at all. You want to then bend your arms to get around parallel then push back up. If you’re an older athlete you might want to just stick to a little bit above parallel.
Now if you were using a parallel dip bar you can easily switch over form dips to this next exercise.
The next exercise that coach Zach shows are parallel bar leg raises. Coach Zach actually learned this exercise when he was in school in a gymnastics class taught by a former championship wrestler.
What you’re going to do is turn around and face the opposite way you would when you are doing dips. From there you are going to push yourself up. From there you can raise your legs to a 90 degree angle and lower them back down. If doing this exercise with straight legs is too much for you, you can start with just raising your knees and build the strength from there.
Instead of just doing these exercises separately, you can also work on them together. You can start off with a dip and then when you push off from that you can then go straight into a leg raise back and forth. Remember to control your body when doing this and allow for no swinging.
Learn More From Zach Even-Esh!
