Sled Pushes and Carries for Wreslting with Zach Even-Esh

In wrestling, while technique should and will always come first, however being strong doesn’t hurt. In a lot of ways, technique is just an efficient use of strength. This means that if you and an opponent are just as technically sound as one another, the one who is physically stronger is going to win out. 

The thing is once you reach a certain level, your physical strength and conditioning begin to matter as pretty much everyone is as good as everyone else. As from just helping your technique, being strong helps in a ton of ways. 

Being strong makes you more stable, thus making it harder to takedown or move. Having more power also means stronger throws, takedowns and sprawls on your part. Also being strong and performing certain exercises can help correct muscle imbalances in your body and help prevent injuries, which means you can train and compete more often. 

So with all that said we have brought in one of American wrestling's best strength coaches to go over a few exercises he likes to use with his athletes.

In this video Zack Even-Esh goes over how you can use sled pushes and loaded carries to help boost your strength and power. . 

Who Is Zack 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.”

Sled Pushes And Loaded Carries For Wrestling 

The video starts off with coach Zach talking about how sled and loaded carry exercises help develop what is generally known as farm boy strength. This is that strength that is just innate in people that grew up on a farm working the fields. They are just so strong and it almost seems effortless. 

Zach then talks about the different ways you can use sleds. If the sled is lighter he tends to use it for sprint drills. If the sled is heavy he is using it to develop power and strength.

Zach then talks about how he prefers to keep the amount of time that his athletes are sitting and laying on things to a minimum. He wants to keep his athletes standing while they’re doing their strength work as it more directly translates to the sport. This way they are pushing and pulling the weights and their own body weight. 

Zach then has his athletes show the first exercises which are sled pulls and pushes. The athletes do one movement down the line and then go back doing the other. 

After his athletes finish that they go on to do loaded carries. You can do loaded carries with pretty much anything that you can pick up. In the video, Zach has his athletes use heavy medicine balls, a keg filled with water and chains. 

After completing a lap with carries the athletes go back to sled work. Zach says that you can do this for time or for reps. You can also add an exercise with the carries where after the athletes finish a lap they do squats or presses with the load. 

For carries you can also do offset carries. With sis where you have weights in both hands but you carry them in different positions. He shows this with an athlete carrying a pair of kettlebells, one in a rack position and one in a suitcase position by the side. 

If you want your athletes to be more intense when they’re training, you can have them compete against each other in a race. 

Doing this stuff will be really hard but it helps develop toughness. Coach Zach doesn’t believe that toughness is something that you're born with, it’s something that you build up by doing things that are hard and that you don’t want to do. 

Coach Zach ends off the video by saying that you need to do strength and conditioning all year round to get the best benefits for performance. 

Learn More From Zach Even-Esh!

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