The Basics
Stance, motion, change of level, penetration, finish.
Stance, motion, change of level, penetration, finish.
Stance, motion, change of level, penetration, finish.
Listing the first five basic skills of wrestling feels like a mantra. It’s got cadence. It’s got weight. It even gets more exciting as you go along.
As a matter of logistics, the basics go in order: you can’t move well if you don’t have a good stance, you can’t change level with your opponent if you can’t move with them, you can’t shoot if your opponent is lower than you, and you can’t finish if you don’t get in on your shot.
Young wrestlers tend to want to get right to the “finish” part. That’s the part that shows up on a poster or a highlight video. It’s the part that gets the crowd to go “ooooh.”
“Show me how to do a headlock.”
“Show me how to do a double.”
Nobody ever asks, “show me how to stay in a good stance for three minutes.”
I get it. When you talk about the best wrestlers of all time, it’s easy to jump right to their signature moves. John Smith’s low single. Kyle Dake’s bomb throw. Lincoln Mcllravy’s boot scoot. Jordan Burrough’s blast double.
When people talk about what won a national, world, or Olympic championship for those wrestlers, those are the things that come up. Certainly, each of those wrestlers had remarkable grasp of the basics, but as a coach, especially as a youth coach, it’s hard to point to an elite wrestler, with the high-level technique and flashy moves they will have inevitably picked up on their way to the podium, and tell an eight-year-old, “if you practice your stance, motion, and change of level, you could win the Olympics some day.”
And then Amit Elor won a gold medal.
Amit Elor is a 20-year-old Jewish woman from California. Youngest of six. She’s five-and-a-half feet tall, and this year she wrestled at 150 lbs. If you walked past her at Target, you might not look twice.
Also, pound for pound, Amit Elor is perhaps the best, most-dominant wrestler in the world. As of 2024, she hasn’t lost an international match since 2019 (when she was 14). In 2022, as an 18-year-old, she won the U20, U23, and Senior-level World Championships. Then she turned 19 and did it for a second year in a row. Then she turned 20 and qualified for the Olympics. Then she won that too. In 20 years, when people talk about Amit Elor, they won’t talk about a slick low single or a flashy throw. They’ll talk about her stance, motion, and change of level.
Without context, learning that Elor’s best moves are the three most basic wrestling moves might make you think she is a boring wrestler, so I will add this stat: in four Olympic matches, she outscored her opponents 31-2. That’s a lot of scoring. You can’t score 31 points and not be exciting.
Now let me add another stat: in four matches, Elor did not throw an opponent, and only one takedown came from a leg attack—a two-point half-shot knee pick in her 10-0 semifinal match.
Every other point from her feet came from staying in a good stance, moving forward and forcing her opponent out of bounds over and over again until they got frustrated and pushed back, then she’d hit a head snap, arm snap, or down block (all forms of level changes) to go behind for two. All the way to a gold medal.
It sounds simple. It sounds boring. It sounds basic. It was the flashiest performance I’ve ever seen.
Hitting slick moves isn’t flashy. Scoring is flashy. 31-2 is flashy. Gold medals are flashy.
Not everyone can be successful at a John Smith low single or a Jordan Burroughs blast double. Eventually, the kid with the best headlock on the team starts running out of opponents who haven’t learned how to counter it.
But, from now on, every coach has been given a gift: in the first ten minutes of the first practice of the season, we’ll cover stance, motion, change of level. And in the first 10 minutes of every practice, every day, for the rest of the season, we can cover stance, motion, change of level. And no matter what else we teach, no matter what our athletes absorb, retain, or are physically gifted enough to execute, if they learn, remember, and practice the first three things they learned in the first ten minutes of their first practice, they will have 95% of the building blocks Amit Elor used to win an Olympic gold medal.
