Category: Uncategorized
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In Praise of Rough and Tumble Play
As a kid, you were probably told at least once there’s “no roughhousing inside.” The playful wrestling you and your siblings did growing up is a prime example of what childhood researchers call rough and tumble play. Rough and tumble play may include chasing, tumbling, and—hooray!—wrestling and grappling. However, please consider this these types of…
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Creating a Fun Learning Environment
Regardless of the style of grappling you teach, having an enjoyable practice–for both kids and adults–is paramount. And we’re not just talking about student retention here…athletes progress faster when they succeed 85% of the time. Seriously, that percentage is science-based, look it up 🙂. Here’s our top five guidelines we try to follow at Horsetooth…
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Grappling and Takedowns—By the Numbers
Interested in takedowns??? Our opinion at Horsetooth…you should be!!! Regardless of whether you play jiu jitsu, compete in wrestling, or seek to hybridize your style for self-defense or MMA, being able to take opponents from their feet to back is an essential skill. Actually, if you’ve been following us on social media, you might notice…
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Learning to Lose is More Important than Winning
An axiom we like to repeat with our young wrestlers here at HHGC – ‘forget the loss, and keep the lesson’. Regardless of age and experience, every athlete has to be prepared for the fact that losses will come. That’s definitely a big part of the deal every time a grappler takes to the mat,…
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Grappling and Self-Efficacy
A critical part of our coaching philosophy at HHGC is to promote good mental health in our athletes. If it’s not abundantly clear, we believe that wrestling is a valuable resource in building ‘self-efficacy’ for kids! New to this term? Albert Bandura developed the idea of self-efficacy as the belief that you can perform a…
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KEEP IT FUN TO KEEP KIDS GRAPPLING
Our rule #1 for practice design at Horsetooth Grappling? Know our athletes! This is particularly important if you want to keep kids active and involved in such a difficult combat sport as wrestling. Consider how video games, e-sports, and other forms of technology have exploded in popularity among young people because they provide so much…
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THE POWER OF EXHALATION
Recently, the Standford Med Laboratory published a study in @cellpress testing brief (5 min daily) practices for reducing stress, improving sleep and heart rate variability, and mood. Researchers compared five minutes daily of either mindfulness meditation, or breath work. They also compared different breathwork practices to each other: 1) Box Breathing (equal timing for inhale-hold-exhale-hold).…
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TAKEDOWNS AS A SEQUENCE OF SKILLS
(..and not fragmented techniques!) When I first began coaching jiu jitsu a few years ago, I was guilty as charged with what John Danaher describes here as the ‘fragmental fallacy’. Show a sweep single to the class, have the athletes practice this back and forth (with an unresisting partner, no doubt), and then move on…
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Scale without Impoverishing
According to recent studies, learning is optimized when we succeed around 85% of the time. From a recent paper by Wilson, Shenhav, Straccia and Cohen: ‘In many situations we find that there is a sweet spot in which training is neither too easy nor too hard, and where learning progresses most quickly. […] For all…
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THE BRUTALITY AND HONESTY OF WRESTLING
Let’s remember what Marcus Aurelius said: “The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, because an artful life requires being prepared to meet and withstand sudden and unexpected attacks.” This vignette between Zain Rutherford and Jordan Oliver from last year’s FINAL X has so much to revel in–admittedly, I’ve probably watched it over…
Horsetooth Hybrid Grappling Club 