By Angelina Tang
What is the most dangerous sport? It’s a subjective question. Most people jump to football due to the viciously high rates of concussions, brain damage, and other physical maladies associated with the professional sport. However, I would like to propose wrestling, and more specifically high school wrestling, as the most dangerous sport. This is not meant to discourage anyone from wrestling; in fact, I think wrestlers are very impressive for their great strength. Yet, this does not discount the grueling and definitely unhealthy lifestyle of the season for high school team members.
First of all, a warning: this article will discuss disordered eating. Please don’t read if it’s a touchy subject. Stay safe and stay healthy! Remember the BMI system is outdated and stupid. Don’t base your worth on numbers, ever. Okay? Okay.
First of all, for those of us–like me–who are not crazy into sports, what is youth wrestling all about? For starters, it’s just like every other sport we play in school, with JV and Varsity teams split by skill. The season lasts through the winter. However, what sets it apart is how physically and mentally taxing it is, as well as the way and factor on which the bracket is split.
For this article, I asked for details from a friend of mine, Nathaniel Lopez, who wrestles for St. Joe’s and went to Catholic States for it last year. Considering St. Joe’s actually has a good team, the training regimen he describes is one that results in success on the mat but is especially taxing. It may not be representative of East’s; it may. I’m unsure. But what I am sure of is this: wrestling is hard.
From Monday through Saturday, every day after school, the team trains for two hours. Practice starts with proper warm-ups and stretching, followed by technique practice and matches with partners in your weight class–more on that later. Partner training lasts for about thirty minutes, which mostly means getting thrown and throwing people on the ground over and over. After that is conditioning, and then the most painful part of all: mat returns.
Mat returns embody the difficulty of wrestling. They are essentially conditioning for both your body and mind: you’re thrown into the mat over and over and made to get up after each hit, no matter how much it hurts and no matter how much you want it to end. The perseverance this develops is what sets apart the mediocre wrestlers from the great ones in the ring, despite the exhaustion and pain.
What is more exhausting and ultimately makes wrestling so dangerous, however, is not the physical strain. The nurturing of discipline and strength is necessary for all school sports; wrestling just happens to hurt a good deal more, since you’re taking falls and literally fighting people. No, what makes high school wrestling dangerous is what happens outside of practice and games. It’s dieting.
In discussing how practice is structured, I mentioned weight classes. Unlike other sports, in which the entire school teams are sorted into divisions based on location and your division determines who you play against, wrestling takes it a step further. Individual members of each team are sorted by weight into one of fourteen weight classes, and they are paired with opponents of the same weight class at matches. Each weight class has a range of weights; for example, the lowest class is 106-110 lbs, the second lowest is 110-118, the third 118-126, et cetera, eventually capping out at the 245-285 class.
The weight class system ensures that people of similar weights wrestle with one another, thus eliminating a bias towards bigger, heavier men in the sport; lighter guys can just wrestle other equally light guys and not be crushed by someone 50 lbs heavier than them. However, this system also creates a new problem: it forces wrestlers to diet a lot. And by dieting, I mean extreme, unhealthy dieting, especially when the wrestlers in question are 14-18 year olds who are still growing and definitely do not need to lose nearly twenty pounds in a month.
If you are not at the upper end of your weight class–especially in the 215-245 and 245-285 classes due to the ridiculously wide range–then you have an inherent disadvantage. You’d be stuck wrestling guys about 10 or 20 lbs heavier than you, which feels huge when you’re already exhausted and trying to get that weight off of yourself while lying on the mat. As such, dieting to get into lower weight classes is literally part of the sport. Every day, after practice, the team weighs themselves to check where they’re at. Most of the team generally has to diet to keep or drop their class, and generally, losing 10-30 lbs is normalized.
Dieting involves eating less carbs and lipids to lose fat, while eating large amounts of protein to gain or maintain muscle mass. It’s mentally exhausting when paired with the extreme amounts of exercise and physical strain the sport demands; in addition to watching how much you eat and drink, you have to constantly do cardio training on top of what team practices demand of you. In terms of diet, instead of actual meals, wrestlers generally live off of protein bars, water, fruit, and minimal amounts of carbs during the week. That doesn’t sound awful until you consider the extremity of their training and the amount of weight they’re trying to lose.
Doctors generally recommend 1-2 lbs a week if you’re on a weight loss regiment, but note that this is for adults who are actually overweight. Losing so much weight as a teenager (i.e. more than 2 lbs a week), when your body is still growing and requires more nutrients, can be detrimental. It’s likely that this loss with an arbitrary goal set by the weight class parameters is also actually taking people under their natural set-point weight, thus making the loss itself unsustainable and a fight against one’s own body to maintain for a season. In addition, losing too much at one time can actually result in electrolyte imbalances and fatigue; neither of these things are beneficial when you look at the training wrestlers have to go through. It’s just unhealthy, no matter how you look at it.
And yet, it is the dedication wrestlers have, both physically and mentally, that makes this sport so impressive. Despite how dangerous extreme dieting is, it is ingrained in wrestling because of its weight class system, and there is unfortunately no way around it. While I will not discourage anyone who wants to wrestle from doing it, it is important to shed light upon every aspect of the sport. I give my respect to you, high school wrestlers. Even if you have to tear yourself apart, you do it for your team, and that is awe-inspiring, despite the danger that comes with it.
Thank you again to Nathaniel for letting me interview you and giving me lots of incredible detail! You’re going to get to Public States for sure this year. To all wrestlers and other winter sport enjoyers: have a good season!
