Is Olympic Wrestling as dangerous as people perceive?

Injuries are not one of the benefits that wrestling offers. Some may say that wrestling is a rough sport where athletes can easily get hurt. On the contrary, wrestling is a safe and serious sport and injuries rarely occur. When athletes abide by the rules, wrestling becomes just another sport like football, handball, athletics and all the others.

Freestyle wrestling is a complex and demanding sport that taxes all the physiological systems of the human body during the course of a match. Therefore a wrestler should be fit in every part of the body. Moreover a wrestler practices both aerobic and anaerobic exercises during a bout. At times he uses spurts of strength and he needs to be aerobically fit to last a whole wrestling bout and competition. Even more, all this indirectly prepares the road of an athlete should he switch to other activities.

Wrestling builds a sense of body awareness. A wrestler has to train all parts of the body beginning from neck down to toes. In a bout, all body parts are used – the neck for bridging, the fingers in holding the opponent, the legs to push etc. Holding, pushing, pulling, lifting and turning are all movements that take place in wrestling, where the athlete is doing exercise of strength using his own and his opponent’s body weight. In no instance are blows and hits allowed, which makes it even less dangerous.

As a matter of fact, in many countries around the world, wrestling is a sport that offers the basics for youths before they take on other sports in colleges and universities. In the United States, wrestling rates as one of the most famous sports in colleges along with baseball, basketball and American football. Wrestling is also very popular in countries of Eastern Europe like Russia, Hungary and Bulgaria, not to mention countries further east in the world like Japan and India. In fact all countries have their own traditional styles of wrestling that finally lead up their wrestlers to one day represent their country and maybe win a medal at the Olympics.