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Day 2 of the camp started out with a morning strength and conditioning session followed by 2 wrestling practices in the late morning and afternoon. The strength and conditioning sessions mainly consisted of gymnastic training, partner drills and body weight exercises. We survived this session without cramping up. The second session consisted of a very extensive warm up followed by some drills and lots of stand-up live wrestling while the third session was par terre (ground wrestling) with strong emphasis on gut wrenches and leg laces, the 2 most high percentage scoring ground-maneuvers.
Our muscle cramps started acting up for us in this session but were reduced significantly and all incidents of muscle cramps were gone by the third day. With the lack of any case studies, I speculate that this could be due to acclimatization or adaptations to the workload. We also had really good recovery sessions after every practice at the recovery pools and that could have helped in negating the incidents of cramps.
That aside, this would be the typical practice format for the rest of the camp with a micro-cycle of 2 or 3 practices per day alternated with educational workshops on goal setting, weight cutting and fitness testing sessions that I personally found to be very helpful.
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The educational workshops were interactive and very well-focused on the competitive wrestler. Topics included, Strength & conditioning, nutrition/weight cutting, goal setting and media training. One interesting take-away I got from the Media training workshop, was to focus on telling the reporters how passionate you were about the sport and making that the focus of any of your interviews.
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Going into the camp, I knew my fitness was at its lowest point and decided to use the camp as a stepping stone to get back on track (read more about it here). But just how bad was it? Majority of my fitness scores were at my personal lowest and without doubt the lowest amongst all the competitive wrestlers in attendance. I had already known this even before the fitness testing session was carried out on the 4th day of the camp, through all the wrestling matches we had at practice where I would get tossed around or lose in exchanges not because of my training partners' technical superiority, but because I was really just trying to even catch my breath and stay alive. I had to really dig deep just to stand up every time I got taken down and to keep on wrestling until different parts of my body just cramped up and shut down on me. Even then, I had tried to get up and wrestle through it, although I found out it was very much impossible and embarrassing at the same time! This was the moment where I truly understood what my coach meant when he said "It shows your character".
While I can't speak for how my teammates felt about the camp, I am really proud of them as Hidayat got a commendation from the resident Sports scientist for his 100% effort at the beep test, Hong Yeow who wrestled through the camp despite getting injured on the very first day and requested for more matches on the mini competition day, wrestling through all of them and showing great heart and lastly, Asyraf who also went through the same cramping ordeal as me but pushed through the camp without complaints.