Freestyle wrestling is the most popular style of wrestling in the world and possibly one of the oldest sports known to man. The modern freestyle wrestling that is practiced today has its roots from English Lancashire, or catch-as-catch-can, style - where basically any and all holds were allowed.

 

The main goal of freestyle wrestling is dominate your opponent with proper grips, takedown or throw them and pin them on the mat (having their shoulder blades touch the mat at the same time). Freestyle’s benefit is that athletes can use both their upper body and lower body to control the opponent, a good example would be a wrestler maintaining a proper grip in a clinch, grabbing a leg taking down the opponent and using the legs of the opponent to score more points while on the ground.

 

Freestyle wrestling is a very intense sport that has become popular recently due to athletes entering MMA competitions such as the UFC and dominating with their wrestling skills.

Wrestling brings an extremely important dynamic to MMA in that a fighter can control here the fight goes - ground, against the cage or kept standing up. This can easily be seen through he amount of UFC champions past and present who have come from a wrestling background.

 

Some of the most dominant countries in the freestyle wrestling world are Russia, USA, Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Cuba, Japan and Guam…… ;-)

 

Each country having its own version, taste and “gameplan” of freestyle  that brings a great amount of excitement and dynamic action to the sport.