Introduction
When one thinks of British wrestling, the first promotion to come to mind is Progress. Not to take anything away from the likes of ICW and Rev Pro. However Progress’ top guys have already been established as future WWE main ‘eventers’.
One thing that makes Progress the ‘best’ promotion in the UK is their prestigious ‘PROJO’ (training school) which consistently produces top quality homegrown talent.
This series of articles is about my own experience training at the PROJO.
The PROJO
Progress prides itself on it’s grungy underground style, and the PROJO definitely reflects that. Although I’m not at liberty to give too much information about the location or any photographs of the PROJO itself. (I had to sign a waiver), the atmosphere reflects that of Progress’ hard hitting urban style.
The PROJO itself although not looking like a state of the area training area (such as WWE’s) the bare-bones design makes one feel ‘this place is the place to be’. It inspires you by simply being there. Truly a wrestler’s dream environment.
Preparation
I’ve been training for approximately a month now at the PROJO, putting me halfway through the beginners course. Believe me… it’s tougher than I had anticipated. Being completely honest, I am not the fittest individual and am rather overweight. Leading up to the training I started putting more time in at the gym and had made some progress (punny), dropping about 8 kilos (20lbs) before starting.
I mainly tried to increase my cardio level, and by the suggestion of a friend who is a former wrestler (performing under the name Leon Lestrange for Origin Wrestling). I did my best to increase my core strength and incorporated some basic polymetric exercises into my workout routine.
The training
From the off set the training is intense. The weekly ‘warm-up’ is a killer. Forty minutes of non-stop cardio followed by yoga, and if the warm up isn’t complete, you don’t train. This warm-up has two purposes, obviously the first is conditioning, getting you ready to go in the ring. The latter reason seems to be psychological, it’s a tough time and it is also to judge who will ‘crack’ first from how difficult it is. Believe me, on more than one occasion have I considered giving up from how tough the warm-up simply is.
The other most important part of the training session is learning the fundamentals of wresting, that’s rolling and bumping/feeding. These should be very easy and generally people pick these up after an attempt of two. For myself unfortunately, I’ve still not mastered the various rolls, I am able to execute them, just not as cleanly as one should be able to. When it comes to bumping/feeding, that is actually fairly fun.
Having to throw yourself at the ground and trying to make as loud of an impact sounds somewhat counter intuitive, but that’s the beauty of it. Back bumps and front bumps are easy to master, the only difficult thing about them is generating enough sound to convince the crowd that a move really hurt. For myself, the biggest issue is he flip bump. Having to flip in the air and them land on my back is difficult. As mentioned, I’m not the fittest individual. That combined with the fear of landing on my neck, has resulted in me landing on my neck! Ouch!
Obviously there are other aspects of wrestling covered in training. But I will go into detail about those in another article.
Conclusion
In conclusion to this article I want to simply say… go for it. There’s this fear that ‘I could never do that’ when you watch wrestling. Yet when you actually start doing it, you start feeling that you can do anything. It’s such an adrenaline rush,it’s amazing.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s extremely tough, and the morning after the first session, I physically couldn’t get out of bed. Despite that I wouldn’t give up. I get home and look at my sweat drench self (apologies to anyone who sits next to me on the tube) and smile. No matter how hard or how much it hurts, I legitimately enjoy the training. I enjoy it more than anything I’ve ever done before. That must be a positive sign.
Until the next article, I’m Big Match Sully and in the words of Ric Flair “Woooooo”. (No relevance to the article… I just needed a way to incorporate it…)
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