6 Tips for Watching Wrestling Film the Right Way
There's a moment every wrestler knows. After a match or tournament, win or lose, you feel motivated to learn and change. You know you have areas to clean up. The experience has given you valuable insights and uncovered areas to grow.
Unfortunately, too often, that motivation dissipates before action has harvested the seeds of experience.
This is where film comes in — not as an afterthought, and not just for college and international-level athletes. It's one of the most accessible, underused tools available to any wrestler at any level. But watching film and watching it well are two very different things. Here's how to do the second one.
Film Is the Tractor to Wrestling's Plow
There's a well-known idea in economics: over the long run, an economy doesn't grow mainly because more people show up to work or more equipment gets bought. It grows because of technology — better tools that let the same amount of effort produce dramatically more. The tractor didn't just make farming faster. It changed what a single farmer could accomplish in a day.
Wrestling has its own version of labor and capital: reps and hours in the room. Every wrestler already has access to those. What separates wrestlers who plateau from those who keep climbing is often the technology they layer on top of the work — and one of the most accessible, least-used pieces of that technology is film.
It's sitting there, free or nearly free, on every phone and every platform, and most wrestlers still aren't using it with much intention. That's not a small inefficiency. That's a tractor sitting unused in the barn.
Film can also reinvigorate you. Sometimes watching the right wrestler, or discovering one or two new things you want to try, can make you genuinely excited to get back in the room. Instead of having to slog through another practice, you have something you're eager to work on. That shift in motivation might seem small, but it can make a real difference over the course of a season.
1. Watch as a Competitor and a Student — Not a Fan
There's a difference between watching wrestling and studying it. A fan watches for the highlight — the big scramble, the pin, the moment the crowd gets loud. A competitor watches for the why — why that scramble worked, what set it up, what the wrestler was doing three moves before the finish that made it possible. Same footage, completely different information, depending on how you watch it.
2. Find a Wrestler a Few Years Ahead of You in Your Own Style
You don't have to look far for proof that this works. Jax Forrest — Oklahoma State's freshman phenom who went from high school mats to NCAA champion in a single season and made the U.S. Senior World Team before he'd even started college — has talked about drawing on the style of Zaurbek Sidakov, the Russian Olympic and multiple-time World champion, as he's developed his own game.
That's the model: find someone whose style resembles yours, but who's several years further down the road. Watching someone who moves nothing like you creates a lot of noise. Watching someone with real stylistic overlap gives you a clearer signal for what to pull from them and adapt into your own wrestling.
And this doesn't have to be one wrestler forever. You can study multiple wrestlers who share strengths in the same area — how a few different guys attack a single-leg finish, for example — and look for the common thread as well as the small variations.
3. Depth Over Breadth (This Is the Big One)
If there's one idea to take from this whole post, it's this: going deep on a small number of things will make you better than going broad on a lot of things.
On technique. Don't try to study everything a great wrestler does. Pick one or two specific pieces — the way they re-shot, the way they work into a tie-up, where they set their hands on a single-leg finish — and study those in isolation.
On repetition. Be ready to replay the same five-second clip again and again. Don't just watch the finish — study the setup. What did they do in the 3–5 seconds before the action that made it possible? Where did their feet go? Where was their head? Great wrestlers usually have more than one path back to their best offense, and you'll only see the pattern if you watch closely enough.
On selection. Don't try to watch every wrestler in the room, in the country, or on your bracket. Watch a few, closely, rather than many, shallowly.
On what you bring back. Pick one or two skills to focus on at a time, and give them real time in the practice room before you go looking to add more.
Breadth feels productive. Depth is what actually changes your wrestling.
4. Let Your Interest Lead You
If you don't know who to study, don't force it. Watching a wrestler you genuinely enjoy is an easy habit to build. Watching someone purely because you think you should rarely lasts — and a film habit that doesn't last doesn't help anyone.
Start with wrestling you actually like watching. The discipline will follow more naturally than you'd expect.
5. Watching Yourself: Stay Objective, Stay Positive
There's no single right time to watch film on your own matches. Some wrestlers want to watch right after competing. For most, a little distance helps — enough time to let the emotional charge of the match fade so you can look at your positioning, strategy, tactics, body language, and pace objectively, rather than as a referendum on how you performed.
The framing matters more than people think. The problem isn't simply negative thinking. It's turning an observation about performance into an identity statement.
“I got snapped down three times” is useful information.
“I'm terrible in the tie” is an identity judgment.
“I need to improve my ability to clear ties and create my own offense” is actionable.
That shift — from judging what you are to identifying what you can build — is at the heart of a growth mindset. Skills can be developed, and film is most useful when it helps you identify what to work on rather than simply confirming what you think you're bad at.
Watch a range of your matches — wins, losses, close wins, close losses — and look for the patterns that repeat: getting scored on late in a period, letting an opponent in on your lead leg, whatever it is. The repeated pattern is almost always more useful than any single mistake.
6. Bring It Back to the Room — Or It's Dead
This is the second big idea, and it might be even more important than the first: film review that never becomes part of your deliberate practice doesn't count for anything.
Watching, noting, and reflecting is only step one. If what you see on film doesn't show up in your next few practices — as reps, focused drilling, or something you're actively working on live — it was just watching a video.
Action is what makes the difference, not reflection alone.
Film Is Most Powerful When You Learn How to See
Everything above is something you can do on your own. But film is most powerful when someone teaches you how to think about what you're seeing.
A coach helps you learn to see, not just watch. Watching film with someone experienced doesn't just get you their eye on your matches one time — it teaches you how to analyze film for yourself, which pays off every time you watch after that.
A veteran eye catches what you can't. An experienced coach and athlete will see things in your wrestling that you genuinely can't see in yourself, no matter how objective you try to be.
There's also an accountability piece. Athletes are fired up to watch film right after a big win or tough loss. By Monday or Tuesday, that energy is often gone, and the film review that mattered most never happens. A standing session with a coach makes sure it actually gets done.
And there's a bandwidth problem. High school and college coaches are often responsible for an entire team, and a single tournament weekend can produce anywhere from 30 to 100 matches. No coach can watch all of that with every athlete individually. Film review has to be something the athlete owns — and having someone experienced in the room, asking better questions about what you were thinking and feeling in key moments, can be one of the most effective ways to build that ownership.
This is where a mindset coach can offer something different. Warrior Steps coaches can help you not only understand what happened in a match, but learn how to watch yourself in a way that makes you a better wrestler.
The Bottom Line
If you aren’t watching film, you are missing out on a wealth of potential and motivation.
Pick a wrestler worth studying. Go deep, not broad. Stay objective with yourself. And make sure whatever you learn on the screen becomes something you're drilling on the mat — because that's the only place it actually counts.