Let me set the stage for you. Your coach just spent five minutes breaking down a new sweep, transition, submission, or position to you. As you sit there watching you get all excited and can’t wait for him to say break on 3 so you can try out the move. Your coach asks “Any questions?” and you hope that no one has a question because you just saw this killer little detail that is finally going to help you nail the move. You break on three and grab your partner.

You set it up the position…..the buzzer goes off…..and then you move at a snails pace. Your partner offers no resistance to your move and just lets you do it. You feel like a bad ass because you finally figured it out!!!! You can’t wait to take it into a live rolling situation and try it out. The time comes….you start rolling…You see your chance to hit the move and you go for it….You fail. So you go back and drill it more. Again you move slowly, your partner offers no resistance, you don’t act like its a live setting. It’s time to roll….You see your opening again and go for your move…You fail again….You get discouraged. You drill a few more times the same exact way as you did before. Each time you fail. Your continual failure leads to you abounding the move.

I’ll be honest..This was happening to me with our new wrestling curriculum at first. I’m not a wrestler by any means so learning these moves from scratch has been difficult for me. I tried to justify my failure to myself by saying “Ohh well I can’t do that…I’m not a wrestler!”. The truth is I could do the moves if I drilled them properly. In the situation above I was  victim of zombie drilling. I knew the concept of the moves and some of the steps to the moves but I didn’t know how to execute them.

Over the next few days I’m going to share some ways I have been trying to avoid zombie drilling. If you have any concepts of your own you would like to share please post them in the comments below. Don’t want to leave a comment? Come down to 10th Planet Van Nuys and let’s talk. I’d love to hear what others are doing to improve their drilling!