Dan Gable Gold

Dan Gable Gold






What I have Learned From Dan Gable

  1. Leaders are molded from the highest character and are generally the hardest workers on the team. They’re the first to come to practice and the last ones to leave. During practice, they lead by example with their mouths closed, concentrating hard. They understand the team’s goals so they know what has to be done. They realize that practice is precious preparation time for the real thing – the game.
  2. After Buzzard finished with Gable that night, Dan fell to the mat crying tears of anger. Right then Gable recalls, “I vowed I wouldn’t ever let anyone destroy me again. I was going to work at it everyday, so hard that I would be the toughest guy in the world. By the end of practice, I wanted to be physically tired, to know that I’d been through a workout. If I wasn’t tired, I must have cheated somehow, so I stayed a little longer.
  3. I’m a big believer in starting with high standards and raising them. We make progress only when we push ourselves to the highest level. —Dan Gable
  4. Dan Gable was not a good loser. He also knew that practice is the cornerstone of expertise. After a lengthy and exhausting practice, he would order his wrestlers to perform “buddy carries”—hauling other wrestlers up
  5. Our conditioning was always different.  We never knew how many sprints or how many of anything we would do.  A player from another school trained with us and asked me how I paced myself for each lap.  I ran every lap as fast as I could and had never thought of that.
  6. His players practiced at 4:30 am in the morning so that they knew they were the only one’s in the nation doing it.
  7. The Gable minute was not 60 seconds.
  8. The world is made of two people.  Those who knew Coach Gable and those who wish they did.
  9. Practice is the cornerstone of expertise because it multiplies experience.
  10. Coach Gable’s epic sessions with wrestlers, coaxing them to ride the exercise bike with layers of sweat clothes beneath plastic gear, the sweat pouring from them in buckets once the gear was removed. Every fiber of the wrestlers’ being wanted to get off the bike and get a drink of water, yet they persisted. By the time they reached the tournament, they had faced every physical challenge imaginable. They could dig deep during the exhaustion of a close match in the third period because they had mastered similar physical adversity day after day in practice.
  11. It provides us with far more experience than we could ever gain during formal performance or competition. Gable’s wrestlers executed and escaped many more moves than their competitors, thanks to the rigors of practice.
  12. A wrestler can develop from average to good (or great) by putting in just a bit more time and effort each day. Daily work adds up to a whole lot over time. Five extra minutes a day doesn't seem like much, but equals close to 31 hours of extra work when added up for a whole year. Add that up over an high school career, and that's 124 hours of extra work. Add four years of college, and that's 248 extra hours of work: 248 extra hours that your opponent was not utilizing.
  13. A large part of my philosophy stresses the fact that the only way a coach or athlete will improve is to set increasingly high standards and then work hard to achieve them.
  14. Another big part of my coaching philosophy emphasizes that champions are often, but not always, the ones who win the matches. In coaching or competing on the mat, the true champions are the athletes who get the most out of themselves and others.
  15. A favorite quote of mine that best summarizes my philosophy, is by Rafe. He says, "Whatever you most need in life, the best way for you to get it is to help someone else
    get it who needs it even more than you do."
  16. Gable on Goals: “I’m a big believer in starting with high standards and raising them. We make progress only when we push ourselves to the highest level. If we don’t progress, we backslide into bad habits, laziness and poor attitude."
  17. Gable on Priorities: “When you finally decide how successful you really want to be, you’ve got to set priorities. Then, each and every day, you’ve got to take care of the top ones. The lower ones may fall behind, but you can’t let the top ones slip. You don’t forget about the lower ones though because they can add up to hurt you. Just take care of the top ones first. In 25 years as a head coach and assistant, I think I might have missed one practice. Why? Because practice is my top priority. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t accomplish something in my family life or my profession because those two things are my top priorities."
  18. Gable on Hard Work: “The obvious goals were there- State Champion, NCAA Champion, Olympic Champion. To get there I had to set an everyday goal which was to push myself to exhaustion or, in other words, to work so hard in practice that someone would have to carry me off the mat."
  19. Gable on Raising your Level of Performance: "Raising your level of performance requires a proper mentality and meaning from within. This gives you the ability and drive to work on the things necessary to go to a higher level. When people ask me how to raise their level of performance, the first thing I ask is, How important is it to you?"

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