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What wrestling moves are harder/easier to perform/receive than they look?


Maikeru

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Am keen to hear from those with some experience of training. Some of my guesses are:

Easier than they look:

- Arm drags (receiving - always impressed how even the most inexperienced wrestlers manage to flip themselves over for these)

- Suplexes

- Drop kicks (to me these look impossible, but seems everyone can do them)


Harder than they look:

- Some worked submission holds

- Clotheslines (that don't look phoney)

- Irish whips into turnbuckle (receiving)

- Running the ropes (seems you have to turn in a very specific way)

Edited by Maikeru
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From my experience arm drags are a lot harder than they look. Getting the whip round, getting your body flat 'mid air' and keeping hold of the person isn't easy (I found)

Worked punches are the hardest thing to pull off if you are going to make them look good. 

Drop kicks are fine if you can get up there. 

Clotheslines take a fair amount of practice to look decent. 

Rope running is fine if you get taught properly. Otherwise you may kill yourself! 

Hurricanranas, head scissors and the like are easy as long as you throw yourself into them. If you hesitate it can be a nightmare.

I found moonsaults really hard. As a former gymnast I was used to do them on the floor and that was fine. Do them from a top rope and the rotation changes completely and I've had a few near misses training. 

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Armdrags always seem like the perfect example of there only being so much you can figure out without actually working. Watch an armdrag and you'd assume that 99% of the work is being done by the receiver. But that's clearly not the case given that Ricky Steamboat was so much better at giving them than anyone else, regardless of his opponent.

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19 hours ago, Lord-Mountevans said:

If dropkicks are that easy, show me Steve Austin or Ric Flair executing one!

Wouldn't it be more likely that Ric Flair not throwing a dropkick was more to do with his character and style than 'not being able to do one'?

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3 minutes ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Wouldn't it be more likely that Ric Flair not throwing a dropkick was more to do with his character and style than 'not being able to do one'?

I'd say so. Dropkicks were a highspot back in the day. You dont want every wrestler on the card doing one. Road Dogg did a moonsault once, but he didnt do it all the time.

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2 hours ago, Devon Malcolm said:

Wouldn't it be more likely that Ric Flair not throwing a dropkick was more to do with his character and style than 'not being able to do one'?

No. 

In one of many shoot interviews Flair has done, he confessed to his inability to nail a decent dropkick. Similarly in a podcast a colleague of Austin's said that he had the ugliest looking dropkick in the business.  

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Leg drops. Did shows for a decade and they always looked dire. Just to illustrate it's not only an issue for people who aren't very good working the arse-end of ShitWres, remember Jericho saying something similar in one of his books. 

Edited by Gus Mears
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There's also a huge difference between being physically able to do a move and being able to do it without thinking, freeing up your mind for reading the crowd/pacing the match/remembering the planned sequences etc.

Plus the whole issue of still being physically able to do the move when you've been running/lifting/jumping/bumping for 15 minutes.

Edited by JNLister
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18 minutes ago, JNLister said:

Plus the whole issue of still being physically able to do the move when you've been running/lifting/jumping/bumping for 15 minutes.

That's the part everyone forgets.

Two of the most eye opening moments in training for me were Joe E. Legend having a full-blown conversation with me while running the ropes, to demonstrate how adept you need to become at doing it without thinking, and how if you concentrate too much on getting your foot placement etc. right, you forget to breathe and wear yourself out quickly, and Tatanka doing a "bump and feed" drill, with a larger trainee really struggling to keep up the pace of getting back up after every bump, and he said, "I used to do this with Yokozuna. He was twice your size, you'd clothesline him, and he'd be back on his feet before you turned around".

I've seen too many matches fall apart because guys came up with a really cool looking, ambitious spot for the finish, perfected it in training, and then were too knackered from working a 15 minute match, sweating under lights, in a packed room, to pull it off on the night.

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Applying the Sharpshooter can be far more difficult than it looks. If you get the right combination of lacing your leg onto the side of them, to correspond to the correct leg of theirs tucking under your armpit, the crossed leg going the correct direction so your spare hand can hold the other foot for balance. When applied correctly you can get real snug real easily, applied incorrectly and it falls apart quickly. Have a look at the symmetry of how Bret used to apply it with his left leg stepping through and how he laced the legs in the same way smoothly and quickly every time, except for one instance against Steve Austin where he went the wrong way in the application to make it easier for Austin to reverse it, I believe at IYH Revenge Of The Taker.

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