The Spiral Ride

• By Owen Reilly

The spiral ride is an incredibly effective riding technique that makes movement from the bottom opponent incredibly difficult. The spiral ride offers a visible route to breaking down, controlling, and turning your opponent. In this blog, we review how to technically perform the spiral ride, how to use the spiral ride to control your opponent, and how to easily score points off of tilts.

What is the spiral ride?

The spiral ride is a riding technique that involves grabbing your opponent's neck and thigh or hip while putting pressure on your opponent's back and hips. To perform the ride:

1. Secure a tight waist grip from the referee's position: Make sure you grab as deep as you can to ensure you have enough pressure around the waist and that your control is solid.

2. With your opposite arm, reach under your opponent's arm and across their body and grab around the opponent's neck. Make sure that this grip is also extremely tight and deep to ensure the highest level of control.

3. Drive your hips forward while applying pressure to ensure that the opponent cannot stand up or find openings to escape.

4. Then, use a spiral motion to break down your opponent. While your tight waist arm pulls in and down, pull your opponent next down and forward simultaneously while running your hips forward to break your opponent down.

5. Once flat, continue to pressure forward and begin looking for tilts and turns.

Common Mistakes:

- Leaning too far forward: leaning to far forward when pressuring your opponent can cause you to lose balance allowing your opponent an opening to stand up or roll.

- Shallow Grips: too shallow of grips will not provide the top man with enough control to properly move and control your opponent.

- Not reacting to your opponent's movements: The spiral ride is a dynamic ride that requires consistent movement and adjustment from the top man. Without it the bottom man can create small openings to find escapes.

Variations of the spiral ride:

1. One common variation of the spiral ride is grabbing your opponent's wrist instead of their neck. Doing so may be advantageous, depending on your opponents' preferred method of escape. Doing so eliminates your opponent's ability to use their hand to post up.

2. Another variation includes grabbing your opponent's inner thigh instead of holding a tight waist. Doing so allows you to take away your opponent's leg base and allows you to turn your opponent to the side more easily.

Transitions:

Spiral ride to an arm chop- When using the spiral ride, breaking down your opponent may seem difficult depending on how hard the bottom opponent fights. When using the spiral ride, you can shift your opponent's weight onto their arm and then chop said arm to completely break down your opponent.

Spiral ride to a tight waist tilt- 

Spiral ride to a leg ride- Using the spiral ride to shift your opponent's weight, whether using your opponent's tight waist or thigh, will allow you to insert your leg into your opponent's base to gain further control.

The spiral ride is an incredibly effective control technique often utilized at both the high school and collegiate levels of American wrestling. Doing so gives the top man full body control and provides top men with the ability to dynamically react to various stand-up and escape techniques that bottom wrestlers will commonly employ. For more riding techniques, click the link below.