The wrestling room at the War Memorial Recreational Center in Mid-Cambridge is split down the middle on Sundays. On one side, a wrestling techniques class is heavy with the sounds of effort: the breathing and grunting of older kids, the thud of their bodies against the padded floor. On the other side, a fundamentals class is light with the spirit of play: the interjections of children and the jokes of the adults who have joined them.
Elementary school-age children are crawling on the floor like bears, bracing their bodies like boulders and crouching with their palms up “like a T.-rex.” The adults, mostly in leggings and T-shirts, are doing the same thing, just slower and with a little more awareness of their bodies.
“I hurt my knee getting into my car,” one woman told another.
“I hurt mine brushing my teeth,” she joked back.
They aren’t the only students in the fundamentals class with a sense of their limits.
“I can’t even lift my body up!” a kid shouted after their instructor, Spencer Lund, asked the group to crab walk across the floor.
Lund didn’t hesitate.
“That’s exciting,” he said. “That means we have a lot to learn.”
This is Lund’s second year teaching wrestling to adults alongside kids. He started because moms had often asked about it. But after only men showed up for last year’s class, he changed things to market the class explicitly to women, nonbinary and gender-expansive adults.
Wrestling without barriers
This fall, the six-class session for adults is held alongside a class for kids mostly ages 5 through 7. Rather than teach specific techniques, it establishes the fundamental movements of the sport. It is $35 for a drop-in class and $150 for the whole session, though financial assistance is available.
“We want to reduce any barrier,” said Lund, who has been rigorously recruiting students, especially girls, into his classes. Girls wrestling, he notes, is one of the fastest-growing high school sports in the country.
After warming up by mimicking animal motions, the class moves to games like sock wrestling, where players try to wrest a sock from their opponent’s foot. Players start shoulder to shoulder on all fours. They circle each other, pushing their weight against each other until someone makes a move — a lunge at an ankle, for instance. They tussle until a sock has been liberated.
Rebecca Richman Cohen, 46, found out about the class when her 6-year-old brought home a flyer advertising it. And although Cohen thought their schedule was already overcommitted, it sounded like her kid’s “dream.”
“She’s always loved roughhousing, and has a ton of energy,” said Cohen of her child, Leonora, who also goes by Leo.
“Not only was it so fun for her, but I looked at it and thought, ‘I want to do this,’” said Cohen. “I was sitting next to another mom and she said, ‘I do, too.’”
Not all of the adults have a child in the class, for which no experience or even knowledge of wrestling is required.
“As middle-aged women, there are a lot of opportunities for fitness with things like Pilates and strength training,” said Cohen. “But wrestling [is] different. It’s fun; it’s sport.”
When Cohen started asking people in her social circles if they were interested, she got a “huge range” of responses.
“Some people were like, ‘No, thank you, that’s my personal nightmare.’ Some people were like, ‘Sign me up immediately.’”
Of all who were interested, not everyone could join with short notice. There are currently four women enrolled, but they hope to inspire more to join them.
“We laughed a lot, but everyone took it seriously,” said Cohen of a preview class held in early November. “It put me back in my body in a way that, at this time in my life, doesn’t happen enough.”
Wrestling myths
Lund comes from the Midwest, where “wrestling is huge,” versus here in the Northeast, where he said the sport seems “novel” and even a “brutish sport,” like football.
Anna Corrionero viewed wrestling as “harsh.” But then the 44-year-old, a native of Spain, enrolled her daughter, and then herself, into Lund’s class.
“What they do with 8-year-olds is not what you see with professional wrestlers, thankfully,” she said.
The middle-aged students are mindful of preventing injuries and do everything at their own pace and comfort level.
“[The adults in the class] are seeing how playful and fun and safe it can be,” Lund said. “It brings back this innate aspect of us: an animal.”
He said he first offered the kids class to form a pipeline to middle school and high school wrestling programs.
“We come out of the womb and develop through play and wrestling,” he said. “It’s something deep down, people feel a connection to.”
As kids get older, they have fewer outlets for full-body physicality.
“Within society, there aren’t any opportunities where you can have a release where you’re pushing someone around, where you can roughhouse,” Lund said.
Jennifer Oberhauser, a 55-year-old professional juggler in Lund’s class, whose son wrestled at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, said she observed wrestling to be “an extraordinary act of self-regulation.”
It may look like you’re facing off against someone else, she said. But the true opponent is oneself.
“Your partner is someone against whom you’re testing yourself,” she said. “There’s actually incredible camaraderie and cooperation between the two sides of wrestling. (You’re) using each other as honorable opponents to test your own strength within a construct of rules and regulations.”
“Yes, it’s aggressive, but ultimately you use wrestling to develop [yourself] to the fullest.”
Beginner’s mind
Wrestling at a more advanced level can be more intense, but at Lund’s Sunday fundamentals class, it’s more silly than serious. Partly that comes from the kids, who can inject the group with a lightheartedness that may be hard to find in a fitness class.
Credit: Bruno Muñoz-Oropeza
“I just had joy the whole time because (the kids) are so cute and silly and distractible,” said Oberhauser, adding that the class had a “puppy yoga energy.”
Learning with young kids is not just fun, but it’s good for learning, said Kara Vidal, 38.
“Any time kids are doing an activity, I think there should be an opportunity for adults to do the same thing,” she said. “I don’t think we’re given as much opportunity as adults to learn new things and it’s not as easy to join and try something you’ve never done before.”
“It all comes down to the beginner mindset,” said Oberhauser. “We’re not actually wrestlers or even athletes. So when you’re learning alongside a young child, it takes the pressure off. It just removed any sense of self-consciousness, which … usually impedes people from trying new things … But it’s all just about trying — how does it feel to roll on the floor this way or lean on your partner that way?”
Connecting to their kids
Oberhauser’s son was the CRLS wrestling team’s MVP last year and led it to the Dual County League championship. For Oberhauser, taking an adult wrestling class “was an opportunity for me to commune with [the] sport that means so much to my son, who is now away at college across the country,” she said.
The same was true for parents whose young kids were also in the class.
When Cohen wrestled with women her age while Leo watched, Cohen could see it was hard for her kid to sit on the sidelines, but “it was fun for her to cheer me as I usually cheer her.”
“I think she saw that it was hard for me and that was fun [for her], to see that I struggled at something,” said Cohen. But afterward, she said, “‘Mama, I’m proud of you, you worked hard,’ which is what I say to her all the time.”
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