Being a women’s wrestler can be rewarding it teaches lessons that can be translated into other aspects of life once a wrestler’s career is over. But being a women’s wrestler you encounter a lot of behind the scene day to day struggles most people don’t know about. But if you are a women’s wrestler, here are some well-known struggles we face:

1. Having to cut 15 pounds in a week is a norm

If your weight class is 170 and you weight 185, you have one week to make weight and that can be a problem. It simply means sweats on hoods up and sauna ready, sleeping in a trash bag is normal and so is spitting in a cup frequently. You learn fruit is a dessert, vegetables are your daily meal and anything else is not allowed.

2. Having hair is a pain!

Coaches get mad when you have to stop and fix your hair—they think your trying to take a break especially if you take longer than five seconds. It usually resolves with being yelled at and running sprints. Not only that during a match it gives my opponent temptations to grab on to it and use it to win.

3. People are always wowed I’m a female wrestle—they didn’t know it was a sport

When people ask what I do and I tell them I wrestle they look so blown away. They always end up saying wow I never met a female wrestler before, Because they didn’t know it was a sport until now.

4. Catching yourself walking in your wrestling walk everywhere you go

Every female wrestle has a certain “walk” they have when you’re entering into competition. It’s like your letting all the other girls know who you are and where you come from it’s almost like your “hood” walk to let everyone know not to mess with you. But sometimes we get so accustomed to it we just don’t realize we are doing it. People are usually afraid and don’t approach us because we look intimidating, which results in having no friends.

5. When you and your wrestling girlfriends show up at a party everyone thinks it’s about to go down

When you’re a women’s wrestler and your only friends is your wrestling team and you go everywhere together especially parties. People always ask us to keep our cool not to “start anything” just because were wrestlers, but just because we wrestle doesn’t mean we come to fight.

6. Arms looking too muscular in all your clothes

Trying to wear a cute dress or a cute shirt can be very difficult when your arms and shoulders are too swollen.

7. Bruises all over your body

Being a female wrestler you want to look cute sometimes but it’s kind of hard when you have bruises everywhere on your body. When you do show off a little skin people look at you funny because they think you get abused because no person could have so many bruises, except for us.

8. That time of the month and trying to cut weight

When you’re trying to cut weight and you didn’t realize it was that time of the month so you took that little sip of water because you thought you would be good. Well it wasn’t ok and you just gained all your weight back.

9. My partners nails are the devil

Nails can grow back pretty fast and if your partner isn’t keeping track of them, you can walk out of practice with 100 scratch marks everywhere and they sting a lot!

10. The sneaky ones

There are some sneaky ones out there who like to wear lotion so your hand slip right off of them or don’t shower for a week so you would be so grossed out buy them you would want you to give up. When your opponent does not shave their legs is the worst because it feels like a thousand needles poking you everywhere! You wish it could be just a clean simple match but being a female wrestler you do have to deal with it from time to time.

Being a women’s wrestler we go through a lot of struggles this only being a few, but in the end it is all rewarding.