Arm wrestlers hone their skills in Ranchos
The best way to think of arm wrestling as an actual sport is to think of it as a microcosm of mixed martial arts scaled down to two arms duking it out— mano-a-mano. The arms act as avatars for two UFC fighters. The detachable elbow and forearm pads on a professional arm wrestling table represent the octagon.
In popular culture, as in the testosterone-fueled sports drama “Over The Top” starring Sylvester Stallone, arm wrestlers are blue collar muscular specimens who get their Popeyesized biceps not from the gym but from the lifting of heavy machinery.
In one of the film’s better scenes, one of Stallone’s competitors tries to intimidate him with trash talk. “I’m going through you like gas through a funnel,” he said, and then proceeds to chug a can of Valvoline.
Here in Taos, a group of enthusiasts take arm wrestling a bit more seriously as a competitive sport. Hyper-masculine ego is taken out of the equation as they try to build each other up and train properly for upcoming competitions. One of the rewarding elements of the sport (at least from the branch here in Taos) is the willingness arm wrestlers have when it comes to sharing information. They’re not trying to get one over on you with trickery or some arcane secret.
The two main techniques are the top-roll and the hook. In the top-roll, the hand wraps around the top part of your opponent’s hand with him holding the bottom part of yours and you drive straight down. In the hook maneuver, you expose your opponent’s wrist by twisting your wrist towards you, and you pull. That’s just a starting point.
The pullers congregate here in Ranchos de Taos and in Santa Fe to pull against each other for a couple of hours. One of the running jokes among the arm wrestlers is that, after an intense session of pulling, the next day you’re unable to wipe your own derriere, from all the blown tendons. Having tickets to the gun show — as in the guns one might have from bicep curls — is not enough to compete in arm wrestling. To stand a chance, you need to strengthen the tendons, ligaments and all the connective tissues, which are generally neglected through weightlifting alone.
Micah Davidson is the arm wrestling coach — he also
coaches mixed martial arts and submission wrestling. He’s also a river runner and a school bus driver for Taos schools.
The training takes place in a garage that’s been modified with a wrestling mat and heavy punching bag. Next to the mat sits the sturdy arm wrestling table. The pullers begin with a warm-up routine that involves the rolling of the wrist.
Davidson explained that “it’s just something we do, we just roll the wrist. I don’t know. Most arm wrestlers don’t wanna do it. We just like to get mobility. And it’s mostly just like a self-diagnostic, seeing where we’re popping and cracking from the last practice. See if there’s anything tweaked, like, give ourselves a chance to fail and be hurt so we know what we need to work around.”
From there on, they just kept pulling and pulling, switching hands, and going back at it. The pullers kept applying chalk to their hands. The action was not limited to just on top of the table.
Tactics were utilized underneath, with the placing of feet on the frames of the table for better leverage. Some simply wrapped their leg against the leg of a table; Davidson would sometimes plant his whole foot perpendicular to the frame, strong enough to lift his suspended weight. At one point, he managed to cut into his bicep from a sharp edge on a table corner.
After Davidson finally managed to pin Austin Van Zytveld, the two bantered:
“That was a good pop, or a bad pop?” Davidson said.
“Your grip was like iron, and I finally got that extra range of motion,” Austin said.
“You started squeezing harder is what you did. You squeezed harder and you got me.”
“Good, thanks, I’ll remember to do that sooner.”
The heavier David Quintero also found it difficult to pin Austin down on the pads. He strained and gave it his all. It ended in a stalemate, which brought up a fitting jiu-jitsu quote for the occasion: “He who doesn’t lose can only win.”
After an hour of nonstop arm wrestling, they continued to train with the help of a strap. It was impressive that they still had enough strength in their arms to keep pulling — even at this stage of the training, it was tough to go against them and get a positive result.
When the wrists have little left in the tank, the straps come in handy. In professional matches, straps are used when the competitor’s hands slip during the match or gets apart during a pull. An alternative is the referee grip, where the referee places his hands over both competitors’ hands as they are interlocked, ensuring a neutral starting position.
Quintero was fighting through pain in his wrist for most of his pulling sessions. With the help of the strap, he was finally able to pin down Davidson on his right hand. Davidson’s left hand remained undefeated on the day. Quintero thought about facing Davidson again on his right hand, but wanted to finish the training on a good note.