Andre Metzger Talks “9 Hands”

Episode Description

Hall of Famer Andre Metzger is one of the most successful wrestlers in American history.  He has used KAATSU to help him recover from a wide variety of injuries.  He explains his concepts of The 9 Hands Principle which refers to his 2 hands, 2 knees, 2 knees, 2 elbows and head in wrestling – and its implications to the sport of swimming, a completely different sport.  He also talks about how athletes “Move with their minds and think with their body”.  Whether it is KAATSU or The 9 Hands Principle, the complex applicability of both is astonishing to learn and appreciate.

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Transcript

A KAATSU master specialist over the past five years, Andre Metzger, was inducted in the Class of 2017 as a distinguished member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. He talked about the nine hands principle where wrestlers and swimmers should think about using their “nine hands”. Their head, two feet, two knees, two elbows and two hands. In this podcast, Metzger talks about some interesting concepts with Olympic swim coach Chris Morgan, also a KAATSU master specialist while discussing the Nine Hands concept for wrestling and swimming. Basically, nine hands work all at the same time. So I’ve got nine hands. I’ve got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. I always forget about those two. And then nine. So my nine is basically my cerebral hand, which can be used for positioning and mainly only in wrestling.

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So with your concept of the nine hands in wrestling, but as a swimming coach and working with high-performance athletes, I’ve been very intrigued and I even feel like it can be a carryover into other sports. But can you explain more specifically what each of the nine hands could be used for in wrestling, both offensively, defensively, and maybe even, you know, on the psychological part?

Yeah, so one, on the psychological part, to start out with that, basically, the psychological part of nine hands is understanding if I know where all my hands are, it’s gonna put more pressure on an opponent if I’m actually doing a physical situation where I actually am competing against you and something that you or I have to come in contact with each other. I’m sure it’s different as an individual sport, but it still has very similar principles. In that, each of our proprioceptors inside of our body, we know that now that they actually act as a balancing act for us sometimes. If I’m going to stand on my hands here, or if I’m going to get upside down, or if I’ve got to be on my, you know, I go to the ground and they have one of my hands controlled or two. They could have my elbow completely controlled. And so many times, if you talk to wrestlers and fighters and different people, when you get caught in a position where just your arms caught, it’d be great to cut it off.

But it doesn’t work that way because if I cut it off, I don’t have it anymore. So I have to use it and understand how to get out of it to utilize like elbows. And the elbows work as a hand. I really believe, too, that there’s really four more, potentially, because when I bring my arm here, if I’m going to rotate this arm up to control anything that’s outside this side, because what I think about within the nine hands when I actually teach somebody is you have to imagine a different level of pressure in order to understand why it’s important.

Because if I’ve got a big blade cutting me right here that just keeps cutting and I put it out, it’ll be gone. It’s just cut off. Bam, the blade cuts it off. But if I can learn to go with the blade or move with the blade, then I understand better where I’m at. Now the unique thing about it is it’s like when I teach young kids, and I’m going to stand up for one second. So when I teach young kids how to do this move, which we talk about wax on, wax off, if I bring somebody here, okay? Whenever I teach them to move that move, I teach them to move this hand too. So this hand becomes involved if I’m going to start to move. Anytime I start one moving, I have to know where the other is. And the thing is, it’s not complicated. It’s a matter of task or drilling. This is why people drill anything we do. Because we think with our body and we move with our mind. Our mind basically is the movement. Now, of course, our brain is different than the connection of the mind.

So when I learn to make motions, it’s a habit. And once I start those habits, once I get those habits in line, and I understand the importance of position, because position is a portion of strength. Anytime I have position on anything, I have strength. So learning positions are so important. For instance, wrestling, the reason I use my head so much, is because if they grab my head, I have a way to get under them. If they bring their arm up, I can duck under this side. If they bring their arm down, I can snap them down. So I have to actually drill to the way for every action, there’s a multiple number of reactions, not just one. There’s a many ways somebody can go. If I grab his elbow, he can move back or forward. You know And when he grabs my head, there’s a lot of different things he can potentially do. And it is the one thing that’s very vulnerable that they have to really be careful of.

Because as a wrestler, they can’t choke me, but they really can. I mean, illegally, you can kind of get around making sure that you cut off the carotid artery. And if you learn how to do it well, they don’t mind if you don’t lock your hands. So there’s different ways to put a lot of pressure on them, or you put pressure on the true joints. I may be getting off a little bit, but it’s really still on target of why it’s important for me to understand all nine hands. For instance, the other thing is to use my legs, okay? My legs are used so much. If you watch the best at, any athlete, if you watch them, you’re watching a bunch of pistons moving. I mean, we got 80% of our body weight is within our head and our main frame. We only have 20% out here with the arms and the legs, which probably the legs take up maybe about 6, 14%. Now, I don’t know those exact numbers on the arms and legs, but I do know the numbers on the 80 because I just studied it. So the 80% of weight that I have, I’m dealing with controlling it with 20%. And the only way I can understand my other 20% is where they’re at. If I’m going to lift up a weight, and this was, we talked about before, if I’m here with the weight, it’s easy for me to lift. But when the weight gets out here, now when I start lifting, I’m going to do this and I come on top of it. So I have to understand how to get under something.

So those pistons or those hands, the feet, hands, and the knee hands work very important together. What I’ve done is I’ve actually started to my younger kids, like four to eight-year-olds, teaching them what a target zone is, which this is a low target zone. This is a target zone too. It’s how to attack this part of the body, okay? And then we have carry zones, which we talked about before too, with these. These are how I carry things. And when I bring them together with my knees, then I can carry a lot more or control a lot more because I can block here, I can block here. I always cross block, not always. Everything happens in unison when you drill. But if I’m touching this hand out, this leg is back so that if they attack, I can bring this arm too in and they go by me. So I can basically run the bull by. I call that a Toro Olay too.

So there’s simple stuff to do with it, but no one that carries on is real important because if I’m under you, if I get to your body, and I can get to your target zone or your load, which is the main place I’m looking for, if I can get in there with an extension because distal control is real important to the law of leverage. So if this arm’s straight and this is catching your target, your carry zone, the back of your knee, and this shoulder now covers your load or your target zone, I now can lift you because I can move you off from that target or move you off from your balance to where you almost jump into my arms.

So as I make the move here to bring you to me, I pick this up. So I bring this out. So I’m controlling your zones too. So understanding the nine-hand principle is nothing more than understanding that all of our appendages need to learn to work with our body to get to the best strength position, if you will. And then like for instance, in your sport, the way I would figure it would work in your sport, you know better than me, Chris.

But you can modify it in just that little things about this too, because these fingers make a difference too. Especially in wrestling, I learned a cup. I do this. I don’t do this anymore because I’ve dislocated these. So when you damage something and you figure it out, it changes the way you think. Because now I have to think about winning or finishing a match besides just, okay, I’m going to do whatever it takes for this match, ’cause I’ve got another match coming up.

If it’s a tournament trying to win, say an NCAA tournament, or trying to win a world tournament, or trying to win any tournament. The bottom line is I still need my body there. In ’85 in the World Championships, I was wrestling a guy who I had shot in on legs and penetrated on legs. And when I went to the side and beat the shoulder, basically I come into his crotch and pick him up. He held onto this leg. When he held onto it, I figured what the heck I’ll throw it anyways. When I threw it, he took my knee and brought it with me, which dislocated my or really just tore my ACL apart. And I was done for the tournament. So sometimes you have to hold back when you realize that one of your arms are in jeopardy, or one of your hands are in jeopardy, or one of the zones that I’m talking about are in jeopardy, you sometimes have to compromise a little bit. Well, I may not score there and I shouldn’t have because I would have beat the guy anyways, although he ended up winning that year. So the bottom line was when I threw him to win the match, it won the match, but I was out of tournament. So at some point, we have to…
No, that’s because I’ve got pressure on me.

I don’t imagine any swimmer’s gonna get out of a tournament because he’s digging too far or whatever. I mean, like I say, I mean, I swim, but do it for conditioning. I don’t do it because I’m worried about how fast I’m going. I want to make sure I get in shape and it’s one of the best conditioned sports there is, no doubt, in the world. Yeah, but I actually think your comment about saving one particular move in order to win the race or win the tournament is very similar to Chris’s athletes. They don’t want to go out too fast. They want to go out too slowly because they’ve got the rest of the race to use their nine hands. Yeah. Exactly. And I think that it’s important that what you’re saying, I mean, it’s so true because the challenge that we have, okay, is we all have levels. And whenever we can reach a level that’s just higher than somebody else and I don’t need to use something to expose it to another opponent that is very well educated because most opponents aren’t.

But there’s many that are. When you reach the top level and you see those athletes in there, like for instance, in the world championship, I know that the Russians, the Cubans who train with the Russians who have since 80, okay? And then you’ve got other countries like Hungaria, Yugoslavia, which I think are fair. But when I’m looking at those countries that really understand technique and drill it the way we do, the way America has started doing it many years ago. Now we’ve walked away from it. We did. Before I got back into sport in 2012, I went into a U.S. Olympic training center that was absolutely ridiculous the way they were training. I came in and said, “What are you guys doing?” And they said, “We’re drilling.” No, you’re grabbing a leg and you’re picking it up and then you’re letting it go. Every one of your wrestlers are doing this. This explains to me why we’re like ninth in the world at that time. They changed that attitude again and started drilling properly because you have to take, you have to start with a setup, right?

Then you have to go ahead and hit the task or hit the actual move or execute. Once I execute, I get to a position in which I must not stop. That’s when it’s really important that I use all those nine hands and make sure that they’re in position. Because when I make that effort to start taking somebody and controlling them, I need to get to where I need to be to be the best strength so that I can score. Once I score, that’s called securing. Once I secure, then it’s over because if I’ve got them pinned down somewhere, whether or not I use, see, because when I pin down, that’s so vital in this game. Like people that have jiu-jitsu, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, by the way. But people that do Brazilian jiu-jitsu learn a little bit more because they, what they call hang out, which I think is ridiculous, some of it, but that’s fine. But because I don’t hang out, I’m going to either destroy you or stop or else we’re not, because I’m not here to learn how to hang out.

I’m here to learn positions. Okay, so I don’t know if that makes much sense to people, but you have, because this is a game of level. Wrestling and judo and jujitsu and others are games of levels where you use trickery to catch him what you just said, which Chris can use in, you know, somebody thinks, “Boy, that guy’s not that fast.” And all at once, he just was calming down because he’s faster than anybody else in the field. Then he goes out and blows it away by three seconds, you know? So that happens and we know it does, and you just told me it does. We know that the coach says, “Okay, man, I want you to stay on this pace.” If he can get him that good where they’re staying on a pace, because at some point you have to up that, amplify it. Similar to what KAATSU does for us, is that when I amplify myself, I change the pressure I’m under. And by the way, that’s one of our senses.

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A pressure, knowing pressure is a sense that we have. So it’s one of our senses besides, you know, smell and taste and all those. One of them is understanding or feeling pressure because our epidermal layer, there’s a dermal layer too, okay?” So underneath the epidermal layer, which is where we touch and feel, is another layer that needs to be fed. Then there’s like a collagen there. I can’t remember the exact name of the next layer in our body. But that, that layer is how we’re getting fed through the pressure that we do. Well, in wrestling, this, these pressures, you don’t have pressure when you know where to put things. So if I understand where this hand is, say I understand where this hand so I drop this if I’m in on somebody. So if I’m penetrating in on somebody and I drop this arm down, see how straight this is. I then can use this as a leverage as a lever. So as I’m catching a knee, I can lever and then I make a turn. When I make this turn, that comes to the side. And it also pivots me up, too, at the same time. So just like when we first met Steve, when we were doing stuff on Huntington Beach or wherever we were, that move was difficult if you don’t have strong ties.

So this is a perfect example of something we need to build if you learn the nine hands. Well, there may be something your weak in. will pick it up and fix it. You know what I mean? Because that’s what training does. That’s what Chris does as a coach. He teaches his kid, okay, you need more strength here and here. Here’s where we’re going to have to work on it. Whether you use a band’s weights or KAATSU. Wow. Andre, I really like that concept of pressure on the epidermal layer as another sense.

And Chris, as a coach, as his athletes are pulling their hand through the water, you know, he, Chris, you could better explain it. It’s feel for the water, but it’s really that sense of pressure. And I think that lead athletes, the Michael Phelps of the world, they totally understand that pressure against their fingers, their hands, their forearms, et cetera. Amazing. You know, I would think, and Chris would have to confirm this, but I would think that actually the better you get in that sport, because it is for me, in the sports that I understand very well, although I do swim. But I would think that you could start actually feeling way out there. You’re actually feeling that water run off the fingers, which is something that you only can open up through trying to understand how the chemical exchange is through the blood barrier. So if I’ve got a blood barrier in between my mind and the rest of my body, because that’s one thing we talked about before, the difference between the nerves in the mind versus the nerves in the body. The nerves in the body are pretty much connected. The ones in our head are all exchanged through chemicals. None of them are sitting together. They all have a synaptic cleft. Each of them that have the synaptic cleft with their axon of bouton, which is what their nerves are in the mind. When we go to the body, it changes.

We’re more feeling touchy, if you will. We can feel things. And there are some people that lose that touch. One of the things like I explained to you guys a long time ago that I’ve had, you know, what do you call it? I’ve had Parkinson’s for quite a while, but I don’t have very many symptoms. I can cause it. I can create it if I want to. Whenever I go here and cause that arm to start to shake barely, it’ll barely start to shimmer. But I can cause it for some reason in different positions. And I really feel like that’s the same as the nine hand principle in that when you actually can connect with your body and see where you’re at, without looking, that’s the most important thing. If I know where my right foot is, I’m going to know whether it’s in position or not. And it’s like we can go back to swimming big time because the majority of people that swim, they’re not using their legs hardly at all.

The best are using their goddang legs. They’re getting kicked out of it. They’re getting movement. Whereas just an athlete like me who just jumps in the water and starts swimming, I’m going to work my arms more than I am. It’s almost looking like I’m doing doggy style as I learn how to swim. As they teach you to go through the water and smoothly take that water and turn it into your friend. You know It’s kind of that’s the important thing. You’ve got to make the ground for me, which it would be the pool because I can’t go to the bottom of the pool. So you make as much of the gravity and the ground as you can to get to the power of the ground. Because like I said, I’ve said this many times, the power is in the ground. Now I have a kinematic link that all starts from my target or my load zone. So I do have that. But all that gets me is the ability to move these arms and legs quickly and with in unison and where I need them.

When I teach somebody how to fall in judo, it’s different than falling in wrestling, by the way. So each sport, and I’m sure that the same thing, how they dive and swimming may be different in one event versus the other. Now I’m not positive, but I would think that there would be changes in the way I enter the water. And because I’m not, you know, once again, I’ve never competed at that, especially at the level that Chris is coaching and probably has competed. So in swimming, but I can say this, that if I look at gymnists, if I look at the other sports out there that I don’t have to have somebody in front of me to do it. I mean, I can perform it myself. Those sports still are vital for the nine hands to understand where they’re at. Because if I’m doing a flip, I gotta make sure my legs are, my feet are underneath it, right? Yes, wow. Chris, do you have any questions specific to swimming in nine hands?

No, I mean, that was incredibly informative. And Andre, you’re right. It’s, you know, we talk a lot with the swimmers about the feel, you know, what is feel for the water? We talk about it a lot. And when you talk about the Olympic level swimmers or, you know, you’re a wrestler who’s getting into cross-train, no offense and no pun intended. You know, the feel for the water is exactly that sense, and I’ve never thought about it, so that’s another thing you’ve taught us, is that, you know, it’s another sense, you know, that we have is this sense of pressure. And the better swimmers really do have, you know, a natural, even a, you know, a subconscious feel for the water. So that’s wonderful. And you know what’s cool, Chris, is that that subconscious, the tap in of it is so difficult for some people to accomplish.

And when, because consciously, we’re very weak, okay? And I say that and I’m not trying to make fun of anybody because I said it we. Okay, most people as they start, because we talk about a positive attitude. There’s so many people that talk about, stay positive, you know, as a man thinketh, we will become. I totally agree with that, okay? But the challenge is we’re going to have doubt sometimes. And what can go through doubt is position. If I stay online with where I’m at, it’s amazing how all at once you get through things. You know, if I can just stay there, I’ll be fine. So it’s real important to understand that like for instance, this is a perfect example because you just rotate it. Okay, there’s a strip about two or three inches here that basically gives me the ability to do this. So my ulna or my radius is on this side and my ulna is on this side coming up my elbow.

When I make this rotation, this right here makes me very strong. In swimming, I imagine it does too, because that’s the rotation when it comes in. In wrestling is huge for me. The difference, I teach people this is a power strike. This is nothing. They’re going to extend out of me. They’re gone. I have nothing to grab. When I turn this, it becomes very powerful. And it’s all off a strip about this big, about two and a half inches in here that actually has a band that causes me to be able to do this, which is weird because that’s what’s so amazing about the body is that if you look at the body, let’s just look at the liver. It does 500 things, and I’ve talked about it before, and I’m sorry for talking about it twice. But if you just look at things in the body that do things for us, it’s like, man, who can make? I mean, God’s the only one who can make this complicated body that does so many things for us. And if we take care of it, and we start actually taking the subconscious like you were talking about, and step into it, and try to figure out how do I tap into that? How am I going to do that? We do it through meditation. We can do it through training hard.

Because when you, I call it a second wind, if you will, they put, whenever I came back and wrestled in 2012, they put a band on me and checked out, you know, what was going on with my heart and different things. We do it similar to KAATSU too, but they could not believe the energy level I had after I kicked in the second time. So I’ve always had that ability to kick in after I get warmed up because they’re finding that it’s finding the importance of warming up is more and more. Especially in in sports where you have to have your proprioceptors kicking out quick where I know where I’m at and I just go because like I told you, man, I really believe that my body thinks for me. I don’t sit there and if I’m too late, if I say, okay, I’m going to grab your right arm, you know, it’s already there. So anyways, yeah. Yeah. So, but it’s enjoyable to talk about these things. I really went in depth in it pretty much in a book. It’s called “The Golden Ages of the 80s, Amateur Wrestling’s Golden Ages of 80s.” And they put in there, they put some different things, but they did put the nine hands in that book. Okay. Well, actually, we’ll link to that book.

That’s great, Andre. And all of this is very applicable, I think, to any sport. The concept of nine hands and the pressure on the epidermal layer. I want to thank you very, very much for this time. It’s been so educational. Yeah, I appreciate you too, and I appreciate all you’ve helped me with through the education that you guys have, you know, and brought, you know, for me, it’s like, was meant to be for me because, I mean, it’s worked so well on what it does for my body and so many people that I’ve helped. I mean, you know, for me, it’s like, it’s like I’m spoiled. I told you that before. I get spoiled. So because when I have an injury, I just know that you gotta get to a machine, man. Or as you taught me, there’s other ways. And I won’t go into those right now. That’s an important part to realize that, you know, when you learn to do something, you can always modify and do it anyways. See, one of the things that gets me about people is that they watch, like when they’re in front of Chris or a coach like yourself that coaches something, that’s when they fire up and that’s when their minds go in. And that’s when they’re saying, “Oh, I’m going to go hard.” It’s the best athletes are the ones when I turn around or Chris turns around and they’re working even harder. They don’t care whether you’re looking or not. They’re only looking at improving their body, their mind, their understanding of instead of saying I’m doing this to look good for my coach, I’m doing this to make it to where I can become something. And you know they’re never going to be Chris Morgan. They’re going to be themselves. It may be Taylor Swanson or whoever the guy’s name is. That’s who Chris is trying to create. He’s trying to create a great athlete where you become the person that everybody looks to. And then he sits in the background and says, “Boy, I’ve produced another one.” And when you can produce them like crazy, it’s awesome. I mean, and people that it starts to, you know, what goes around comes around all once they start saying, “Yeah, I learned this, learn this.” But those people become great in their sport. Well, thank you very much, Andre. Again, this has been wonderful. Thank you. I appreciate your time.

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