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The weekend after attending the Johnny Moss and Marty Jones camp in Cumbria, I found myself attending a Paul Tracey seminar courtesy of the Reckless Intent wrestling school in Livingston. My seminar and training related blogs are considerably more ‘insider’ than the norm, but I hope the more casual fans still enjoy them.

Paul Tracey has a great level of experience on the European wrestling scene and beyond, having wrestled across the world and having a solid reputation as a wrestler and a trainer. As a fan of his work, I was looking forward to this seminar. Reckless Intent have a good setup at their school and I saw some familiar and new faces as I attended the seminar. The Livingston roads can prove to be all over the place at times, but I managed to arrive in decent time, with it taking me just over an hour to get there from my neck of the woods (North-East Fife these days).

The seminar itself was tremendous. It was very informative and I managed to learn several sequences, takedowns and counter holds that I have since put into further practice at the W3L Action Academy recently and my conditioning was also put to the test with the bodyweight warm-up. The seminar also covered things as simple as what to put on a wrestling CV, such as quality promo pictures and full, 8-10 minute matches. It was good to receive positive and negative feedback regarding my in-ring work and the 45 second promo I was required to do and I look forward to working on them more moving forward.

Due to odd numbers attending the seminar, I agreed to work two training matches, one with Theo Doros and another with The Westler. Theo is a man Reckless Intent and Discovery Wrestling fans are familiar with and is a good all-arounder with a great body and charisma and I found his villainous ‘Greek God’ character to be interesting. The Westler has a great, wise-cracking personality to go with his top-rope dropkick finishing move, with it working well with my ‘Guru of The Life of Smith’ persona I have been testing the waters with recently, where I was afforded the opportunity to show those familiar with me my improvement and those not so much what I could do and bring to the table.

I would like to thank Paul Tracey for the seminar, as I got a lot from it and hope he runs another one soon. Thanks go out to Michael and Jam for having me at the school, as well as Jackie Grady for helping me navigate the Livingston roads in the dark after the seminar! Thanks also go out to Julie and also the rest of the people who attended the seminar who made me feel welcome. Reckless Intent will be hosting a seminar that will be taken by Scottish wrestling veteran Chic Cullen, which will take place on 10th December and will be more akin to an all-day camp. This week sees me wrestle at a W3L birthday party show, so next week’s blog will be in relation to that but until then, that is the life of Smith. Good day.

Lucian Maynard Smith
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Reckless Intent Wrestling I Paul Tracey I Theo Doros I Jackie Grady I The Westler I Michael Chase I Jam O’Malley