My Top 3 tips for in-season training for rugby players
In-Season training, three points to consider to keep you playing week in week out.
The Three tips
- Vary your volume day to day week to week to create waves in intensity
- Keep intensity high and train with intent, but keep that volume low overall
- Expose yourself to maximal sprints and declarations to prepare your body for the game.
One of the biggest error I see is when the season comes around they suddenly start doing nothing.
Being ready for the game is key, you need to be physically prepared to compete. But letting yourself slip back physically will not keep you playing week in and week out.
A base of strength, fitness, and power is key to playing more games.
So the question is how do you do it?
To begin with is to have a base plan, how does your week look like from pitch based sessions? How many games a week do you need to play? Within your life when do you have opportunities to train?
Once you have those questions answered you can look at the structure.
So here are the in-season training errors I see
1. Always doing high-volume work week in and week out.
Think your body has a finite amount of energy. Every time you train or play you take away from the account. Training week in and week out with super high volume means you withdraw from the account.
Think about planning your week in waves with periods you go harder, and periods you go lighter.
Use this template as an example
Sat – Game
Sun – off
Mon -Lower Body Gym
Tues- training and Speed
Wednesday – Low Intensity Cardio
Thursday – Upper body gym and training
Friday -off
2. Letting the intensity drop
Within the season the goal is to maintain or improve your physical qualities. Your physical qualities are key to playing week in week out. Because training and the games can be so fatiguing its key to use minimum required to make the change. Intensity for strength and power training is key here. Lifting between 70-90% with maximal effort with low volume is key. However, the key here is to not yourself go into a fatigue hole. So understanding what your body needs to have a minimum change is a good starting point. This great article by stronger by science (https://www.strongerbyscience.com/adaptable-training-program/) quotes two research papers that state that 2-3 sets you can improve your strength significantly.
Power development shows that intent is key. The CAT method, something I first read about in the book Base Building, states that moving the bar as fast as possible improves your strength output. With plenty of other research supporting this, if you are interested check this out. https://www.elitefts.com/education/compensatory-acceleration-training-maximizing-each-rep-each-set/ or read the research https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-017-0676-4. To improve speed, change of direction ability, and power in contact situations, throwing and jumping are great tools. Create ways to drive intent, by measuring speed, distance, height and competition.
3. Not performing max speed and declarations
Sprinting and max declarations have been shown to be causes of a lot of injuries. This could be because you can't handle the repeated nature of these events. Or the other reason is you do not expose yourself to them regularly enough. Sprinting on a weekly basis is key to keeping the hamstring, calves, and hips healthy. The sprint vaccine is something that is widely spoken about. With sprinting shown to be as good as if not better than training the hamstring. https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4663/12/5/134. The same is being suggested with declaration https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8761154/. Decelerating generates 5x your body weight. Which is greater than any squat or deadlift you will do.
So my simple advice for this is to make time for it. Ether within your gym sessions, a specific session or your warm up. Instead of doing the classic thing seen across the world messing about the football, rugby ball or hockey ball actually use this time wisely. All it takes is 15 mins to have a decent session improving your outputs and decreasing your injury risk
So there you have it, 3 simple methods to improve your ability to become available this season
Key Points
- Vary your volume day to day week to week to create waves in intensity
- Keep intensity high and train with intent, but keep that volume low overall
- Expose yourself to maximal sprints and declarations to prepare your body for the game.
