New Weekly Guest Blog at YSC from TrueFitness – What kind of workout should you do for Rugby?
Over the next few weeks there will be a new guest blogger at YSC! The trainers at TrueFitness in San Diego, CA will be sharing a rugby focused training post each week on Wednesdays. We would like to formally welcome Annalise to YSC!
First we would like to thank Wendy for the opportunity to blog about one of our favorite subjects. Sports and Conditioning. We intend to use this forum to educate, debunk and just generally inform the masses what is and what isn’t, what should be and what shouldn’t be. So let’s start with what should be. For all you Ruggers out there trying to get better at the game you love, have you ever actually curled your opponent like a barbell curl? Of course you haven’t, so the only curls you need to be doing are the cold beer variety after a win. Even with the technique of “binding in” it only uses an isometric contraction of the bicep and back muscles so even with that technique an actual barbell curl has limited applications in Rugby. Training for Rugby is not like training for anything else. It can’t be because nothing else is like Rugby. Your training needs to be just like your sport. Fast, tough, intense, and brutal. With that understood, at TrueFitness we don’t train like any old workout in the gym. Your workouts don’t even need to be in a gym. All that your workout needs are intensity, moves specific to Rugby and motivation to put forth the necessary intensity.
Your workouts need to focus on power and speed. Power is defined as the application of force and in the scrum there is definitely a lot of that. Speed is also very important especially in open space. A workout for any rugby player must be powerful and fast.
So how do we develop a workout that is powerful and fast?
We start by making sure our players know that all movements are done at full speed. Training for maximal speed is known as velocity training. Velocity is our friend and we use fast velocity. This mimics game speed as close as possible. Remember that we are training to get better at Rugby. Not training for a nice looking bicep. We start with our base level power movements
- Deadlifts
- Cleans
- Snatches
- Squats
- Push Press
Remember the power and speed components. All of these moves are power based and must be fast. Speed is our other training goal and is present in all power moves.
These moves are the basis for everything we apply in training. We also incorporate agility, quickness, and reactivity drills done at maximal speed to train like game speed.
So if we apply Power and Speed we ensure that our athletes will be game ready. After power and speed we apply pushing and pulling exercises to ensure our dominance on the pitch.
Stay tuned for more about training for Rugby. Next week we go deeper into the principles of Overload and Specificity to make our athletes the best that they can be.
Please feel free to call or email Annalise Evans of TrueFitness with any questions: (760) 809 1848 annalise@truefitness.biz and join her fan page on Facebook: TrueFitness Annalise Evans
