TRAIN TO BE A RUGBY ATHLETE - 5 Simple Ways To Improve Your Movement/Athleticism

Join us as we discuss about various training methods to enhance movement quality and athleticism for rugby players. Find out how to incorporate rugby-specific movements into your training routine and take your game to the next level...


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Transcript

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Okay, yes, what is going on everybody welcome back to the rugby muscle podcast I'm host as always TJ and today we are going to continue on our series where we are taking a Full well rounded look at exactly what rugby strength and conditioning Looks like in the real world what it looks like for you as athletes amateur Professional, semi professional, uh, soon to be players, whatever your situation is, we're going to discuss exactly what it takes to physically prepare yourself in order to play the game of rugby. And we've done this over the past month or so already. We've spoken about conditioning, we've spoken about what conditions shouldn't be, we've spoken about all the different areas, the five key areas, and today we are going to look at one of those areas, which is Movement control slash athleticism and I like to call it athleticism because it makes it makes a little bit more sense than movement control because it stops it from being sort of, uh, Ido portal. Touch butt in the park type territory, and if you don't understand that reference, don't worry. It's just gonna be lost over your head But we must understand really what we're trying to achieve here because a lot of the time right people think you are either Born as a superior athlete or you you're not or you're somewhere on that spectrum, right? And that's that's it. It's just genetically Imposed and that's that's it. Now that would sort of in my mind defy The purpose of strength and condition in the first place, right? If you're just relying solely on what your genetics have given you, um, like what you're doing, listen to this podcast, you know? So, athleticism can absolutely be trained for. It's just not done by movements. And we'll talk about this in a second. Um, what athleticism actually is, is not this general term, kind of like marketing term, I guess, in a way, as to, as to, Um, what it seems to be on social media, what it is, is basically the ability to solve problems with the body, right? So whatever problems are presented with you, if you're the higher your athleticism, the more competent you are, and the more likely you are. To solve all amounts of different challenges that come your way By using your body right by so whether that's climbing a gate whether that is Okay, whether that's picking up a really heavy tv whether that's opening a door with a really heavy tv in your hand Or it's running out the front door with the tv in your hand while someone's chasing you Not advocating, obviously, for doing these movements. Particularly in that order. But that's, that's what athleticism is. And for me, obviously, it's going to be specific to the task at hand. And for me, obviously, that means rugby. Or for you, that obviously means rugby. Right? So, how do we train for athleticism in rugby? That's, that's what we're going to look at. And I've got sort of, uh, five different areas that we can look into. And within those, we can look even deeper. But as usual, I don't want this to run much longer, if at all longer than 20 minutes. So I'm not gonna, like, go crazy. I'm just gonna touch on these areas, give you guys some ideas as to what you should be considering when it comes to training to be an athlete, not a powerlifter, not a bodybuilder. Um, an actual athlete that performs, I mean, an actual rugby athlete that is training to play rugby better. And if you, if you like the idea of that, of course, if you're watching on the YouTube channel, Hit that thumbs up button really does help the show the show is growing Thanks to this new podcast feature on youtube, which i'm really happy about um Of course if you are listening on apple podcasts or spotify I would love to earn your subscription with this podcast Keep you around for future episodes so that you can really understand what you should be doing as it goes as far as Actually training in the gym to become a better rubber plant not to become a bodybuilder not to Be a general fitness person, but actually to be better at rugby and that's that's my goal here with the rugby muscle podcast So if that's that's what you if that interests you, of course hit that subscribe button And if you've been listening for quite a while consider giving us a review the spotify I should read that i've had a couple come through on spotify, which is amazing If you're listening on apple podcast, you can also give us a review That would really help out. I don't know if you're watching on YouTube why this camera keeps swiveling around. It's this new Apple, um, continuity camera. It annoys the crap out of me, but it stopped doing it. So, on that note, let's move on to the different ways that, uh, you can train for athleticism. So, actually before I get into the different ways, uh, it's really important that you understand that This isn't a, do this exercise and you'll become instantly athletic. It is not a, um, you know, this is the one movement you need. I'm not going to tell you to do Olympic lifts. I'm not going to tell you to do a certain type of plyometric movement. I'm not going to tell you to do some sort of carriers because those are going to solve all your athleticism problems. No. Athleticism, as I've already explained, is foundational. It is How you move better. It is how you solve problems with your body. And that means that it's kind of a skill and that means that it needs to be trained like a skill. So if you don't move very well and you don't even know it, right? So if you've got someone that's, it's a perfect example is you ask a, well, a cliched example. I'm not saying this is true, but it would have been no, you know, There's a saying, I'm tip toeing around this now. There's a saying, you throw like a girl. And I don't I'm getting myself in trouble here. There's a saying that you throw like a girl. And that is What comes to your mind when you think, oh, that person's throwing like a girl, that person is unconsciously incompetent at throwing. They're not using their force through their hips. They're not driving through their foot. They're not rotating their whole body properly. They're kind of doing that, right? That's someone that just doesn't know how to throw and they never learn. And then you get them to start to try to throw, but then instinctively, they'll still go back to their poor technique. Better example and a less, um. A less offensive example could have just been new people to rugby. If you ever watch new people play rugby, you watch how they pass the ball, it's, it's kind of funny, you know, if they haven't learned properly. Now the better athletes, the people that are born just slightly more athletic, are going to pick up the skill of passing a lot quicker than other people and that's, that's a really good example actually. I should have, should have mentioned that way before I got myself into trouble. You see people that the better your, your movement capabilities, the better your athleticism, the better you're going to learn these skills and all different movements are different types of skills, but the tire you get at moving really well, the better you're going to be able to combine different movements and solve other problems. And that's what we're going to do when we're training athleticism. So what that means is, um, It's a continuous process. It's continual improvement and potentially that you're going to hit milestones where you don't have to necessarily really arduously train that movement, but you're also, uh, yeah, and not, you know, once you learn how to run or once you learn how to ride a bike, right, you don't, you don't forget that, but there's going to be points where you will regress as you, Lose some of that movement capabilities if you don't train them. And that's why it's really important that this isn't as much a, a, you know, training block where we're only focusing on athleticism, where it's actually most of the time going to be just underlying. You must consider this stuff. Okay. Cool. All right. Now let's get into the five things. Number one, right? Way to train your athleticism is going to be master the basics, right? So we've got your fundamental movements, your hinges, your squats, your lunges, your upper body pushes, your upper body pulls vertical and horizontal. You've got your core movements. So rotation through the trunk flexion, like, uh, crunches and sit ups shouldn't have done that with the camera. Um, Flexion and extension, lateral flexion and extension, so bending to the side through the trunk. And then you've got dynamic movements such as jumps, throws, carries and sprinting. And essentially you want to be able to train those different movements continually. And you want to be able to improve your ability to perform those movements continually. Um, if you cannot squat. Like, if you cannot do a basic squat, that's going to hold you back in so many other areas that that's, that's what we're going to tackle first. And it's useless me then saying, ah, the way to be the best athlete is to do this dynamic box jump into a split stance, uh, power snatch, you know, because that movement's way too complex. You're never going to be able to do it. So what we have to do is. Break everything down and start with those basic movements and really every Every other movement is almost just a combination of those different things you can you can sort of pick parts where it's part this part this part this and The better you get at those movements the better you're gonna be Everything else and once you and the way to get better is just to keep doing them and really critique your movement As you would do, you know, your, your, your, the amount of weight that you put on a bar. Very, a lot of people are concerned with the amount of weight that goes on the bar. That then they sacrifice their actual, uh, movement, their movement capacity, their movement control for that lift, right? This is one of my, this is one of my real bugbears, actually. I'm gonna, I'm gonna let this frustration out on the podcast before I move on. When people post PRs and then they say, Oh, don't worry about the form, I'm just going for a PR. And I'm like, well, it's not a PR if you've had to adjust the form in order to lift more weight. Right? So, if you're doing a squat, every single squat should look Kind of identical, right? At least hit the same type of range of motion. If you cut your, cut your squat short to lift more weight, it's a different squat. Actually, I've done, I'm having flashbacks now. I've definitely done this rant already on the podcast. So, apologies if you've already listened to this rant. Um, let me know in the comments if you do remember which episode that was from. But, yeah, anyway, just letting that little Uh, vent out on the, on the, on the podcast. Now we'll move on to part two of how to train for athleticism. It's to challenge those movements with increased load and control. Those are the real two. Um, Basic ways. Once you've got those movements down, right? Once you squat pretty well, you lunge pretty well, you hinge pretty well. Alright, now we can start to add weight. We can start to increase the load. If you don't squat well, if you don't lunge well, there is no point in you increasing the load because you're just, you're challenging a harder movement. You're making moving Even harder before you've even got down the process of moving, right? So, you get some people, and I've definitely been there, uh, in my early days, that can only squat once they've got 60, 80, whatever kilos on the bar. And if they've got an empty bar, they'll fall over backwards because that's the only way they can squat. That's not, that's not a good thing, right? And, really, people like that would absolutely Benefit from spending some time and just focus on that moving. It's a frustrating process because you want to add weight to the bar, right? But what I could, what I would suggest for you is if that's the case, then look at more control. So look at lowering under eccentric, uh, uh, load or loading the, uh, controlling the eccentric portion for longer periods of time. So maybe you spend. a count of five going down. Maybe you pause halfway. Maybe you pause at the bottom. Those are fantastic ways to improve your ability to perform the different movements and. down the line or even at the time, to be fair, that is going to increase your overall movement capabilities and athleticism. And of course, from there we can start to add load. Those two things should be continually played with. I do like the idea of undulating, um, which is basically a fancy way of Of sometimes loading heavy and then lining up and then building up to going heavy again. Uh, I do like the idea of doing that with the amount of weight on the bar. I do like the idea of spending some time with controlled pauses, spending some time, um, slowly lowering the movement down, the, the, like the squat down or the bench press or an overhead press, whatever. Taking the eccentric component of movement and putting it under control, putting it under a strict, usually it should be like at least, One to two seconds still controlled. It should always be controlled on the way down, but the better you, uh, the, the more you want to train that eccentric component, you can increase it from, you know, up to three, five, seven seconds on the way down, even as much as 10 seconds. It's a really good way to enhance your ability to move well. And only a few weeks of slowly centric training can really. allow you to move so much better. And then once you move better, then we can go back to adding more and more load, uh, you know, over the weeks. So that's number two, challenge that movement with increased load and controls. I should also mention just the different pauses is also another fantastic way. If you get different parts of your movement that you don't hit really well. So say if you struggle, um, at the bottom of a squat, or you struggle with your range of motion at the bottom of a squat, Do pauses at the bottom. Fantastic way to, to solve that issue. Next, we can, uh, actually challenge these movements with increased ranges of motion. So, just as I said, um, you can add load to the bar, you can add slower eccentrics, you can actually just try to move deeper. So, this is a fantastic way if you're someone who's a, a really shallow squatter, you, you barely get to 90 degrees, go, like, keep the weight nice and light. Don't continually add weight week to week, instead, try to make that movement look better and try to increase that range of motion, so move further. If you're a bench presser that doesn't touch the barbell all the way to your chest or doesn't get the dumbbells all the way down to your chest, you're, you're, not only you, you know, like really decreasing your ability to gain muscle and gain strength, you're also like in, you're, you're practicing poor movement because. When you go onto the rugby pitch, you want to be prepared to push, to pull, to squat, to move yourself in different ways. Throughout the different, like throughout a full range of motion, not necessarily you're going to do a full squat from the bottom of a squat to the top, but you will be challenged in deep knee and deep hip flexion. You will be challenged with your shoulder all the way back here. And you want to be strong enough that that doesn't, well firstly, it definitely doesn't injure you, but you want to be strong enough that you can be confident here that you're also still strong here, right? With your, with your hand all the way back down or your, your, your hips and your knees all the way, um, completely, uh, you know, uh, a real tight angle so that you can be strong in those motions and that's going to allow you to move a lot better, control your body in those different positions. Next we have specific load adjustments and complexity. Now we've got good at the movements right? We've got good at squatting, we've got good at hinging, pushing, pulling, lunging, all the different core movements and we're not just good at One version of those moves. We're not just good at goblet squats. We're now able to back squat. We're able to front squat. We're able to do split squats. We're able to, uh, lunge with a Zurcher hold where it's in the crook of our elbows. We're able to do different variations of those movement categories. Now, what we want to do is once we've got good at those, well, actually. if once you're already good at those, they're going to be like that strength is going to be easily transferred to the pitch as long as you're doing point five. So stay tuned for what point five is going to be. Um, but now what you're going to do is you're going to make these movements slightly more complex. Um, so the, and potentially add some specificity as far as making them look more like rugby movements. So this is where you go from instead of just doing overhead pressing or even push pressing. Now you're really getting it into where you take a step and then you, you drive up to make it look a lot more like a line out lift or you instead of, um, Um, doing a bent over barbell row. You're actually in a proper position where you'd be in a rock and maybe you're rubbing all the way back to your stomach and you, and you're trying to hold that position. So you're loading your whole posterior chain and your core to keep you tight, but then also using your back muscles to, uh, put row the, the way up. Now this is where it can get a little bit crazy because you can absolutely overthink this. Um, I. If you do so, what you're going to do is you're going to sacrifice the strength and the muscle that you're going to gain from doing these movements. And instead, like, what ends up happening is you just waste your time in the gym, essentially. And you're constantly trying to make your gym workouts look like the game of rugby. And that's not what you should be doing. There's just some There's some scope there for you to be able to take some movements, make them a little bit more complex, make them a little bit more like rugby and potentially that translates to the rugby pitch. I'm not, as I'm, I'm actually working this out as we go because I'm not actually completely sold on that. I think if you master the basics, you get really good. That complexity can actually come from. You know, now, instead of doing a, a basic hinge, a basic, uh, uh, a basic upper body pull, we combine the two and what we do is a clean, or a snatch, or a jump. You know, we combine the different movements and there's lots of different ways to do this. And, I would just urge you to combine those movements, add complexity, potentially move the load into different ways. It looks a little bit more like, um, a game of rugby. I would do this only During preseason and at the beginning of the season to make make it transfer across really well and other than that, I wouldn't, I wouldn't worry about this too much. I wouldn't stress about this too much. I would just really try and challenge yourself to combine a different movements to potentially make it more complex by making it unilateral, right? So instead of doing, um, a, a continued doing bilateral squats. So back squats, front squats, whatever. Maybe you're doing a Bulgarian split squat or just a normal split squat or a front foot elevated split squat, whatever you're doing to, um, you know, challenge that movement in a different way from before is something that you can. Like in a more complex way is definitely something that you can play with once you've mastered the basics once you've got strong in those Movements once you've got a full range of motion in those movements now we can start to Add more complexity and one other way that you can have a complexity is by adding rebound so you can again play with the tempo Make it really fast Because you've already demonstrated that you move well and you can control it But those are the stages that you must go through and then to make it transfer onto the pitch Like, this is something that I think is, is so, so missed in the world of particularly amateur rugby strength and condition. The top level pros do it so well, um, and then everyone below that does it actually really poorly. And that is do your rugby specific movements in your rugby training, right? So don't try and make the gym or don't try and. Do stuff in the gym, do your weight movements in the gym to get better at jackling. Practice the skill of jackling. Take some time before training, particularly you amateurs that are listening. You're gonna, like, have 15 minutes at the beginning of training where you just, loads of people just stand around and they pass the ball around in a circle. Or they play touch, like, walk in touch. That is a really good time for you to get a, a teammate and say, hey, look, can we, can we grab this, uh, grab this foam pad here? And we're just gonna practice rucking. And you're gonna, just gonna go at like a 40 percent intensity to work on your movements and you can add it and make it more and more dynamic. Maybe you want to work on your left handed passing. Well, working just rotation continually isn't definitely going to directly transfer. It's going to help, but you have to implement the specific skill itself in games of rugby for it to translate. So, obviously we're not playing games of rugby four or five times a week. Instead, you're just going to do it in training. You're going to allow yourself some specific time in training to work on the specific skills and the drills that you want to improve upon. Okay. So that wraps up this podcast. So remember that. Athleticism really comes from a solid foundation and a progressive challenge of that foundation, whether that be through tempo, whether that be through load, whether that be control, range of motion, whatever that the case may be, that is how you build that foundation of athleticism and movement control. And without it, you're going to end up like. That person that's never, I was going to say the, the girl throwing again, get myself into trouble. I've just got past that. You're going to look like that person that's never played rugby and then ask them to do a goose step or pass a rugby ball. You don't want to do that. You want to move better and that's how you're going to do that and make sure that you're adding this stuff to your training routines, not just in the gym, but also sometime, you know, in your, in your rugby training as well. And give it a go. Give it a go for a good month. Come back and let me know how you got on with this stuff. Um, I'm always, I always love to hear your feedback. Of course you can leave direct feedback right now in the comments below on the YouTube video or in the comment section on Spotify. Just hit that three dots. I'd love to hear some of your feedback because it really does help me improve the show. Uh, lets me know what you guys want to listen to. Um, on. Tuesday, Thursday or Friday, we'll be doing another Q and a. So if you have any questions, let me know in the comments below as well. Um, hit subscribe to make sure you don't miss those. Hit a thumbs up button if you've made it all the way to the end. Oh, and next week we will then continue down this path and we'll be talking about strength and muscle gains, which is, I mean, that's what YouTube is about. So thank you guys so much for tuning in. I'll catch you in the next one.