Principles to Train POWER for Rugby - a Practical Guide

Today we go through how to train power as a rugby player, not just looking at exercises you should do, but instead looking at the principles you need to follow if you really want to become explosive and effective on the pitch, and as an athlete.
Sure, that might sound pedantic, but it's important because these principles are both more important and easier to adjust and refine that going through difference exercises.
This episode might just redefine your approach to power training, setting you on the path to dominating the rugby pitch. Enjoy

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Transcript

All right. Yes. What is going on everybody? Welcome back to another brand new rugby muscle podcast. I'm your host as always TJ and today we are going to take a deep dive into how to train power for rugby power. Obviously really important, way more important than you would think actually in this context because my, uh, laptop battery is at about, uh, Sixteen percent.

So we'll see if we have enough power to get through this episode. As you can see behind me, I've also queued up the, if you're watching on the YouTube of course, you can't sit behind me if you're listening on Spotify. But if you're watching behind me on the YouTube, you'll see this sort of red huey glow.

That is because it is in reference to, uh, the Sith  who love unlimited power. And if I  could be bothered to get someone to edit over the top of Palpatine screaming UNLIMITED POWER I would do,  okay. So instead, what we're going to do is we're actually going to discuss how you can become a more powerful athlete.

Obviously, power is one of the five physical conditioning components to train for to improve your rugby performance. The others being aerobic capacity, movement slash athleticism, strength and size. All of which we have been covering over the last month or so. So if you want to train those things and you haven't listened to it.

Go give those a listen and then the fifth one, well, this, this being the fourth being power and then the fifth being speed, which will be covered at a later point. Um,  so yeah, before we jump into that, I guess you should be making sure that you hit subscribe to make sure that you listen to all these episodes, get them delivered right to your inbox, whether that's on YouTube, where you can also give a thumbs up or on Spotify.

Where you can not give a thumbs up, but like YouTube, you can now leave a comment or a question to, um, and, and this would be good for this episode because we're going to get into, um, exactly what to do with power and there's going to be questions I'm sure. So, before we jump into the specifics, let's actually touch on what power really means in the context of, context of rugby, right?

Because power is the ability to exert maximum force in the shortest amount of time in rugby. Obviously this can translate to explosive tackles, dynamic sprints, um, any rapid application of force that can Like you'll see in contact situations it can it's mostly in contact situations to be honest But it could also be change of direction.

It can be uh, what else could be explosive? I guess a powerful swing through of the leg for a kick Um anything like that that is all involving power and those situations More often than not can make or break games of rugby, right? Those are really important interactions, so um, I think  Power training is something that can absolutely revolutionize  the way you play, particularly if you've been training for a long time, just like a bodybuilder, or are relatively untrained. 

It's really important to understand this, because power training is not, like, some people think, oh, I need to do some power training. They carry on with the exact same training method. or whatever they're doing, right? Push pull legs or whatever nonsense they're doing. And then they just add in some box jumps.

It's not about that. It's about crafting the actual physical adaptation to be able to exert and produce as much force in as little time as possible. Okay. And you can only continually or you can only. Train that and actually get the outcomes that you're looking for. If you are doing this as part of a long term focus program, so you can like truly impact your actual training outcomes and, and actually get the results you want.

Quick fixes, adding random movements in, looking for, oh, what exercise should I do for power? It's not going to work. Okay, so I've got some insights for power training. I think I've got six today. Um,  And of course, if you're finding value in this stuff, I've earned your subscription already. That's great. You can also leave us a 5 star review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Those, that, your support there really does, uh, really does help out. And you could also just share it with a mate, or leave a comment on the Spotify or the YouTube. And just say hi, because I'm, I'm happy you're here watching it. Just say hi, um. That'd be cool.  So let's get into some key insights for, uh, power training for rugby.

So first power requires freshness, right? Power training should 99 percent of the time. Now, 100 percent of the time, it should always be at the start of your session  because of the way or because of the amount of muscles or amount of recruitment of your fibers because you need maximal recruitment of your muscle fiber, you need those fibers to be nice and fresh if they are fatigued, if you have already done some exercise before and if you are in any way, shape or form, um, overly fatigued and unable to recruit all of those Muscle fibers.

You're not going to be able to train power. Okay. So  potentially you can do this after like a zone two or something, minimally fatiguing or not fatiguing at all.  It's best to do this when you're as fresh as possible. That also means right. The rest periods are going to be crucial. They should be long enough to allow for full recovery between sets.

I'm not saying you have to sit there twiddling your thumbs for 10 minutes after doing three jumps, just to do three more jumps. If you're in shape, it could just be a minute, but.  You still need to make sure that you can perform every set maximally. Every single set needs to be as explosive as the previous ones.

If you start to decline over time, that means that you are not resting enough or you just don't have the capacity. Either way, you're not training power as the way you think you should. You're not going to get the right improvements. You're just training your body to move inefficiently. And actually Less explosively.

You just want nothing but explosive movements when you're working on power. Next,  a short work duration. This is kind of obvious, but it's still, still needs to be said. You're training, you're exercising when you're actually on. Needs to be brief. It needs to be less than 10 seconds  per set. So that could be 3 to 5 reps really and not including the pauses, right?

Sometimes a set of 5 might, no it wouldn't take longer than 10 seconds. It should be less than 10 seconds. 3 to 5 reps,  usually way less than 10 seconds. Usually like less than 5, like 5 seconds or so. maximally explosive. There are exceptions and I'll get into maybe a couple of them later,  but this overall guideline is going to help maintain quality and intensity.

Again, just like if you would decline set over set over set because you don't rest enough, if your sets are too long or include too many reps, as the reps go on Or as the time goes on, your, uh, muscle fibers are going to get fatigued and you're not going to be able to recruit maximally. Therefore, you're not going to be able to move explosively as possible and therefore you're going to decline, right?

If you do 10 jumps consecutively, all as high as possible, it's going to happen that your last 5 jumps are going to be Lower than your first five jumps. So  no matter what you do once you pass this like threshold Your force output declines and just like with a heavy weight, right if you had  Right, if you had whatever your five rep max is on a bar and you're doing a bench press you get to those five reps You fatigue your muscle fibers and they're so fatigued that they can't lift for the sixth rep  It's the same thing for power training.

Your fibers are taxed, therefore you cannot move explosively, therefore you're not training what you want. You're not able to train what you want to train. You cut that set there. Okay? I don't want to see sets of 10 to 15 thinking that you are being explosive. Thinking that you are doing power training. 

All right, we are now down to 12 percent on the battery and we are moving on to ATP PC system condition. So this, uh, these are your high, high power intervals. I've spoken about these in conditioning, but it also applies to power because this is the energy system. That is utilized when you are, um, performing these explosive movements.

So, uh, adenosine, triphosphate, phosphocreatine system. Uh, this essentially is going to improve your ability to perform at your absolute peak, maximal power output, and then recover again to go again. That is what you want to do in rugby, right? You want to do a big, powerful explosive carry or tackle.  That play is finished.

You then get back into the line as you recover and then you go again. This is something that can and should be trained. It's not just a case of getting a more efficient aerobic system to help you recover and then also working the strength and the power that we've already discussed. It's actually an energy system that we should be able to train for and be able to increase our actual total power output and by allowing our body to efficiently supply the muscles with energy to go again and again and again and that repeat power ability.

Um, and essentially. The way you would train this is something like a six to eight seconds, maybe 10 second absolute maximal power output, uh, intervals. Mostly these things are going to be done on any aerosol bikes or what bikes when you see, um, professional teams on social media doing those really. Tough intervals where they look like they're really pushing it.

This is what they're training, right? So you go for  Like we said already with your how your power drops off after 10 seconds or before that same thing here So you're gonna go as fast as you can as hard as you can for six to eight seconds You'll notice your power start to drop off and then you rest There are different ways to train this so you could train for the like peak power So you'd have like a full complete rest and you wouldn't get too fatigued.

You just  Particularly on a watt bike or an air bike, you can see your absolute  highest point that you reach as far as wattage goes, and you try and match that time and time and time again.  Then you can also go try and maybe try and improve capacity by either extending that set out to like 10 to 15 seconds.

Um, I don't think that has much application with rugby. What I prefer to do to improve capacity with rugby is have incomplete rest periods. So you go again after maybe only 10 seconds, you work for five seconds, you go again after 10 seconds, lots of different ways to do this, but in general, we're not going to get into the weeds of stuff in this episode.

It's just. High, high power output conditioning, you should be doing that if you want to be as powerful, uh, a player as possible. Next,  intent.  Training with intent is like one of the cornerstones of rugby muscle. It's one of the things I bang on about all the time, but particularly with power, this is something that, uh, I cannot overstate the importance of.

Because You have to to train power you have to perform as powerfully as possible You have to every rep has to be as explosive as possible So even when you're lifting heavy or you're doing warm up sets or you're doing anything else you can still  Theoretically, trained to become more powerful by lifting everything as explosive as possible.

There shouldn't be too many times, if any times, outside of maybe like 0. 5 percent of the time where you're actually restricting and purposely lifting slow. I just don't see that, right? Normally, if anything's going to be slow, you're going to have pauses or you're going to lower under control. When you're coming up, you want to lift as explosively as possible. 

No matter what, right? But especially if we're thinking about, um, really improving our power. So even if that weight's heavy and we can't move it as fast as possible, like we can't move it really fast, we're still trying our best to move it as fast as possible. Even though gravity is not allowing that to happen with the intent is still there.

And intent is, uh, really important for power development. Right? So.  Good way to think about this is like with your warm up sets, right? So once you're nice and, like, warmish and it's safe, right? Now, every lift should be max intensity on the way up. So, you know, say you're working up to sets of 100 kilos on the bench press, just for easy maths, right?

You start with, you've done a couple on the bar, you're nice and warm. Right now we hit 60, and we, every lift, every, every time it goes up. As explosive as possible then we go to 70 or 80 same again, then we go to 80 or 90 then we go to 1995 every set that we do on our way up to our to our max to our heavy sets Still done with explosive power because those are lighter weights You're going to get a little bit more power out of that and you're going to  sort of potentiate How well you can lift because you're recruiting those fibers and once those fibers are Recruited or like turned on there is potential there for you then to be able to lift heavier.

So a really good way to train power without actually Specifically going out of your way to train power is to utilize, uh, like intent with all of your lifts um, another thing I will touch on is the fact that obviously, um  Getting stronger is part of that power, uh, equation, right? Because you're recruiting and you're applying as much force in a small amount of time.

If you cannot apply much force because you're weak as piss, you're not going to be powerful. You're just going to be fast. And maybe that's okay, but we're looking at training for power here.  Next point, plyometric progression.  With this, what I want you to do is to focus on  simple plyometrics. We, we can over, like plyometrics is not box jumps.

Plyometrics is not any explosive work. Plyometrics is specifically the ability to rebound. So it's either upper body plyometrics can be done by throwing a ball against the wall and you're rebounding back up or they can be done  by throwing a ball on the floor, rebound, rebound, rebound.  plyometric pushups, hands and rebounding off the floor.

Now there are different ways. And obviously then the plyometrics can apply, um, with your feet hitting the ground. Got ahead of myself there. So obviously lower body plyometrics are a thing as well, but they're not static jumping jumps.  Or starting from static starts, they're continual bouncing, right? And there's two ways that you can really think about this, uh, training your bouncing ability with plyometrics.

One of them is going to be like. Uh, yeah, deep tear is like a Swiss ball bouncing, I guess, off the floor. So maybe you're quite, quite flat. So it absorbs the force of gravity as it's going down and then projects back up and it's a little bit more contact time on the ground. But the idea is that you're utilizing the force that you're absorbing, potentiating the upward phase, and then you're coming all the way up.

Then you've got like much harder pliers.  Shallow pliers, ping pliers, um, where what you're trying to do here is you're minimizing ground contact time. Now, rather than being like a Swiss ball that absorbs and bounces and then goes up, you're like a dense rubber ball, right? Like a real dense ball that as soon as it hits the floor, bang!

It bounces straight back up. That's what you want for, um,  for like the, the ping plier metrics. Lots of ways to find out more stuff about this, but I want to keep this simple because I want you to implement this stuff in your training. I want to help you out with this stuff. So, um, you can think of different jumps.

You can think of different movements. I can go into some specifics and I might do a bit more on the specific side of things in next week's episode when we might go into more detail about power. For now, um,  understand how to progress your plyometrics. Essentially what you want to do is you want to start with extensive, like low intensity plyometrics and progress to more intensive, more complex movements and faster, more dynamic movements with less work time.

So extensive plyometrics is just to get more, a bit of a, get into a bit of a rhythm. So you get used to bouncing, coming back up, bouncing, coming back up, bouncing, coming back up. It's like, it's like, Being able to dribble a basketball Before you start practicing your crossovers and you're through the legs and you're everything else, right?

You just want to be able to bounce sufficiently with both hands. Then you can start doing everything else But if you can't bounce it with both hands efficiently, like you can't bounce yourself Then there's no need. So you want to start with sets of like 10 to 20 and just really get a rhythm and you'll do that for a few weeks and then finally, once you get proficient, then you can start really building like the complex things that you see on social media where they'll jump over three hurdles in front and then off to the side or whatever but  sometimes that stuff's like  overly unnecessary.

It looks flashy. It can help but for the most part, keep things simple. Just jump up and down. You don't even have to jump on a box. You don't have to step off a box. You can just jump. And then use that as your plyometric  Change your directions potentially rotate potentially go off of one leg or land on the other legs things like that Lots of different ways that you can do it  Yeah, I think that's enough for explaining how we're going to Improve our overall plyometric effectiveness and improve our ability to bounce and become more powerful that way and then finally  um I've sort of alluded to this with the, the way we're progressing our pliers, but the way to progress power is not what we do with most of our weight training.

Most of our weight training, we, we basically just over time add more load, right? We add more and more and more weight with power training. It's not really about adding more weights to the bar or lifting heavier, um,  medicine balls, et cetera.  When it comes to, uh, improving our power,  We just want to be able to recruit more, uh, or express more power, recruit more muscle fiber, produce more force in a shorter period of time.

So we, we do those two things. We don't need more weight to produce more force, right? We can actually just move faster. And if we recruit in a short amount of time, so we move faster and faster,  then we are becoming more explosive. So progression can instead come from just increasing your speed. So you're, you're, I guess you'd comp, you can't, you can't.

Yeah, you're producing more force because you're moving faster, you're producing more, uh, power.  With the same amount of force, same amount of, uh, resistance against you. So you're lifting the same weight faster. That is, uh, a way to progress power. You can even actually lighten the weight in order to move faster.

That's something that we do with some of our medicine ball work, um.  And some of our plyometric work in rugby muscle is we'll instruct the, the athlete, the client to lift less weight as the weeks go on so that they can then express more power by going faster, right? They're using the heavyweight to,  because they have no choice but to go a little bit slower.

You can get more control in the movement. Then as the weight drops down, we can move more explosively, but now we've got a good, uh, Like control with our movement, and therefore we can express more power exactly how we want it. You can also, um, express power by, or improve power by adding complexity to the movement.

So we can add a rotation, or we can add an extra step, whilst keeping control of the movement, whilst still producing the force. We're adding a little bit of complexity, and again we're progressing our power training. This is more of a progression, not to necessarily  power, but it's in to increase our expression of power when we come on the rugby pitch and in different dynamic situations.

And then finally, other than adding more weight, we can also reduce contact time, imply, uh, imply metrics, right? So if we  can literally ping off the ground, we can, we can jump higher, of course, but we can also. Um, like have less ground contact time, meaning rather than spending 0. 5 seconds on the floor to bounce back up, we're tapping the floor.

Less, less time and we're more springy, more springy as time goes on. And really,  all of this time, whilst we're looking for these progressions, what we're really looking for is your ability to, um, continually move, move well. Express like force through quality movement and that in itself is going to just get enough work done over time to increase your power.

Okay.  Right. So we're already at 20 minutes.  We are at 5 percent on the battery. We'll wrap it up there. So just understand that power training for rugby is nuanced.  It's not a really.  A simple thing as add some Olympic lifts. You could add Olympic lifts and become significantly less powerful. It's not about the movement.

It's about your overall approach. So by understanding and applying these principles that I've gone through today, you can really  actually improve your power and enhance your own field performance. Remember, the goal is not. Just to increase your Olympic lifts or broad jump distance or any other simple measure of power What happens if you, oh, see the power on the lights also gone out.