10 Training Tips for Rugby Players Short on Time - Be Efficient with Rugby S&C

If you want to save time in the gym, this podcast is for you. These time saving tips will allow you to get your workouts in more efficiently AND give you better progress than before.
A big mistake is trying to match the training schedules of the pros who train up to 8-15 times a week for S&C. For you, you need something more efficient.

0.00 Intro
2.49 Save time w/ Warm Up
5.00 Use Density Training
7.36 Contrast Training
9.48 Timed rest periods
11.46 Supersets, Bi-Sets, Giant Sets
13.50 Myo-Reps
17.10 Focussed Time Blocks
18.45 Big Conditioning Tip
20.49 Isolation Work
22.30 The MOST IMPORTANT TIP



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Transcript

0:00

Okay. Yes. What is going on everybody? Welcome back to another rugby muscle podcast. You're sat nav in the journey of rugby strength and conditioning to get to your ultimate best ever performance and do so in the simplest way possible. Made that one up on the flight. I'm as always TJ. And today we're going to be tackling a common challenge for amateur athletes. Particularly you rugby athletes and that is maximizing gym time. So whether you're balancing your training with your work, with your studies, any personal commitments, we've got 10 strategies lined up that are going to help you get the most, not just out of every session, but out of your training in general. And we do that like this is a big emphasis actually of rugby muscle is efficient training because it's not just about like saving time. It's also about enhancing the quality. I do find that so many. People are quite happy to spend hours upon hours in the gym and, and by virtue of just getting through everything, they somehow eventually tick the box. But I think what is way better is an efficient approach, right? If you can just focus on what truly matters, you can find massive improvement on the pitch without sacrificing those hours in the gym. And you can spend then those hours either, you know, back to doing quality time in other places, de stressing or working on other areas that might not to, might not be to do with the weights, right? So your conditioning, your speed work, you might save much more time for that or for things like sleep. So this camera is sort of bugging out me. If you're watching the YouTube episode, I don't know who just sits around and watches my face, but if you do say hi, and if you're listening on the Spotify feed, Remember to subscribe if you're new and hit those three dots and give us a five star rating that helps us That helps the show grow massively And you can hit the three dots and also leave a comment if you have any sort of time saving tips that you use Or share to me your favorite of the 10 tips i'm about to give of course if you're listening and watching on youtube hit subscribe leave that same comment as well So which of the 10 Did you find the most valuable or do you have any of your own suggestions? And then if you're listening on apple podcast five star reviews that really do help too. So without further ado, let's get into 10 time saving gym strategies. I think this is really important because as much as I've spoken about the theory, In these past few months of like exactly what you should be training how you should be approaching your training There is sort of a practicality to this that I really do think is absolutely critically valuable for You guys as amateur athletes. I think this is massive. So Let's get into them. So number one doing your core and stabilization work as a warmup. So I think if you start your sessions with your core work and maybe some sort of activate activation, some sort of stabilization work, if you've got those in your program, if you do them at the beginning, you're going to get through them way more efficiently. And it also prepares your body for the training to come. I don't think anyone has ever it. bottomed out on a squat or not being able to get a deadlift because they've done too much ab workout ab work beforehand. I actually think that doing the core work can really sort of wake up your core and have you be even more prepared to do those heavy lifts. I don't think it takes away and of course it just gets the blood flowing, it gets the heart rate up a little bit and it gets you ready to do it. And it also makes sure For if you're like me And make sure that they get done. A lot of rugby players will just see their core work and they'll see their sort of you know their prehab work at the end of their session and just Sack it off. If, especially if it is like a grinding session, you've been, you've been in the gym 50 minutes, 60 minutes, 70 minutes, and now you're looking and you've got all this ab work to do. It can, you can either really sort of drag it out or you can just completely sack it off. If you do it as part of your warmup right now, you're getting in that quality work. You're actually getting stuff that's going to pay off. Rather than just generic warm up stuff and generic phone rolling for no reason, you're actually going to do stuff that prepares you for your lifts and is a good stimulus anyway. So I think getting your core work, stabilization work as a warm up is a massive real good way to Prepare you for your lifts get you nice and warm. You could also throw in Like a sort of mini circuit so you could do core work You can do stabilization work and you could even do some level of plyometric work or power work just to get you really engaged No more than like five ten minutes absolute most and remember it's not just ten minutes warming up It's ten minutes actually getting in quality work and you're ready to get into your heavy stuff And we'll talk about more about how you can combine the heavy stuff and the power work in a later tip. But for now, do your core stabilization work, maybe even power work as you warm up. That is tip number one. Tip number two is utilize escalating density training. EDT involves timed sets where you perform As many sets as possible, usually on two opposing muscle group sets. So maybe an upper body push and upper body pull, maybe a lower body squat, a lower body hinge. It could also be just one movement. It could also be a giant set. So you've got three or four different movements. And essentially what you're going to do is work for time. Instead of instead of working for a set number of sets. So instead of saying, okay, I'm going to do three sets of pull ups and three sets of bench press and see how long that takes. Instead, you're going to say I've got 10, 15 minutes to do as many sets of five on the bench press and the pull ups as possible. You're still getting in as much rest as you need, but you're not mucking around on your phone. You're not scrolling through. You're not like just letting time drag on you. You're on the clock, right? So that really does help you pay more attention to your rest periods. It also helps you because the goal of escalating density training certainly Escalating density training, not just any density training, is to get in more sets. So maybe week one, you got four sets of bench press, four sets of pull ups. Maybe week two, you try and get five sets of each of those. And you, you can, you can keep the weight the same. You can drop the reps, whatever it is. You don't let the, the work drop in quality, but you get lots of work done. I also like doing this with my accessory work. Sometimes when it's like, when I, I'll put 15 minutes on the clock and I'll do three or four different exercises and I'll just pump them out. So it could be like arm stuff, shoulder stuff, stuff like that. Like little prehab stuff I like to do in a way that keeps me engaged. It also keeps the heart rate up. I'm not really sure if it's going to give you much aerobic benefit. But it is just going to make you get a lot more work done in less time. As you get more used to it, you build up more tolerance. You build up more work capacity. You're able to get through more work, get more adaptation, but yet you're still not in the gym for hours on end. You could do this with your heavy work. You could do this with your light work, do more. Density training and not only again to speak on the efficiency side of things, not just a time saving side of things. With density training, you're a lot more likely to get through more total work than you would have done had you just done like counted your amount of sets and just done three sets or four sets or whatever. So not only are you saving time, you're getting more work done. That is a win in my book. Next we've got contrast training. So this is where you're going to combine your heavy lifts with explosive movements like heavy squats combined with a jump squat. This could, loads of different examples of how you could use contrast training. French contrast training is a particularly Popular part of a particularly popular method of contrast training, but you don't need to do that All you need to do is pair up a heavy movement with an explosive movement with utilizing that same Muscle group or that same movement pattern. So like I say, it's heavy squats jump squats You could do a heavy deadlift broad jumps You could do bench press or overhead press with some sort of medicine ball throws or plyometric push ups. Loads of different variations of this and the idea here is that you're cutting down on the need to do power work, spend 10 minutes doing power work and then 10 minutes doing strength work. You could just do that 10, you could do all of it in in 10 minutes and not again, and to save time Essentially, you're not taking away from the rest that you're needing from your heavy work and you're not taking away from the rest that you needed with your strength work. These two things don't cause any sort, you're not getting extra fatigue because you're doing the, the jumps after your set of deadlifts. You should still take two minutes rest. Maybe you add a little bit of time for the actual movements to be done, but overall, if you compare it to working both the, the explosive movements, And the heavy movement separately, you're saving yourself so much time. And then again, to talk on the efficiency side of things, not only do you save that time, but you also get the potentiation effect. So the heavy work potentiates the explosive work and the explosive work potentiates the heavy work. So both things end up being more efficient, more productive as a result of being combined with each other. It's not necessarily a free lunch. There are things to consider. But overall contrast training is a fantastic way to get your heavy work and your power work in at the same time. I'm a massive fan of this and I utilize it for a lot of strength work with my athletes. Next we're going to do controlled rest periods. So essentially you're just keeping a strict eye on your rest intervals using a timer. Or looking at your watch, actually continually looking at that watch, keeping it, you could even just keep a, a running timer going. So when you finish your set, you look at it, you see where it is and you wait a minute and it just, it just stops you from resting way too long between sets. It's very easy in the gym, particularly when you're, you know, you're not feeling overly energized. To and even when you are feeling energized to let that clock just keep ticking over and to let time just sort of Go by when you're resting just mincing around doing things that aren't training so by having a a clock there i'm Like i'm not a big fan of rest periods being absolutely necessary and really Governing the success or failure of your training. I just think I just think you should rest as much as you needed. And, and really that's not as much rest as you would think. And therefore keeping your eye on the, on the clock is a fantastic way just to cut down your time. And again, for efficiency, we're probably keeping a bit, a bit more intense. focus during our sessions. If we're doing that, right? If our mind's wandering, if we're sort of, again, scrolling through our phones, if we're chatting for too long, we could get out of the zone and that could definitely make our sets less productive. So keeping a strict eye on the clock between your rest periods really can help. I like doing this with my strength work at the minute. So I don't think I really need even, it doesn't matter how heavy I go. I don't really need. Much more than I definitely don't need more than two minutes So i'm putting two minutes as soon as I rack it I look and then I wait and i'm ready to go within two minutes of finishing that set Maybe I could lift An extra rep over the total course of my Training session if I rested even longer, but i'll take that trade off because we save a lot of time keeping on our training and we keep that intensity next we've got super sets, buy sets try sets giant sets, so essentially Just integrating your exercises back to back when you can. So supersets are obviously when you're doing one exercise, then another exercise and then taking your rest. Biceps are where you're doing one exercise, resting for a little bit, doing another exercise, resting for a little bit and going back. Usually you're doing the biceps or any, anything other than specific supersets. You're going to be not utilizing the same muscle group so that you're not You know say if you're doing I keep going back to bench press and pull ups, but we'll use this again Say if you go bench press you rest for a minute, then you do your pull ups That way you're, you're getting enough recovery, you're still recovering from your bench press, at least the muscles are, when you're doing your pull ups. So, rather than wait for three minutes, you're waiting for doing nothing. You're waiting for three minutes total, but that's because you've taken a minute, you've then done some pull ups, you've then come back, you've waited another minute. And maybe yeah, it's only two and a half minutes instead of waiting doing no work You're actually getting through work again. You're keeping that heart rate high You could do this with three different exercises You could do this four different exercises make it like a mini circuit, but you're just resting as you need Obviously depending on your availability and space in your gym To make this work, but essentially you're just reducing the downtime And increasing the amount of work that you can get done in, you know, 40 minutes to an hour whilst you're in the gym Now sometimes you could and the beauty of like not doing them as supersets is that you can also If some equipment isn't available and you can't do them as a specific dual set or bi set or tri set That's okay You just do them as straight sets and sacrifice a little bit of time Because you're going to be sacrificing that time waiting for the equipment to be available Anyway, so you're just moving on and figuring out what you can do and adapting and that way again You're still saving time getting in more quality work because you're getting more total work And you're not faffing around you're keeping that intensity up during your training Next, what are we on? Number six. This is going to be Maya Repsets. So, Maya Reps are one of my favorite ways of doing accessory work. I'm pretty much always using either Maya Reps the Giant Sets, Circuits, or Density Training when we're doing most of the accessory work. And it's because it's just easier. Like when we're doing the accessory work, we want to get it done efficiently We want to keep that intensity high rather than just letting the sessions drag on and you know sessions can really Drop in quality after that like 40 45 minute especially hour mark So we want to get as much done before that happens as possible. So my rep sets Essentially what you're going to do is you get your first set It could be anywhere between 8 to 15 reps on that first set. Almost reaching failure. You could reach failure. It depends on where you are within your training cycle. You'll take a short break of 5 to 15 seconds. And then you'll knock out another bunch of reps. Depending on the movement would be the more heavier movement, the more taxing a movement, the more rest you would give yourself. And the more you would expect some level of drop off. And then the, you know, the, the easier or the more isolation, the movement, the less time you need of breaks between those little my rep sets and the less drop off that you'll get and essentially again rather than You know doing three sets where particularly if you're doing a set of like 15 You're only getting real stimulation like the first 10 or so reps are Not overly stimulating they're just to get you to a point where you're going to be fatigued and you're going to get those stimulating sets or reps in the last five reps of the set this Cuts that out of the second and third and fourth subsequent sets. So rather than taking two minutes going again and then doing another 10 Reps before you're actually really getting some quality working You're just resting short and you're going back and you're starting in that effective rep zone for lack of a better term and this allows you To you know get all the work done you skip those sort of fatiguing or reps that are designed to fatigue and you get quality work done. Now, if you're, like I said, if you're doing more isolation work, you can actually probably knock out too many sets and this ends up being a bit too damaging. So I would cap this at like four or five total sort of Meyer rep sets extra on. So you would do one activation set. Plus rest a little bit go again rest a little bit go again rest a little bit go again Rest a little bit go again. That would probably be the maximum I would do like for lateral raises you could do 15 and then you could do five I could do like five reps pretty much until I I ever get have to stop because i'm hungry or I stop because I need to sleep like I could go on forever Doing those so it's just a it varies exercise to exercise. This camera is absolutely bugging out today so My rep sets easily one of my favorite ways to getting Your accessory work particularly your prehab work particularly any sort of hypertrophy work my reps are Like I don't know why they're not more done because they are so Efficient at saving time and you can't do them with things like heavy back squats That's why they're perfect for all of your accessories. And i'm a big fan. All right next we've got what four more to go So focus blocks essentially what you're doing here is You're dedicating specific blocks of your workout to either conditioning which usually actually Shouldn't be stuck to just one block of a workout probably should have its own session, but looking at power strength, hypertrophy of particular body parts, hypertrophy of the upper body, hypertrophy of the lower body, core work, etc, etc, etc. Just giving yourself a little bit more structure can help you, rather than just sort of faffing around, moving from exercise to exercise, not really knowing what the purpose is. Giving yourself time with focus blocks within your training, knowing that, okay, this is my block of training. Lower body power. So you're doing your whatever power movements and maybe a strength movement. If you're doing a contrast method style approach You know that that's what you're doing and you're giving yourself 15 minutes to do all of that And then you when you go to the upper body, maybe do upper body strength You give yourself 15 minutes to do that and now it's taken only 30 minutes, but you've gotten all of your Like main heavy powerful meat and potatoes work done in half an hour And then you can then you've got lots of time for accessories, etc And then again, you could even time your accessory work, but timing your like focus blocks dedicating each like Knowing dividing your session up rather than just saying, okay I've got to get these different seven different exercises done today You divide them up specifically and you go and knock them out accordingly to whichever focus each one has again Keeps the intensity up and allows you to get through lots of work in a short space of time. Next, we've got our only conditioning tip. And this is not, obviously this isn't a time saving tip in the gym. In fact, it's a time saving tip that should not be included in the gym and this is doing your conditioning straight from your front door. So incorporating conditioning work that starts the moment that you leave your house is a big time saver. If you have to sort of drive to a field or drive to the gym, you've got to check in, you've got to put your bag in a locker, you've obviously got to go to the bathroom because obviously that's your pre training ritual. Or at least it's mine. All of a sudden you've wasted half an hour before you've even done anything. And so to go to the gym, to then walk on the treadmill, even if it's cold, doesn't, it doesn't, doesn't vibe with me too much. Instead, what I like to do is get out the door. Go do your run. Maybe if you're gonna go do your sprints, you carry your boots in your bag and you go run to the closest field. Your run then is your warmup. Or if you're going to the gym and the gym is, is a runnable distance, go run to the gym. Then you're getting in your condition work there as well. And making this easier. You could also obviously use a bike but getting in your condition work just by leaving the front door and going like, I think this is, that's huge and I think it's one of the biggest benefits. Actually, it's not the biggest benefits of your zone two aerobic cue work is that How well it improves your actual aerobic conditioning and how well that actually affects your your actual ability to perform Over and over again in a game But one of the most convenient parts of it is the fact that you can just put on your shoes Go out the door and then you maybe you run for 45 minutes That is 45 minutes out the door and you're back at your front door again, and you've done You Whereas if you have to go to the gym, maybe this takes two plus hours, you know, I think like Lowering the barrier to entry to get your aerobic work done is something that Will save you time and then Get you to actually consistently do it cool Next one. We've got is minimizing Isolation work. I think I think isolation work unless you're doing Specific Like prehab stuff and, and maybe a little bit of accessory work for the, for the guns. I think it's just, it's just over, overhyped. I think you could do like a couple isolation exercises per session, maybe even per week. And, and you're, for the most part, that's easily going to cover your bases. I actually think your get bases are 90 percent covered by efficiently training the, you know, the, the big basic compound movements anyway. And you just, you know, you're just making sure that that box is absolutely completely ticked. It's like getting in that extra protein shake, even though you've probably already had 200 grams of protein for the day. Maybe it's going to give you an extra benefit, who knows, but you're going to feel better anyway. And then again, if that isolation work is like my rep type work, then you're not going to, you're not going to spend more than two minutes doing it anyway. That's maybe when I would see it have its function. But if you're just spending all of your time doing loads of different isolation work without a purpose or on top of doing your compound movements, your main heavy lifts, I just don't think that's giving you much in return. Like I, I barely program flies, for example, for anyone, because we do enough pressing work and that is going to develop your pecs, your chest, your pushing muscles easily enough that we don't need to do flies. So I think minimizing your isolation work is going to save you time and still going to give you that quality training that you need. And then finally, number 10, The 10 of the 10 ways to save time and maximize your efficiency in the gym is going to be. Have a plan. Entering the gym with a cleared, structured plan eliminates the guesswork, eliminates the indecision. You now know exactly what you're going to do and therefore it streamlines your session. You don't have to figure out, okay, I've got to train. I guess I've got to train this muscle. Oh, this muscle feels a bit sore. Can I try this movement? Oh, that feels a bit off today. Last week I did that. What did I do for my, how much did I do for my chest last week? How many, This just wastes so much time man, like instead you go in you have a plan and you know exactly what you're going to do all of a sudden you're focused on the task at hand for the entirety of that session and then that entirety or that entire session lasts maybe one hour. Okay, cool. So, oh, I should mention actually, if you do want to plan, I'll put links in the description below. Team Rugby Muscle, we have, I think, 15 different programs for you to choose from, varying from pre season, off season, in season templates with different focuses. So whether it's a speed focus, a conditioning focus, a strength and size focus, whether you can train two times a week, three times a week, four times a week, five times a week, we've got options all covered. for you. And we are continually expanding that base of programs expect to that, that 15 to double into at least 30 different programs within the next few months. I'll put the link to sign up in the description below. Of course, if you want one on one coaching, where the plan is completely individualized for you, I'll put the links for that in the description as well below, but otherwise essentially by incorporating the strategies, you can significantly reduce your time in the gym. And still make not just as good a gains but potentially better gains and therefore You're working smarter not longer. You're able to really increase your performance on the pitch Because you're training with purpose and because you see better results You're able to stay more consistent because like if you able to stay consistent If you're able to keep your training intense There's no way you don't get results as long as you're you're on the right path You If you see the results that then becomes motivating in itself, it becomes more enjoyable. It's a win, win, win, win, win, win. Okay, cool. If you enjoyed that episode, give it a thumbs up, give it a five star review. Let me know what your favorite tip was in the comments, which one you use, or if you've got any of your own time saving tips, let me know in the comments as well. Thank you so much for tuning into the Rugby Muscle podcast. Stay efficient, stay strong, and we'll see you in the next one.