I’m sure I’m not the only openside that hates them – the new interpretations of the tackle ball have removed the greatest weapon in my kitbag. And I’m cranky.

My favourite trick is to assist in a tackle, just reefing the player to the ground, remaining on my feet, getting that dear old piece of leather into the crook of my arm and owning it. I’ve gotten away with it this year until tonight. But enter ye olde new law interpretation [see update and video from 20 July below for my workaround].

In a rather informative post, Sanjay Deva provides the following description of the new interpretation of the tackle ball from Lyndon Bray of SANZAR:

“The tackler, once hitting the ground in the tackle, must release the ball and the ball carrier. This gives the ball carrier a chance to ‘play the ball’, and will tidy up the tackle-ball area which has previously been weighted towards the tackler.

“As well, any player involved in helping make a tackle, who is in contact with the ball carrier when he is taken to ground, must then release the ball, before then attempting to contest possession, even if he is on his feet.

“This ensures that in Super 14, we are truly refereeing the Law at the tackle, and it provides the ball carrier with his rights, having been tackled. After this tackle, any player then on his feet, in a position of strength (his side of the tackle) may then contest possession.”

(more…)

breakdown · flanker · jackal · law interpretations · tackle

You’re dead-keen on your rugby and are more than happy to beat yourself up in your pursuit of match fitness. But hey, a year is 12 solid months, with maybe an 8 week transition phase, so that’s a hell lot of rugby. Ever feel like a holiday? Well, too bad, you can’t afford one. Try mixing things up instead.

The old adage is that change is as good as a holiday, and this is very true for athletes, too. And let’s be frank, sometimes injury forces a change. This article is about how I’ve used completely non-rugby related training sessions to contribute both to my overall fitness goals and to my very sanity and mental “peaking” for the season ahead.

Most of you know that in a periodised training program, you’ll need a “recovery” or “unloading” week roughly one in every four.This gives your body a chance to recover and adapt in preparation for competition or for the next mesocycle of training. During your off-season and early pre-season, you could also use these recovery weeks to recover mentally by mixing up your sessions a bit, introducing different activities that still train your energy systems appropriately but that also open your mind to the existence of the world outside rugby. I’ll look at some options for both endurance (aerobic and anaerobic) training and for strength/power/core exercises. I’m talking about something more than cross-training, which you’ve already likely factored in: I’m talking about immersing yourself in the culture and history of another discipline and taking what refreshment, insight and pain (read: quality training) you can.

Endurance Training
Endurance training is divided into aerobic endurance and anaerobic endurance. All actual work efforts in rugby – eg, tackling, running the ball, rucking, lineout jumping/lifting, scrummaging etc – use your anaerobic system, but during the periods between these efforts, your body is using your aerobic system to recover. If you have a well developed anaerobic system, you’ll find that you can repeat high intensity efforts, but a well developed aerobic system contributes greatly to your ability to last through a match because you’ll be able to recover more quickly between your work efforts.

Generally, you’ll train your aerobic system in your general preparation phase in the off season. A well trained aerobic system gives you a good base from which to train for anaerobic endurance in the later general prep phase and specific preparation phase because, as discussed above, you’ll be able to recover reasonably quickly between your anaerobic work intervals.

If you want more information on aerobic and anaerobic endurance training (and strength, power, speed and agility training for rugby), take a look at my Resources page [coming soon].

So, that theory out of the way, let’s look at how you can train your aerobic and anaerobic systems in exciting ways.

Over the last 8 months or so, I have been rehabilitating a knee injury, so was pretty much confined to a bike for my training. This forced me to seek out some interval training podcasts that I could use while riding my bike on the indoor trainer. I found, to my great benefit, The Sufferfest.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ7MSJOZmfI&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&border=1]

The Sufferfest – killer cycling interval sessions
The Sufferfest produce structured interval training podcasts for competitive cyclists, and I mean competitive both mentally and physically! You need a good base of fitness to even finish these sessions and the videos really bring out that competitive streak in you through merciless on-screen taunts along the lines of “Um, my grandmother just called. She said she can ride harder intervals than you. That isn’t true, is it?” and “You need to think a little harder about why you’re doing this, nancy.” These usually appear at moments when you are almost dying and are, for that simple fact, just merciless, as I said. But I found that The Sufferfest videos have been one of the influences in my considerable fitness gains this offseason, both for the fact of the tough sessions and for teaching me that I actually can push myself higher and harder than I ever have before.

Okay, so to the specifics. I won’t talk about the old prototype versions as they are no longer available.

For Aerobic Endurance in the General Preparation Phase

Nothing beats Fight Club (see promo vid above). Jump on your trainer, turn on your iPod and you’re right in there fighting it out in the UCI World Champioships with Cancellara, Evans and co. You get a warmup, then 5 laps of pain. The first lap is a 6 minute, tempo effort, and the remaining 4 laps consist of 4 minutes at “time trial” pace plus a 2:30 hill climb. Randomly, through all laps, you will be forced to “attack”, ie increase your effort to 10/10 for 15 seconds or so with no recovery. Ouch, it hurts.

But I tell you, on the back of riding one Fight Club and one Billat session once a week for two months, I increased my velocity at VO2MAX (vVO2Max) by 7%. The previous two months, wherein I rode only the Billat sessions, produced a 4% increase. So, there’s a ton of value in Fight Club for me to see those sustained gains.

For Anaerobic Endurance in the Mixed Conditioning and the Specific Conditioning (Pre-season) Phases

Revolver is brutal and effective: 15x 1 min on, 1 min off. This is fairly perfect for conditioning anaerobic endurance and you get to immerse yourself in some really fierce track and road action. You are strongly encouraged to put it all in to each interval.

The Downward Spiral is similarly useful for anaerobic endurance, and like Revolver, employs 1:1 work:rest ratios. Overall, this is a good match for rugby, particularly for forwards, because although the work:rest ratios vary throughout the game, it’s fair to say that overall, the 1:1 work:rest ratio is analogous to game conditions. The Downward Spiral gives you two sets of descending intervals, starting at 2 min on and 2 min off, followed by 1:45 on and 1:45 off, all the way down to 15 secs on and 15 secs off.

A note on more specific training

I love training to The Sufferfest soundtracks for other workout sessions: the music is great, it really gets my amped, and the fact that I’m listening to a Sufferfest means I am constantly reminded to push that bar higher. I use it for my gym sessions and also for more specific endurance stuff. Here are some ideas you might like to try:

1. The Downward Spiral with the Agility T + Burpees

Yup, this is a killer. We all know that one of the most energy sapping things you have to do on the rugby field is to regularly get back to your feet. Why not train this by chucking some burpees into your intervals? Good idea! And then, well, it’s rare that you just run straight lines in rugby, you’re always moving forward, back, sideways and so on, so why not run your intervals with burpees along an Agility T? All to the rhythm of The Downward Spiral — and hey, you’d better not let my grandmother beat you at these ones!

2. Revolver with tackle bags

If you’ve got a bunch of tackle bags, why not set them up and run your Revolver intervals with a few tackles thrown in? Or if you have no tackle bags, a home-made scrum machine is an option. I personally use an old stroller loaded with ballast and drive that for a good few metres. Yay.

Strength/Power Training

I’ll be frank with you: I hate core exercises. There’s nothing more boring than banging out 70 crunches or holding the plank for 3 minutes. Really. So here’s what I do: front lever and planche progressions from gymnastics. Hey, if I have to do core stuff, I may as well be learning cool tricks while I do. And people, these are not easy! The tutorial I use is Building an Olympic Body through Bodyweight Conditioning. I’m up to the tuck planche and the advanced tuck lever and they are both very difficult but effective core and general strength exercises.

For more excellent bodyweight exercises that are fun to do, you can’t beat Beast Skills! My favourite at the moment is the muscle-up, a great upper-body power exercise. There are plenty of awesome exercises there. Power exercises are most suitable for the Specific Conditioning/Pre-season phase.

Summing Up

To save yourself from staleness in your workout program, try briefly immersing yourself in another sport in a way that complements your current training cycle. This article has shown you how to use cross-training in the form of cycling to build aerobic and anaerobic endurance and how to use bodyweight exercises from gymnastics to build your core and general strength and your upper body power.

I love using The Sufferfest videos and the exercises from Beast Skills. I love the variety and I appreciate greatly the exposure to excellence in another domain. This reminds me of the importance of discipline and the great boons that self-belief and effort really are. Through The Sufferfest, I have learned of people like Greg LeMond, who did absolutely everything to win, and I know that my success is in my own hands.

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Genuine confidence is probably an athlete’s most powerful weapon. Genuine confidence means you have an expectation of performing to your peak, both in training and in games and it is this expectation that bears the fruit of maximum effort.

If you expect yourself to win or to reach a particular goal, you are far less likely to be satisfied with a “just doing enough”. You take the extra effort and make it happen.

Confidence produces more than mere performance. I love to watch our captain train. Even when she is personally tired, she keeps her head up, keeps team momentum rolling. Positive body language – no hands on hips or head when tired, looking strong – has a massive impact on the confidence of teammates and on the perceptions of the opposition.

Confidence means new challenges can be faced and surmounted. True confidence, I think, comes from what Lombardi call “the perfectly disciplined will”. It comes from knowing you are seeking excellence and have done all you can in pursuit of it.

confidence · preparation

We rugby players are a determined and competitive lot, which makes injury quite frustrating when it strikes. You find your own way through it.

I ruptured my ACL last year at the National Championships and experienced everything the researchers predict: feelings of isolation, sadness, grief, blah, blah, blah. There were hours when I didn’t want to get up from the floor.

It is a kind of grief, and you get through it in your own way. I helped myself by making a 13-month periodised rehab and training plan and by buying myself an indoor bike trainer. This gave me a good amount of control over my situation, because I knew I could still reach my fitness goals in time for the 2010 season.

So, alas, why did I lose the plot *after* returning to the field? I played 7s with the Brumbies on Saturday and went to club training on Tuesday. The drills were great, I was so excited by them that I continued to train even though I knew I had an effusion and should stop. Like the proverbial bull at a gate. I’ve probably set myself back another three weeks at precisely the wrong time.

Lucy Zelic from the University of Canberra has posted an interesting article on coping with the emotional effects of injury, in which she states that 44% of athletes accept their injury at the start of rehab, but this number drops off to 39% at the end of the rehabilitation period, “indicating that symptoms of depression and emotional distress increased with time.”

For me, I have to say, it was not depression, it was a combination of frustration and excitement. Primarily, over-excitement – I just wanted to tackle people! Like a lunatic, I definitely had a brain-snap.

I’m not sure if anything can be done about this sort of thing, short of putting people like me in some type of restraining device or straightjacket. The Brumbies Women’s coach was a bit more subtle, saying “Maybe rest it over the weekend & don’t play in the Uni-Norths 7′s??” Yes, I think I did need the two question marks.

It’s easy to talk loftily about keeping the end goal in mind and what-not – sometimes your emotions sneak up on you and disrupt the best-laid plans. We all know that. But looking at it rationally, we always do have a choice about our behaviour, and something as simple as preparing properly for the session would help avoid silly mistakes like the one I made. For now, it’s ice, ice, baby.

injury · Rugby Training

If you’ve committed to playing rugby and are training hard, you’ve likely got a whole bunch of planned training sessions each week – some individual and some team sessions. You may already be in the middle of a long off-season/pre-season program, with the months stretching ahead until your next transition phase at the end of competition.

How do you make the most of your program? How do you stay fresh and focused? In this post, I’ll show you how I prepare for each session to make sure I’m always contributing to my overall rugby goals.

This post assumes that you have defined your goals and have a periodised training plan. Knowing your goals is pretty fundamental – owning them is likewise essential. More on that later… If you don’t have your own training plan and would like a framework, feel free to use mine:

Rugby_Periodised_Training_Plan

Okay, so you have a goal and you have a plan. It’s all about execution now, and that means making sure each session – including recovery sessions – contributes to your overall goal. Here’s how I do it.

EACH SESSION

• prepare
• be supportive
• listen and learn
• execute
• recover

Let’s look at each in a bit of detail.

Prepare
Firstly, this means understanding the purpose of the session and knowing what you want to get out of it. So, you’re running intervals – are they designed to improve anaerobic endurance or aerobic capacity? Knowing this will help you plan your intensity levels. It sounds basic, but is very important to get right to ensure you are training the correct energy system and also for ensuring you get enough recovery between sessions – you don’t want to be training the aerobic system when your plan wants you to tax your anaerobic system because your next aerobic session may be too close to allow proper recovery and adaptation.

Secondly, it means setting goals for the session. Try to make the SMART goals – you’re bound to get more from the session. And hey, stretch yourself, keep pushing that bar higher. You’ll find that quite often, the ceiling to achievement is purely in the mind. Smash those ceilings, even if you are doing it incrementally!!

Thirdly, you really should prepare physically. So, proper fuelling, people. Fluid intake, enough carbs, protein if it suits.

Fourthly, prepare mentally to put in.

“Winning is not a some time thing, it’s an all the time thing. You don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.” Vince Lombardi.

Enough said.

Be Supportive
Hey, you’re playing rugby, it’s a team sport. Be there for your teammates and encourage them.

Of course, you should also support yourself, and this is important. Success is about confidence, so talk positively to yourself about how you will meet your session goals. And don’t train injured (my personal failing point)!

Listen and Learn
Your coach is there for a reason, and you can never learn too much. Keep those ears open and ask for feedback whenever you can. Learn as much as you can from your teammates.

And listen to your own body. If you do, you’ll know when you can push harder, how to recover better between work intervals, and you’ll know when your technique is not quite right. It takes practice, but being aware of your own body is a key ingredient to success in meeting your goals.

Execute
With all the preparation you’ve done, execution should be a piece of cake, right? Well, yes and know. You still need to control your performance, and that starts with arousal. You need to match the level of arousal to the type of drill or exercise you are doing. For example, if you are pumping heavy weights in the gym or doing a tough mauling drill, fire yourself up! Same with short duration, high intensity intervals. For longer intervals or for skills sessions, you might need to tone it down a bit. When your mental arousal is matched to the requirements of the session, you’ll find you perform better and get more out of the session.

Most importantly, learn to switch on and off when you need to. This will help your focus over the entire duration of the session and will also help your teammates and will eliminate unnecessary distractions at important points.

Recover
I think recovery is very important, both mentally and physically. Physical recovery assists in adaptation to the training load and prepares you for the next session. Mental recovery includes an analysis of the session and your feelings about it and again prepares you for the next session. It assists you move forward by helping you identify areas of strength and ares you can work on.

Rituals are very important for recovery. Mine are pretty simple: I like to ice up, starting with my gammy knees and then rotating the ice packs over all the muscles that have worked hard. After games, I take contrast showers, or dip in and out of a cold bath. I also like to wear compression gear. For mental recovery, nothing beats writing in my journal!

This article is an excellent discussion of recovery for rugby.

I hope this is helpful. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you optimise your training.

Each

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