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
No tags
Coping with injuries - openside · March 4, 2010 at 22:43
[...] 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, [...]