Barbell Off-Season Strength for Rugby
1st Edition
Harry Munro
Specification:
Must Improve strength, power and muscle Mass. Benefits include increased acceleration, physicality, confidence and the ability to boss.
Must maintain or improve running fitness.
Analysis:
Training to increase strength, power and muscle mass is most easily accomplished using barbell lifts.
Training load must not be too high on the weights. Rugby players aren’t strength athletes, like weightlifters, and must be trained accordingly. Rugby players need to be able to move well, which leads to simultaneous lower risk of injury, and increased chance of winning. Moving well and strength training do not easily go hand in hand. Proprioception practice (controlling the movement of the body in space) should be conducted before and after training sessions, or ideally every day. The proprioception exercises serve a dual function of improving movement patterns and additionally providing core work for the trainee. Core work should not be performed in isolation, and should always include a degree of self limitation to it.
Weight training should not be based on bodybuilding. Gun polishing should be kept to a minimum or substituted appropriately. For example if one feels compelled to do bicep curls, take a logical intervention and do chin-ups instead. This will mould the beast just as well as curls and also provide additional upper back work. Think compound.
The program:
Barbell lifts: Squats, front squats, standing overhead press, power cleans, deadlift, pull-ups/chin-ups
Week 1
Monday
Squats 5x5
Overhead Press 5x5
Power clean 5x5
Deadlift 1x5
Tuesday
Hill Sprints
Wednesday
Squats or front squats 5x10
Chin-ups/pull-ups 5x10 or 5xreps
Power clean 5x5
Thursday
Longer slow run or cross training
Friday
Squats 5x1/2/3
Overhead press 5x1/2/3
Power clean 5x1
Saturday
Hill Sprints - 50% volume
Sunday
Day of rest
Week 2
Monday
Squats 5x5
Chin-ups/Pull-ups 5x5
Power clean 5x5
Deadlift 1x5
Tuesday
Cross training or longer run
Wednesday
Squats or front squats 5x10
Overhead press 5x10
Power Clean 5x5
Thursday
Hill Sprints
Friday
Squats 5x1/2/3
Chin-ups/Pull-ups 5x1/2/3
Power clean 5x5
Saturday
Cross-training or longer run - 50% effort
Sunday
Day of rest
Notes:
Pull-ups > chin-ups for general strength. Chin-ups > pull-ups for guns. Parallel grip = good compromise.
Conditioning – Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays
Hill sprints:
Find a steep hill or section of hill that takes anywhere from 8 to 15 seconds to sprint up. Sprint up it. Walk back down the hill without rest and sprint again. Perform five times to begin with and add a rep each session, don’t go overboard. You have been warned.
Cross training and Running
A longer run could be a mile, but keep the maximum to an hour or six miles. You aren’t training for a marathon here; too long runs will eat into your strength. As a rugby player you must find a balance and capping the runs at roughly 6 miles is a good place to start. Cross training could include anything that gets the heart rate up and keeps it there. A personal favourite is cycling or mountain biking. When riding the bike for a while ensure that the session is followed by hip flexor s
The cross training day is an opportunity to have fun and in the process get some conditioning in. It is a time to be creative. There are plenty of resources on the internet for rugby specific conditioning drills if that takes your fancy.
Tuesday and Thursdays: Hit them hard
Lazy Saturdays: Go 50%. Hill sprints half the number of sprints. Cross training and running either half the duration or drop the intensity (which shouldn’t be too high anyway). This is to help recovery over the weekend.
Nutrition
You will be hungry. Eat like a king. Lots of milk if it doesn’t make you shit like a baby. Brown rice, eggs, chicken, Burgen bread, peanut butter and jam sandwiches (get real peanut butter and 100% fruit jam with no sugar). Scrambled eggs on Burgen toast. Slather on the butter or even extra virgin olive oil if you are a person of expensive taste. Drink 100% whey protein shakes if you feel lazy or poor. Don’t forget lots of vegetables. Don’t eat sugar or white carbs like pasta, white bread or white rice. They are sugar in disguise. If you have takeaway pizza, go thin crust and have extra toppings.
For cooked meals try meat, legumes and veg. 1/3 of the plate for each.
Eat cholesterol, it’s been linked to testosterone production, you need testosterone. Butter is in, Benecol is out.
Technique: there are a lot of internet resources for technique. Crossfit.com contains a lot of instructional videos. Youtube is a good source of information. For literature start with “The Strongest Shall Survive” by Bill Starr. You will progress from there.
Rep Schemes
Mondays: Heavy and Hard. You will do five sets of five reps of each exercise with up to five minutes and at least two minutes rest between each set. The weight is to be ramped each set (that is, increased) so that the last set is very hard but can be completed with good form. The weight will have to be guess work at first. So if you are not sure, always be conservative and choose less than you think you can do. The upshot of a lighter than optimal weight is the bar will move faster so high power is still being developed. The downside of a weight too heavy is form breaks down which renders the exercise both ineffective with low power production and dangerous.
Why 5x5 with ramped weights rather than sets across with a constant weight? Sets across (using the same heavy weight for each set) are a fantastic method for rapidly increasing strength. However it comes at a cost of sapping all the energy from a trainee and leaving nothing in the tank. A proper 5x5 set of squats could take a week to recover from fully and the soreness experienced is like nothing else. This is contrary to the goals of a rugby player. Ramped weight is used to develop strength while leaving gas in the tank for other forms of training, and that shall be done.
For example on first day of training on Monday, squats could look like this for winger:
Warm-up empty bar (20kg) 2 sets of 5.
40kg x 5
45kg x 5
50kg x 5
55kg x 5
60kg x 5
The following Monday the squats would look like this:
Warm-up empty bar (20kg) 2 sets of 5.
40kg x 5
50kg x 5
55kg x 5
60kg x 5
65kg x 5
Write down on a piece of paper before getting to the gym exactly what weights you will hit and exactly for what reps. Next Monday add 2.5kg – 5kg to your final set. Progress.
For chin-ups and pull-ups you will first aim to complete five sets of five reps. If you can only do one pull-up than you will start with five sets of 1 rep. The reps will come. Once you have achieved five sets of five reps then add 5kg of weight to the next session either with a belt or by holding a dumbbell between your knees. Work it out. If you can’t do a pull-up then jump upwards and perform negative reps by lowering slowly.
The deadlift on Mondays: After your last set of power cleans add a 20kg plate to each end of the bar and perform just ONE set of five. You will feel like you can do more, the important thing is you don’t.
Wednesday
This is rep day. To flush the muscles with blood, promote growth and size, increase confidence under load and practice good form over and over.
Just like Mondays the loading will be ramped, but 5x10 will be used instead. That’s five sets of ten reps. The exception to this is the power clean, keep it to 5x5. For the cleans use your best weight from Monday and subtract 10kg. Subtract 20kg if you are gorilla strong and cleaning over 100kg.
For chin-ups and pull-ups, don’t use any additional weight and go for five sets of higher reps, aiming for 5x10 reps. When you hit 5x10 reps then great, keep it that way.
Friday
This is a low volume day but a great day to hit some new personal bests in the weight room.
You will ramp up to a personal best in the squat, overhead press and power clean. With squats and overhead presses this personal best can be a single, a double or a triple. With the power clean I want you to aim for a personal best single. Sets will still be around the five mark. Keep the reps to three or under.
If your last set of squats on Monday was five reps of 80kg then your training on Friday might look like this:
Empty bar 20kg 2 sets of 5 (warm-up sets)
40kg x 3
60kg x 3
80kg x 3
85kg x 3
90kg x 2
Write down what you do and aim to better it next Friday.
Warming up and cooling down
Warming up and cooling down will be the same. None of this gradually raising the heart rate bollocks, which will happen regardless. The goal of warming up and cooling down is to prepare the body, the spine in particular, to be loaded. Cross crawls serve to improve the movement and motor patterns of the body, while warming up the core musculature. The pump stretch serves to decompress the spine and mobilise the thoracic spine, hips and shoulders.
Cross-crawls 20 reps
These are simple. Stand and touch your elbow to your opposing knee without hunching or falling over. Keep tall. This is more difficult than it first appears. The slower you do this exercise the more benefit it gives. After a few weeks then this can be made more difficult by being performed in the press up position. This drill is used to strengthen the core and teach the body how to use the core properly as a stabilizer for moving limbs rather than a prime mover like sit-ups, crunches and leg raises teach.
Pump stretch 10 reps
My description for this exercise is awful so type “pump stretch” into Youtube.com and see for your-self.
