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Training Changes for the Undefeated Coach

Although I am primarily known for my work on the anabolic side of the coin, I’ve had the opportunity to train some truly top-flight natural athletes. During my time as a rugby coach at a Military academy, I was a bit of an anomaly.

First of all, most other coaches at the academy were associated in some way with the armed forces. I most certainly and obviously am not. They all have crew cuts and other tell-tale military motifs. I have several visible piercings and tattoos and other symbols of “Generation X” adorning my body.

There was another significant difference between me and my colleagues. In my first season as a head coach, my team went undefeated and brought their first division championship to their school. Most of the other teams were hovering at around .500. In the season before I arrived as head coach, our rugby team also produced a sub-.500 record.

How did we do it? The secret was this - we practiced things that made us better. Whoa! I know that sounds kind of obvious, but judging from what I’d seen at the academy I worked at, it wasn’t.

For example, all of the athletic fields were in the same general area, so all of the coaches could see what the other teams were up to. The first thing I noticed was that I couldn’t tell what sports the other teams were training for. Sure, they ran laps and did wind-sprints and stuff like that but I couldn’t tell what they were training to do unless they were wearing their uniforms.

The football team (I think they won 2 games that year) trained like a long distance track team. The baseball team trained like sprinters. The (outdoor) track and field team trained like a football or baseball team, although I can’t confirm that because they trained indoors on a surface on which they’d surely never compete.

Luckily, my rugby training experience (as a player) had included a season in New Zealand, where the training was about as specific as it gets. When I was playing in New Zealand for East Coast Bays – a first division club – we did a lot of conditioning. I mean “a lot.” This conditioning, however, took the form of various skill drills performed at a breakneck pace, interspersed with very little rest in between sets and stretching.

Stretching

In retrospect, I can tell you that the amount of stretching we did was far in excess of what would be done by American rugby coaches. We stretched, stretched and then stretched some more. We stretched after warm-ups to avoid injury. We stretched between sets to clear lactic acid out of our fatigued muscles. We stretched after training to decrease recovery time and increase range of motion.

When I see rugby teams stretching here in America, coaches are typically having a bit of a yarn to each other or getting their notes in order for the training session. This is the wrong attitude. Stretching is something that needs to be emphasized and coached, just like anything else. My pet peeve- or at least one of them- is going to watch other teams practice and seeing the players who show up early kicking the ball around without stretching at all!

Skill Work

Once we were warmed up and stretched, my team in New Zealand would practice our high skill work. For forwards it included “line-outs.” I was a forward (hooker), so I was concentrating on throwing. Our training sessions typically included high skill work first, followed by intensive conditioning. For forwards, this would include drills related to sprinting and tackling, as well as rucking and mauling done at full pace and intensity.

What a novel idea, huh? Instead of having everyone run around the paddock for 20 minutes, we actually performed basic skills at game pace repeatedly.

Work intervals were thirty six seconds long, followed by half that much rest. Why? We did this because the average senior first side game in our province had the ball in play for 27 seconds followed by an almost equal amount of rest. Our coaches added a third to that for our work time, and halved it for our rest interval.

Sprinting and Passing

Since forwards often run for under 5-15m on average (at any given time,) our sprint work rarely went over that. We sprinted in groups, and practiced passing at full speed. We practiced passing in tightly spaced groups, because that’s how we practiced running. Sprints were, by the way, done in pairs or groups of three or four- just like in games.

At this point, I’m probably being redundant, but if you’re absorbing even half of what I’m saying, you’re beginning to realize that practices should prepare athletes for game situations and conditioning should be geared towards getting athletes through their games while performing their role optimally.

If you’re a coach and your training sessions don’t do this, then you need to rethink your training paradigms. For Pete’s sake, if the casual onlooker can’t tell what sport you’re training your athletes to play, change what you’re doing!