Yes, what's going on everybody. Welcome back to another brand new rugby muscle podcast on her Zoe's TJ. And today we are doing a, another live Q and a. I apologize that we are a little bit behind the app that I use to record. Go to the brew cost is live Q and a decided that it was going to update like a second before I had to hit record and it took 10 minutes to download. So government organized got questions lined up as always, if you are watching on the live feed and you have a question, pop it in the comments below or in the chat. And I will answer that one today, post if you're watching in the future. So I guess you're watching this on a replay, ask you a question in the comments and we will answer it on next months or potentially in two weeks. I'm not sure because we might change this Q and a, because this one's been a little bit delayed and we might be short on time, other updates. If you're new hit subscribe as always, of course, Hit that thumbs up button really does help out and check out any of the links in all descriptions and stuff below. We've got all the links in the description below. We've got team rubbing muscle. We've got coaching, we've got programs. We've got everything that you could want to try to improve your rugby. As far as the the team stuff goes also, we've now got A skills template coming out because we will be delivering it all through an app. So I'm quite looking forward to that. So really excited to get going. I will take another sip of this green whatever this has gone on here. It's a, it's a green mix. I think it's, if not, and then we'll just get caught. All right. So first question we've got today comes from AB dunks who says how to manage load conditioning, strength training. When coaches aren't well versed in the world of Shanklin conditioning to high-intense eat too often. That's a bummer that your coaches aren't well-versed in strength and condition, but that's also kind of normal. So very, very, very good question. Cause this is what probably a lot of you watching this will be will be subject to. So I think there's a few different answers and there's a few different ways you can go about it first and foremost, I would suggest suggesting a change to your coach. Like people way too often are afraid to. It makes suggestions to coaches. They're afraid to, to question their coaches, they're afraid to you know, get any sort of dialogue going, but I think that's actually like, that should always be your first port of call. If you know, the coach rejects and is a bit of a Dick that then we would go to other options. But absolutely first and foremost, you know, If you communicate well and you suggest what's going wrong, most coaches, if not all, coaches will be very receptive to that. So if you just say, you know, I'm trying to improve outside of practice and we've just got too much going on. And I think we're still, we're pushing ourselves and we run ourselves into the ground. Maybe he justifies it and you probably won't agree. And you can, you, you can gather as much data as you can. I, you know, if you were to make an argument to any person you would, you would want to make the best argument you can so that they are on the same page as you. So therefore, that's exactly what you've got to do with your coach. You've got to make sure that they're on the they're on the you're on the same page, you know, so if they're not on the same page, And we have to make adjustments. And not that, that would be my second suggestion is if you go to the coach and you say, Hey, this is what I think we should do. Or I think we're just pushing ourselves too hard or I'm feeling overly fatigued and it's just raw enough. I could see it in a lot of the other players or it's just baby. It's just you personally, like, I can't feel myself improvement cause I'm pushing myself too hard. And they're not receptive to that. Then you're looking at potentially changing clubs and that's sounds kind of extreme, but I think that is, that is what you got to do. Change your clubs are changing teams because you've gotta remember that you're playing rugby. Yes. Obviously rugby is a great team game and everything, but you're playing rugby when you really boil it down for yourself and your own improvements. So if you do so. If you're, if you're stuck with a coach that is just holding you back, that's holding you back. That's limiting your development. That's limiting the amount of success that you can have with the game. I had an enjoyment, right. Which at the end of the day is why we all play rugby. So potentially looking at changing clubs, changing teams, unfortunately, that is an option that is available to a lot of people. And it's an option that a lot of people are resistant to because they've got mates, but like rugby is an awesome sport, no matter where you play, like as long as you don't find a terrible club, you're going to be fine. And yeah, that's, that's genuinely a suggestion that I would make. And then finally, if you, like, if maybe you change clubs and the next coach is the same, or you. No, you just want to stay at your club and changing clubs. Isn't viable. Then you just have. Yeah, you kind of have to flip your, your rugby training. Oh, your the way you program your trainer on its head, you can't look at it. This is the same way I deal with in-season programming. Right? You can't look at it in terms of what are my outcomes that I absolutely need to come from. So do I need to get strength? Do I need to get grow muscle? Do I need to get faster, et cetera, et cetera. You have to look at first. You have to look at how much volume am I able to put in. So. If you've got so much fatigue that you can only put a little bit of volume towards whatever like towards progressing your training towards progressing your strength or your speed or whatever it is. That's that's all you've got. And maybe there's a point where you just have to look at just maintain the most things and you could look at what can you do with a lower intensity. So it's all about managing fatigue. So look at what things that you can do at lower intensity so that they don't fatigue you outside of your training so that you can recover from your, your rugby training. Look at lower volume. Again. So if you're doing things like sprints that you can't do at low intensities, high strength work, which you can't do at low intensities power work, which you can't do a low intensity is then look at real low volume. You know, there's one to two sets on things that you want to really get try to improve. That's can work for strength, work with power. You're looking at three to four sets for different movements. And again, you can keep that low volume really low. And you'll be able to fatigue. W I mean, you'll be able to progress without all of that fatigue that usually comes along with you know, real high intensity strength and power work. The other thing I would absolutely advise you to do is condense your stresses. So if you can right. Try to do your high intensity stuff. And you're a high fatigue stuff on the days that you have rugby on the days that your coach is in charge of you, and he's already going to fatigue you into the ground. That way you've got the days away from those sessions that you can recover from and actually utilize your recovery to the fullest. Whereas if you were today, so you had to shoot traditional Tuesday, Thursday training. Rugby training days. If you, if you're already like semi fatigue going into your car by doing a high intensity session on a Monday, maybe you're doing sprints. Maybe you're doing a heavy strength work on the Monday, and then you go to the Tuesday and it's a, it's a brutal session by Wednesday. You are, you are at that sort of ground. Like you are rough. Right? And then you've got. Another high intensity session or high fatigue and session on the Wednesday. It just makes things so much more difficult to be able to progress. And in fact, it makes it kind of impossible to progress because you're just so fatigued that you'll burn out before, you know, the end of a three of three weeks. So look to condense those stresses. Rather, you want to put those high intensity sessions, those, those, that heavy strength work, the speed work on the days before your rugby. Ideally, it's not going to. You're in the day, recovery is never going to be that bad. So you can do it either in the morning or literally just a couple hours or at lunchtime, a couple of, or a couple of hours or a couple of hours, or like literally within the hour before you go to training. Right? So say if you've got trained at seven o'clock, you can go smash the gym five 30 to six 30 drive. However far it is to go to your training session and do that. That's a great way to do it. It can like that's rough that the, in those moments, but outside of that, that you get a lot of recovery after that. I hope that makes sense. Oh, Toby says, why is that? Why is that your not popular in the rugby SNC platform? Explain that question me. And I'll be able to answer. If you mean why we were, why we still, how many subs? We're still under 5,000 subscribers. It's because this isn't, I don't put clickbait stuff up there with a reason. Cause I don't want to work with people that are only after clickbait stuff. I'm. Absolutely a fan of giving you the information that you need and the information that you need is never really the sexy stuff. It's always like just basics hammering home unglamorous work. There is lots of like, there is fun to be had, but it's not the same stuff that you. Scrolling through Instagram, seeing a guy doing a muscle ups with a bench chained to him. If we S if you've seen that viral post that's happened recently, or the guy that was he, he was doing a a spin bike whilst also hanging. It was really weird, but that's, that's the sort of stuff that gets popular. We are building a good following here at rugby muscle. We were building something special and I want to keep that. And I want to keep it on the foundation that we've built as far as like real practical, not necessarily graph glamorous information goes. So that's why, if that's the question that you're asking. How to develop lower body. Explosive power. Well, that's a good question. Let me see who, who asked that question? She goes, I wrote down, I didn't see this is comes from Connor avant. This is how to develop explosive, low body power. So it depends what you want that powerful. And I'll explain what I mean in a second, but first and foremost, as far as power. For a lot of athletes, you need to get stronger because power is strength times speed. And a lot of time, if you just up that strength, you'll up the the overall power, right? You can keep the speed the same and you're up. And you'll be able to be more powerful because you're stronger a lot of the time, like if you've got. If you're stronger, if you're able to apply more force, you're going to be more powerful, particularly in 90% of rugby contexts. Now there are a few contexts where it doesn't quite occur and we'll discuss those in a second, but like overall, your, your primary, your primary goal should be getting as strong as needed. Maybe I'll do a video later about. What getting as strong as you need, what those strength standards should be. In fact, I will do, I'm going to note that down now, strength, standards, video. So I'll upload a video comment down below. If that's something you'd be interested in about how strong is strong enough, particularly if we're looking at power It's nothing. It's nothing amazing, but it is a decent level that you need to develop. So absolutely getting strong is number one for developing explosive, lower body power. Then you've got understand that. What, what is it that you want this power for? Right. So. If you want to be powerful because you want to be faster. As far as sprinting speed is a specific skill. So is acceleration as is agility as is, you know, if you're looking to become a powerful tackler or a powerful in the rucks or in the scrums, those are also all different skillsets that require different sort of Abilities on the power spectrum. But before I talk about the power spectrum, you understand that they're all different skills. So the best way to then get faster is yes, develop some strength, but practice the skill of sprinting. If you want it to be more agile practice agility like and agility isn't necessarily doing pre Dance is through cones. It would be reacting to what the opponent has given you. So you can have the most agile man, but I'm in the world. But if he's not played rugby too much, he might not be able to get through gaps because he's not really sure. How to react to those gaps, how to S how to fool the opponent into thinking that he's going one way and then go the other, like, these are all real specific skills and they need to be treated as such, and they need to be treated with the respect that they deserve. And given the time to develop at those specific skills now, As far as like overall lower body power to improve your ropy, you want a range across the spectrum. So you want to be able to, we've spoken about getting stronger. So like that one rep max or three rep max strength, that's important for your power, but you also want to go unweighted or you could even go like less than unweighted where you could do support jumps, because that will help you develop your. And then there's lots of space in the middle there that you can play around with, right? So you can use heavy Olympic lifts, which are a little bit more towards the strength end of that power spectrum. Then you can do just jumps, which are a lot towards the light spectrum, but they're going to have a lot more relevance to your change of direction and your sprinting. And then you want something in the middle where you've got like slightly weighted. Medicine booth throws those sorts of things where they're in the middle. So you're developing not really heavyweight, but some weight and a lot of ex, a lot of speed. You know, an independent on where you want to lie or where you want to improve within that spectrum. Be specific with that stuff. I would actually start at both ends. But even on the unweighted side, we would work more movement mechanics than we would like out and out speed so that you're moving well without weight. Then you're also getting strong. And then as you go on through your program, you can. Like add weight to, or add weight. Yeah, I guess you would add weight. You would add resistance and you would add difficulty to that unweighted stuff. And then you would slowly introduce more stuff in the middle, more power, more medicine ball throws more jumps once you're able to move better and have enough strength that you can withstand that power stuff, but you can't just go straight into part stuff. If you don't have a good strength based developed. And if you don't have a good movement based developed. Hopefully that makes sense. There are lots of different ways that you can do it. So we've named jumps, hops, bounds Olympic lifts. We, we said medicine booth boroughs reactive sprints. And then obviously there's all of your barbell and dumbbell lifts and your standard lifts for strength training to increase your strength. Well, it's up to everyone. Who's on the live stream. Please give that thumbs up. It does help this stream get out to more people. Therefore, we ask more interesting questions than why is that you're not popular in the rugby SSC platform, cause it's still don't understand what that means. Sorry, Toby to call you out. Okay. I think this might even be one of our last questions. So I'll stick around on this for a minute. After this question, if we haven't don't have any more in the live chat. So Alan asks how long to train after COVID. Now maybe I've already boost myself up by saying the C word, and this is going to down rank this video. But. I think it is absolutely dependent on how you feel in this. And we can use this as sort of a gauge to we're not talking about like specifics of brilliant. We don't talk about specifics of like how dog we're going to wait one second. So let's answer this as far as like, if you're feeling sick and how you would train about how would you, how long would you wait to go about doing that? Ideally get outside dog. Ideally you would you know, wait until you're a hundred percent and you'd be 100% in a couple of days. Like when you're sick, your primary like bodily resources is going to be geared towards making. Better, right. It's not about how well you can train when you're sick. It's about how quickly you can not be sick so that you can train and be better. If you know, there's a potential where if you go back from, if you're already sick and you go into. Like you can make yourself worse, which then obviously makes you less able to train and therefore hold you back. So there's definitely a a line there where you want to make sure that you were healthy before, way before you go back, train them. Now that's as far as like properly, properly training now being active, not just being a slob is a different thing. Go out and walk as much as you can. If you can do some, some sort of light aerobic exercise. Without feeling the effects. And obviously when we're talking about the big C that might be impacting your lungs. So be careful with that, but you can absolutely. Like being in a position where you can do some stuff just to keep the body's processes ticking over. I'm not talking about doing like bunches of pushups or panicking or doing anything. You can take time off. Like you can take two weeks and you're not going to lose most of your train effects. If anything, you might be able to recuperate so much so that when you come back, you're feeling better and you're actually somewhat stronger because you've able to been able to, despite all of that fatigue that's in and around the muscle. The world like. Be holding you back and making you slightly weaker. There's definitely a theory to that. I think I I've heard an old strength adage where they used to say, if you, if you think that you need to take three days off, go ahead and take two weeks off. So, you know, you would use your sickness as a time just to take a couple of weeks off. Maybe catch up on some other things that get. Yeah, all the things in your life, they get pushed to the back. When you've got to make you know, sacrifices because you need to get into the gym and get your training. But overall it's, it's, it's there is no, like one day you're feeling like this next day, you're feeling like this, and then you go to the gym just do what you can like, but don't beat yourself up and don't try and rush going back to the gym. Usually after two weeks, you're going to be fine if you're not, that's still going to be fine. Just gauge it as you can. And a lot of the times I've. When you're feeling like you might be getting sick or when you're just recovering. A good idea is to go back with a light session and just start by having a real good comprehensive warmup. If you feel better after that comprehensive up, when you feel like you can do the session, go ahead and do that. If you still feel like trash and you're like, there's no way I can do anything here. I'm still feeling rough or I'm feeling worse because I've used so much energy that I don't have to give towards training that I need all of my energy towards, you know, fighting this. Go home and don't even do a session, just do the warmup and go home. But that way, you know, you're, you, you sort of covered across all aspects of trying to get better. Last question. Here we go. Toby, he's got different question. Now he says, would you say isometric strength is more important than absolute, maximum shank for a front load? Or to Uber, these qualities work together. Yeah, absolutely. All these qualities do work together. There is something to be said for isometric strength, but what you've got to remember is in the front row, there is a lot of isometric action going on. But it's not the same as like holding a bottom of a pool squat, or even the same as pushing a barbell against like a fixed object where you're just pushing as hard as you can, because the resistance in a scrum is constantly changing. So yes, you would like, I would like some isometric strength work in there, particularly in preseason to get you ready then, like it's. I would say, as far as my experience goes, it's not overly necessary after that. I is always a good time to get some isometric just to get your resistance and G to get you accustomed to doing that. Yeah. To doing that isometric sort of contraction for up to 10 seconds in a scrum because you've gone through a period in your off season where you haven't done much, but other than that, you're going to get. Of those boxes take from your week to week scrummage and training and games. So I don't necessarily think you need to add more isometric what in there to to increase your ability to scrum. The other thing with isometric work is that it's really bloody fatiguing. If you just do all our isometrics for, you know, a few sets of a few seconds that can properly grind you into the ground. Whereas if you had. Sled pushes are really good because they're concentric only let alone east sensory. So concentrate is going to be the least fatiguing of the different muscular contractions. So lifting the weight or pushing the weight, that is the least fatigue. And then you've got isometric, which is a lot more fatigue in for a lot less output. And then you've got east century. So the lowering of a weight or the controlling undertenant. That can be absolutely fatigued. So if you're gonna eliminate that in season just to push it, that would absolutely work really well. There are times for isometric stuff, but you know, if you improve your absolute maximum strength, as far as like, you know, you improve your squat from a 140 kilos to 160 or 70 kilos. Your, your isometric strength is absolutely going to improve your isometric potential is going to absolutely improve. And it's also just about then adapting it to how you would be able to perform in a scrum. Cool. I hope I almost died you that instead of saying thank you for the. Thank you for that question. Cool. That will wrap us up within 25 minutes for today's live Q and a. If you want to do another, if you, if you request another Q and a, we might do one in two weeks where I have a little bit more time. More questions, the better I enjoyed these once a day. Thank you so much for watching. If you've made it all the way to the end and you haven't given this video a thumbs up, please do. So if you have any questions about your own training, your own nutrition, your own rugby ability, your skills, whatever it is, throw them in the comments below. And I will answer them in a future Q and a. If they're really interesting, I will add them to a, or I'll answer a I'll answer the question in its own. Again, check out the links in the description for all of the things that you can access through ropy muscle, whether that's team rubbed muscle, it has one-on-one coaching with its programs, big things are coming. I I've said that before, but I'm really excited about what, the direction that we're going in here with every muscle, because we're looking not just. We're looking at a strengthened condition from a bigger scope and ropy performance overall from a bigger scope. So we're gonna look at skill a, we're going to look at tactical work and it's all going to be housed in this cool place. I'm really looking forward to seeing how that will come. So if you want to follow us on the journey, hips below hit subscribe. Give me some lip balm because my lips are really dry as hell is making it more difficult for me to talk. So I've heard it. We'll call that there. Thank you guys so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one.