Yes. What is going on? Everybody? Welcome back to the Rav muscle podcast or YouTube channel, however you're watching or listen. It's great to have you here by now. You already know what we're gonna be talking about. We're gonna be talking about preseason and why most amateurs totally bulls it up. The overall philosophy and approach that's completely wrong. And what you can do as an athlete to correct this and make yourself the best rugby player you can be. And not just over pre. So preseason a fun time and probably like the most anticipated time of a lot of rugby players annual calendar. It's also a place and a time where so much gets screwed up and so much potential for really like good stuff to happen. As far as your physical preparation just gets wasted. And I'll get into why in a second, but before we do that, let's get some housekeeping out the way. 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If it's just for the algorithm or you can please leave a comment towards the end comment in on anything about your pre-season, if you agree with what I'm about to get into, or if you disagree and, and however, your team approaches pre-season, I'd love to hear, I'd love to get the discussions in the comments below. I always enjoy replying to them, responding to 'em and, and seeing that really does like make these videos worthwhile on this YouTube channel. If you're on the podcast, five star reviews have started to drip down in 2022. So let's pick them back up. You can just click five stars. You don't have to leave any words or anything. I think it's five stars still on Spotify as well. That stuff really does help out. Now. I've already spoken too much without getting into it. So let's do that right now. Shall. So to begin with, we are gonna talk about a visualization. We're gonna look, as you can see here on the screen, if you're listen on the YouTube channel, it's a, it's basically what, how most people approach preseason or their overall mindset is towards preseason. Let me put it up in a little, a bigger window. Boom. Do youd like that? So this is shiny overall redness. What usually happens is. The season finishes and, you know, you're told to have a couple weeks off and then you are instructed to, you know, still stay in relative shape for most amateur that watching this that are already going to the gym, you probably end up doing a lot of strength work. You probably drop all of your aerobic work and you, you either your strength, your hypertrophy, that's the traditional off season stuff for a lot of amateurs that only get their fitness from rugby and are watching this because they want to get fit, but they dunno where to. They probably don't even do anything. And this is the norm for rugby players in the off season. It's a big drop in overall readiness for your ability to play rugby. Right. It drops down and then we expect that preseason comes around and then we just get boom. We get in a couple of months in three to six weeks, all of a sudden we're ready to play rugby again. And we're actually hopefully like, because we've got bigger goals, we're probably thinking that we, our performance is gonna be on a higher level than it was previously. Unfortunately that's not how it works. And that's because preseason is nearly always approached in a complete wrong way. Firstly, it should not be three to six weeks to try and get in shape. It cannot be because three to six weeks is not long enough to get into shape no matter what you are doing. physical changes take a long time, particularly ones that are really going to be profound. Three to six weeks is just not long enough to get you from zero to 100. Right. It just doesn't work like that. Things that can happen in three to six weeks are things like speed power, like little quick changes, or like, you know, getting up your converting your like muscle to like a little bit of a top end strength that stuff can, can happen. We'll talk about that a little bit later and get ahead of. It it, but reality is three to six weeks to get overall into shape. Just ain't not gonna happen. Pre-season also should not be mostly running because if you've been out of rugby for, you know, a long time and you need to prepare for rugby, having no balls for your first couple weeks, just doesn't make sense. And that's another traditional thing that I see teams do, and it just bulls pre-season up. It just doesn't make sense to not do that. You need to get your skills back. Therefore you need to be doing that, but. So many guys come in completely out of shape, they think, okay, crap, we've only got, you know, X amount of weeks to prepare our guys to play. We've gotta get them running. That should not be the way pre-season is done. It. Shouldn't also be like brutal nerve inducing competition. And there is an element where it does be, you know, there are tough parts of pre-season and there are parts of rugby training that are competitive because you will be competing with your teammates for certain positions to get starting on the starting team for, you know, week one or week two. And, and that, that is healthy. That's normal. That's good for a club team to have, but brutal competition people completely being nervous ahead of every single preseason session. That's not good because that shows that your team is out of shape. And that shows that you're probably doing too much, speaking of doing too much, any sort of military nonsense that gets involved in pre-season. This is another thing that rugby teams love. And it just has no correlation to actual rugby performance. You look at the best teams at the minute. They have a lot of togetherness and stuff, but that's not done through like, you know, The means of fitness fitness is to prepare your, you physically to play rugby. Coming together is a completely separate issue. Like things like what Sarah's doing, go out on the beers or teams do and have socials that is, has been shown to bring better togetherness. And then the fitness takes care of the fitness, not the team building, not the, ah, we both suffered together and now we are, you know, we're gonna try harder for each other in a match. It just, it doesn't work like. We have to do better for pre-season right. We cannot be suffering through. Pre-season just hoping that the light at the end of the tunnel is all of a sudden we're in miraculous shape and we're ready for the season. It just doesn't work like that. We have to structure it preseason. So here's another visualization for how this should work. This is, this is actually how it happens, right? You just cannot force the body to make adaptations that quickly in that short time. If it does happen and this is where it goes, even worse for a lot of players And the reason we have to drop our expectation that in three to six weeks, we'll make a miraculous change. There's that Emmett Smith quote of all men are created equal some work harder in pre-season, which kind of shows me that this isn't just a rugby problem. This is an overall sports problem or a pre-season problem. We think all of the hard work is done in pre-season and it makes the big difference. Ugh. It doesn't make the big difference, right? This visualization should show that it shows that this is, this is the reality of, of the increases that you're going to make month on month or month. Right? And I put this here to give people a bit of an alert and what tends to happen. In fact, I've got some slides to explain what tends to happen. Most people are not fit or fast enough as amateur players. Anyway, most fitness adaptations for amateur players comes from games. So they work hard in pre-season. But they do two sessions a week where they're red line themselves and they just make it through. But they still feel like outta shape that first pre-season game always. Right. They still need to get their lungs underneath them. They don't feel comfortable in it. And by the time game three or four rolls around, they've adapted, they've got a little bit better but they haven't got a little bit better because they've got fitter from pre-season. They've just become accustomed. No, they've got better because the games are what give most amateur rugby players, their fitness. It's that 80 minutes at the end because the fitness work that's done throughout training, the fitness work that's done outside of the gym, like your 10 and 20. High intensity stuff that just doesn't prepare you aerobically for an 80 minute game of rugby. If you're already prepared, that's a different thing. And that could be trained year round. Right? You can train your aerobic capacity the whole time. You can train it through the season. You can absolutely train it through the off season. And I actually have I actually have all of my guys that I trained through off season training, some aerobic capacity, because for this exact reason, The worst thing you want to do is gain a huge amount of strength, gain a huge amount of muscle and lose all your fitness along with it. Because then what happens is you run beyond your capabilities, which means you are going to sacrifice this, this new found strength or muscle. The body can only adapt so much. So if you're placing a massive running stimulus on the body, the body can kind of adapt and it tries to adapt. But one of the ways it's going to adapt is say, okay, we've just gained this new muscle or strength. We need to lose this because we cannot keep this and still be efficient at this man, a huge amount of running that we're doing. It also means that we can't stay as powerful if we gain power or speed through, through the off season, which is a fine off season goal. If that's what you want to do, we like the body can sacrifice that because it doesn't work. It doesn't need to be powerful. It just needs to run. It needs to run a lot because we've ran so much and we are completely not prepared for this and that. All of that fatigue comes at that. That means that you off season ends up being wasted and performance drop. So even if you think, okay, you know, I I'm starting pre my preseason at a higher level because my muscle, my strength, my power, that's at a higher level. That's great, but you are not prepared for running. That's going to hold you back. That's going to bulls up your preseason. That's a, that's a huge mistake that so many people make. And it just wastes their preseason So even if you know, your coach is going to really give you a tough preseason, it's it would behoove you to be prepared for running because then you can still focus on the rugby development part of it. You won't be so knackered for everything. If you are coming into preseason already fit already firing or already looking good, then you could keep your strength, power, and speed, and focus on just everything else that comes along with preseason. What does that look like? It looks like three to six weeks to prepare for competition. Not three to six weeks to run you through the. This also means building on all aspects of game readiness, as far as like speed. Your skills, everything that you need to do to get ready for your game of rugby should be done in preseason. That's what it's there to do is to take you from not playing rugby to playing rugby. It's not taking you from being out of shape, to being in shape. You have to already be prepared to do some running in order to then build upon that. If you're not prepared to run, you're gonna have a bad time during pre-season because you're just not gonna be ready. If you are prepared to. Man, you can make so many great games during this three to six week period because you are prepared to make those changes. You're prepared to get faster. Three to six weeks is definitely enough time to improve your speed or improve your game agility to improve your line outs, your cohesion as a team, your set players, your actual rugby playing ability. Because you're not having to build up your fitness, you're already fit. And therefore all of the running you're doing has a purpose. It has the purpose of making you a better rugby player. You can't practice your rugby in the off season because there is no bloody rugby practice. You can maybe practice some like individual specific skills. That definitely can be a thing, but overall, you can't like play the game of rugby. That's what pre-season is getting you ready to. And so you have to do game specific capacity building, like just playing rugby, which is getting you prepared to play rugby. But if you're not prepared to do that, then you're not gonna be having a good time in your pre-season. You're not gonna be having a good time in your first few games. Pre-season has to be a slow build as well. This is something that came intuitively to me. I remember my first, pre-season where I came for the first week and it wasn't that difficult. And I was like, oh my God, the coach is building it. That makes a lot of sense. end up. He was a really shit coach and he just didn't know what he was doing, but it still is a very good idea. If you overload yourself in the first week of preseason or if your, your coach overload you and you're not prepared, like that's asking for shin splints, that's asking for overuse injuries. That's asking for lots of high fatigue that is just overdoing it like unnecessarily. You should always only, you know, build yourself up as far as you can. And unfortunately, if you come in out of shape for preseason, you're just not gonna be ready for the huge demands that rugby will entail. And that will result in something that looks like this. Let me pull it up into the other. boom. This is the difference between an ideal off season and an unprepared preseason, right? The ideal off season means, yes, your still can take, you know, two to three weeks off if you really want, but then you're getting prepared for it and you can get that slow build over time, going into preseason. Whereas this person in the pink has not been prepared in the off season. They drop all the way down because they're completely out of, of shape. And then they can, even if they do everything perfect. They're still going to slowly build and they're still behind the person that's spent their off season preparing themselves. This is the reality. There's no catching that person up. That's done the work. There's no going back in time and making up for lost time. That doesn't happen. Right? That's something that gets a lot of people, particularly when it comes to like anything fitness, we're always making up for lost time and it doesn't work like that. If you accept whatever in the past is in the past and you say, okay, how can I continually slowly build going? That's how you're gonna get the most out of your physical changes. that's how you're gonna get the most out of any training that there is nutrition, anything that requires the body to make adaptations. If you're prepared to take a long term approach and fundamentally change the way you think, and rather than say, okay, I'm gonna do three to six weeks to 12 weeks or whatever. And then I don't have to worry about it. You're not, it's not gonna work. If you have an overall long term philosophy that you're gonna slowly build and potentially that build on the different aspects and use the different levels of fitness to then, you know, get to sort of way points as we've discussed before. So that then you can put those specific parts of fitness on the back burner. You can then keep like progressing and progressing and progressing. That's the cool. About rugby, physical preparation. You've got so many different areas that you can really work on and continual growth year round is definitely something that can be done. And you only stop building when you just stop building. Right? The problem is that most people don't think about it this way. They think pre-season is the only time that they need to work on their fitness and an in season. They're just, you know, they use rugby and say, I'm doing rugby three times a week. I'm definitely getting fitter. Ah, you're probably not. In fact, more often than not most amateur players, they don't. Missed this on the other slide. Most rugby players don't actually get fitter as a season, goes on some, you know, they kind of do, but more is the cases that they adapt their game to their lower level of fitness. This is something that happens way. Like more than people think about, right? You adapt your game to suit your lower fitness level. And maybe you know, you increase your rugby, rugby IQ, which is great, you're lowering the work rate that you can possibly do in a game, which is always going to be holding you back. So a better way to approach rugby fitness is not just thinking about pre-season. It's thinking about doing this all the time. This is, this is a lifestyle. And in fact, it's something that you should think about when you're retired, because the same things that make you a better rugby player make you a better, more capable human. And if it's a motivational thing, You could continually improve year round on all these different aspects. There should be no worries about like, am I improving these things? Because you've got to you're training this really entertaining way that keeps things fun. That keep gives you new goals to keep achieving. You could keep seeing yourself strive and move forward and so when we go back to this slide, you'll notice that when we go into the, the season here as that sort of the ideal one sort of drops off, I've left this one clear because what happens in two ways, this person that's unprepared can, can always just, you know, just drop down. They get into pre-season they say, okay, I'm fit enough. Or, or whatever, I'm playing rugby. Now I've got too much on my plate. I can't do any fitness. I can't do any extra. I'm just gonna say where out or they try and, you know, go zero to 100, they get injured or they give up or they take this on board. Maybe thanks to this video. You're welcome. By the way, hit that like button or leave a comment because this is again helping you out. They can still keep improving, right. And eventually, like they will, if they just keep going, they keep going. They keep going. They will catch up that person. That's just the way it works. Right? If you just don't stop, you can continually improve in all the different aspects of a rugby player. What do they look. Rugby physical preparation, pyramid people. That's what you should be aiming for as a, as a rugby player, right? You're looking at your strength and high trophy aerobic capacity and your movement control to be kind of trained year round on the back burner, but slowly improve it. Go back and watch a previous video. If you're, if you're unsure about how to improve these or what, why they're so significant. And then you've got all the other areas that you can throw in for focuses as different phases as you see fit. And as you see necessary, and that way you've got a year round approach, not just a pre-season approach to get you ready, you've got a year round approach. That's constantly not just getting you ready, but making you a better athlete continually. And therefore you're always improving. You're always staying motivated in the gym, but you're always getting, you know, more out of your rugby performance. You don't have to worry about preseason or anything. You just continually. Use each game to set yourself a marker to say, okay, that's my previous performance. I'm gonna try and improve and improve and improve and improve. And we've got guys that we work with at rub muscle that you know, are in their th late thirties and forties that are still making improvements because of their attitude. And because of the way that we lay these things out, because there's no reason to say, okay, put a line in this sand. Where are we trying to improve? And then you'll see those improvements on the rugby pitch. You can ask yourself the following questions. Am I getting better at rugby? Am I getting fitter? Am I getting stronger in contact? Am I getting faster? Am I getting more explosive? Am I being more defenders? Am I getting injured less? Am I in a position to keep improving my skills? All of these things can be worked on the pitch. They can be worked on the, in the gym. They can be evaluated on the pitch or in the. all good stuff. Okay. So I hope you found that video useful. I hopefully it didn't come too late and you could get started working now. It's not gonna come too late, right. Cuz the, the best time in the world to have done this stuff and to, to have really got on the wagon is, you know, when you're 17 in your prime, the second best time is right now, I'll leave you that. Thank you guys so much for. As usual, if you, if you, if you any disagree with me or if you have any thoughts on this, let me know in the comments below thumbs up really does help out if you're not already subscribed, hit that subscribe button and I'll see you guys in the next one.