Yes. What's going on everyone. Welcome back to the rugby muscle podcast or YouTube channel. However you're watching. I listen. It's great to have you here today. We are doing a second and hopefully final video on pre-season at least for the year. And this is going to be spelling out all the different things that I have learned and mainly the differences that I see between the high levels on the low levels. But what I've learned from rugby pre-season at all different levels. so throughout my career, I've seen and been a part of as a coach or as a player. Rugby preseason at all different levels of the spectrum. I've, I've been witness as an assistant the highest level and, and as a volunteer and as an intern at the highest level. And just as a, a eager witness, I guess, oh, what they do at the higher levels. I've also been a player, you know, in the medium levels, I've been coaching at different levels. I've been apply at the lower levels. I've seen all different levels of preseason and there are a few key differences that I think that you are going to. With amateurs and professionals, you know, the higher levels and the lower levels, what they do differently as part of their preseason. So for this, for the purposes of this video, most people watching this are going to be amateurs. They're going to be, you know, I wanna say the lower levels, cuz that sounds kind of offensive, but they're going to not be professional athletes. So I'm gonna give a bit more of an insight into what the professional athletes do and then sort of compare that to how the athletes that I see at amateur levels and the lower. What they do with their pre-season. So before I get into the different topics, I'd like to invite you to hit the thumbs up button that always helps out the channel the algorithm and stuff, always good, but also it just makes me feel good. If I see a video that's got like, you know, lots of thumbs up. I, I watch it. I go, yeah, good. Well done teach and I feel good about it. So really helps us out. But more importantly, it makes me feel good. So make me feel good. Hit that thumbs up behind. If you have any comments throughout about this pre-season video about your pre-season comparing it to what you do. Any sort of poignant points. Love to hear him in the comments below. And I love to respond to them. I, I basically respond to every single comment. Hopefully help you guys out, but also obviously comment also help the algorithm and we're growing this YouTube channel day by day. And so that stuff will help. So don't forget to do that. And if you're new hit the subscribe button before we get into it. So first and foremost condition, right? Most people go refer back to the last preseason video, if you are not sure about this. Most people think conditioning is everything with pre-season. It's not okay, but it is a big part of pre-season for sure. And at the higher levels, it, it's obviously still a part of it, but it's not as much. Right. And, and you'll see what I, I mean, by that in a second, first and foremost, with the testing, there is conditioning testing. There's also strength testing and stuff, but it's done with a purpose. I see a lot of amateur clubs do testing. And I've actually, unfortunately been a part as a player to clubs where we've done testing at the beginning of preseason. And then we've not really followed it up. I'm not really a big fan of most amateur clubs doing testing, because I don't think you do anything with that data. There's no point even if right. You did a test at the beginning and the end of preseason and you saw like either a great result or, or no result, like what are you gonna do at the end of preseason? Like after you've got those results, you're like, it's too late at that point. You've you've gotta play you. Can't just go, oh, let's delay the season for another month. We're not fit enough. Like that's too late. It doesn't really make sense. Whereas, you know the strengthening initialing staff on a professional. we'll be able to look back over the data of their players, how they want them to play speaking with the coaches and they can formulate plans depending on where they're at with their specific levels of fitness, strength, power body fat levels, all that sort of stuff can go into the plan as to what they're going to do either throughout the pre-season. in their own time with their strength and conditioning in their own time with their nutritional needs. And you know, if they've got drop body fat or gain muscle, whatever, all this testing has a purpose and a specific purpose when it comes to professionals in their preseason. I like, I see, I think I see a lot of amateurs do testing just for the sake of doing testing there's you don't really do anything with that data. So therefore what's the point. Why not just do training to build that fitness rather than just doing a test to say, oh, look, we're all already unfit. Doesn't make sense to. The other thing you'll notice with most professional teams, if not all professional teams. with their condition is that they have a much higher baseline of fitness. They already come into preseason with a good deal of running volume under their belt. In fact, like running volume and keeping their aerobic capacity up is probably more of a priority than like going to the gym and hitting the weights. Most players will go to the gym and hit some weights in their own time anyway, but having been witnessed. professional players go abroad and, and spend their time away. And when they're even when they're on their breaks, they will get a set amount of, you know minutes that they've got to do. As far as their aerobic work goes, to make sure that they're keeping up their proficiency with their aerobic work or they're keeping up the amount of volume through their legs. It's just important for their it's important to keep up that level of fitness because once you've lost it, it's just that much harder to, well, it's not that hard to get it. But it just doesn't make sense to lose it. Right. Whereas muscle, particularly when we're looking at the professional athletes, they're going to be bigger and stronger as a general rule of thumb compared to your amateur. So they've just got to really work on maintaining that ridiculously high level of fitness. And then when they get into preseason, yes, it, it will have dropped a little bit, but their baseline of fitness is that much higher that they can already get a lot more work done. And that's my final point here. Professional athletes are professional rugby players, professional rugby teams are going to be capable of a lot more. I'm not just talking about a lot more as far as like, they can get better on the test and they can do more fitness work. But I'm also talking about like, with the amount of sessions that they do throughout the week, right? When you're in an amateur situation, your problem, how much uh, situation you're you're probably training two, maybe three times a week, three times is probably gonna be overkill for most how amateur. so you're training twice a week. That's all you've got. And you've only then got, you know, a set amount of weeks before your first game, wasting those minutes on just doing fitness. Doesn't really, you can do that. You can choose to do that, but it's, it's, all of those minutes become much more valuable, right? Because you've only got those two RPY sessions per week. Whereas if you' in a professional environment, you might be doing two or three sessions, particularly in preseason a day, right. That gives you a lot more opportunity to, you know, not. Push the fitness, not just push those like real hard sessions. It gives you, it definitely gives you time to do those really hard sessions in occasion and because you've got so many sessions throughout the week, that just gives you the time to not just get through like loads of fitness work or, or dedicate certain sessions to just fitness and just hard graft, you know, some real tough blowouts because you've got so much, but you've also then got a lot of space for, you know, generic skill work, basic skill work, low level, low intensity skill work. Which is all really valuable. And that's, you know, the stuff that doesn't make the, you know, make the YouTube channels or the cameras or the social medias, because it's not glamorous, but a lot of preseason will be that stuff. Just getting back to basics, just doing low intensity work and also, you know, just chilling out and recovering. So, you know, they can also have room for those intense session. Because they've got not only a high level of fitness, a higher amount of sessions, so they can, they can use some of their time doing this condition and stuff, but then they also go home and they haven't got other jobs or loads of other stressful things going on. They can just go home and chill out and play PlayStation or, or, or chill and have some coffee with the lads or just sleep more. You know, I, I know a lot of professional players that they sleep bloody loads and that's to allow them to get through all of this high intensity work and this higher level amateurs on the other hand, because you've only got those two sessions. And then outside of those two sessions, you've got, you know, your actual job your day to day stressful stuff that you, you, you know, you squeeze in rugby on top of everything else means that not only do you only have those two sessions, but you know, recovery is also still a premise. So whatever you do on top of those two sessions, or during those two sessions, will be more difficult to recover. so in general, you know, conditioning, the overall approach to conditioning is going to be vastly different from amateurs to professionals. Then when we're looking at strength work, I often see actually the opposite happen from amateurs to professionals. Amateurs. A lot of the time will get into the. getting ready for preseason, maybe like a few weeks out and, and they'll try and hit the weights and trying to sort of step everything up as preseason comes around as rugby season comes around. And again, I, I spoke about that in the last video. So go revisit that if that's if you, if you didn't watch it already, but otherwise, when we're looking at professionals, I think you'll find that most professionals will actually dial down the amount of strength work that they're doing in pre-season. Because of the fact that during preseason, there's a lot more impact. There's a lot more speed and conditioning emphasis particularly with their training sessions and for the most part, what, you know, once you're already at preseason and you're a professional player, it's, it's not going to be putting on a couple kgs of muscle. That's gonna make the difference. No, like once you're at preseason, you know, you've got most of your muscle and you'll be gaining it throughout the year. There is not, you know, that's gaining it. You're not trying to gain that extra muscle during preseason. To make any difference. It's not really gonna make any difference. And in fact, for the most part. Also, when you're looking at professionals, they're going to already have greater genetics for muscle building. So there's no fear of losing their gains. There's they're already probably going to be as muscular as they need to be, or, or getting there it's not going to make or break their preseason, whether they're going to gain strength or gain some muscle so that it's put kind of put on the back burner a little bit, and then it can sort of step up slowly building into the season as a preventative method. Once they've got enough running volume. And once they've got up to the aerobic capacity, the speed, the repeated speed, their game level is just that much higher. So then when they're in the season, it's about maintaining that fitness and that speed and. and they can then probably increase their weight slowly heading into the season. And you can see that on the graph here, if you're watching on the video. The other thing I notice with professionals in with their strength work both in the season as well, this applies, but for, for sure, it happens in preseason is, is a huge emphasis in the weight room on efficiency. There's just not much room for. Yes. There's not much room for fluff in season as well, but like in pre-season, because there's just so much going on. There's so much other stresses. there's just time to really take care of the big rocks, whatever they've got to move wherever it's that's the power, the strength base, whatever it is that has to get taken. Care of first and probably there's not too much room for everything else because of the amount of other work that's going on. And the fact that you need to recover and, you know, within a few weeks start playing games and be game. So to sacrifice game readiness for a couple extra strength sessions just doesn't work out for a professional because you know, being ready for the games is the most important thing, particularly when you've got some players that if they don't play well in preseason, they're out of a contract and it becomes harder and harder, particularly in the economy that we're in right now being a professional rugby player is definitely not something that is a guaranteed position for you to hold season and season. So you have to be game ready. they're not worrying about the extra high trophy. And in fact, most players you'll notice. And I've, I'll talk about this more in upcoming video that hypertrophy comes over years and years and years, it doesn't come in spurts of a couple weeks or, or real strong efforts of, you know, even just a couple months, like no high trophy happens, particularly for athletes over years. And you've got to allow it to. and so that's what most professionals do. They, they're more concerned about, you know? Yes. You know, everybody want to be a bodybuilder as Ronnie Coleman said, but they're not as concerned about the weight room and, and numbers in the weight room. They're more concerned about their rapid performance because that's at the end of the day, the most important thing. Speaking of which skills, this is probably the, maybe not the biggest difference between amateurs and professionals, but it is one of the, one of the most stark right. Professionals are expected to have a high base level of skills across the board, you know, catch pass, rocking, tackling all those basic skills are to be worked on not just in team sessions. They're, they're expected to be worked on, you know, within 10 to 20 minute individual sessions throughout the year. You'll see hookers all the time, just working on their throne. You'll see line out jumpers, work on their jumping. You'll see kickers spend so much extra time on their kicking you'll or. Wingers back three spending the time catching scrum house passing. I'm not going to name every single position and every single little skill that that position involves or whatever that player wants to do. But you get the point, right? That each individual has an expectation that they have to do a certain amount of their skills need to be of a certain standard. And in order to do that, because there's so many different skills and so many moving parts. For a rugby player to manage, they have to spend, you know, 10 to 20 minute individual sessions throughout the year to improve those skills. and because they've done that because they have a higher level of skills, you know, when they're building it up, that means that when they drop down and, and they do take a few weeks off, they're still able to execute a ridiculously high level, most amateur players that I see, like spend actually no time working on their individual skills. They, the only time that they spend in working on their individual skills is during team sessions. You know? And if you think about it, like that's a huge difference compared to just spending five minutes. Each team session, you know, before the warmup, just working on some skills that would make a huge difference to amateurs, but it's for the most part, not done. And if you are someone that does that, that spends five to 10 minutes at the beginning, or, you know, before a warmup of a, of a team session or at the. I applaud you because that is going to make a huge difference to you as a rugby player. And I know I'm, this is rugby muscle here talking about this, you know, you think, well, we're only talking about, you know, being as big and strong and fit as you can for rugby, but reality is this stuff can make a huge difference. And if you're going from a base level of doing no skills to, you know, 10 to 20 minutes a week, that'll make a huge difference. These professionals are doing, you know, 10, 15, 20 minutes a day throughout the year. Working on their different, basic levels of skills. And so therefore when it comes to preseason, it's not as necessary to revisit those skills, but they still will. And they'll still do the most basic, you know, boring, repetitive skill work that you can imagine because it makes a huge difference to their game in the long run. And then when they get into their team sessions, they're already firing on all cylinders with their skills. And it's just not something that I see with amateurs. I think you. With amateurs, we'll have a preseason week one where they might even not even touch the ball. So again, no skill work. Then in week two, they might just go straight into touch. It's not as common to see basic individual just repetitive, you know, a hundred passe of, of one arm, a hundred passe of the other be done during any team sessions. if that's not part of what you do with your team, then you as an individual have to do that on your own or not, and just don't improve. But if you want to improve and you want to get better at your skills, this is something that you have to take advantage of in something that you have to include with your, you know, rugby performance schedule or, or ideology that you want to improve. You have to find the time to do this sort of stuff, because it will make a huge difference. Again, professionals. This is done all the time. This is just expected throughout the week. Because again, cuz they've got so much time, they've got extra free time. They will just go and do this stuff. You know, before or after at the end of like their one or two training sessions that they have on the days, sometimes on the day off, but more often than not, it's just done within and around the training sessions. It's so easily done and it, again, it doesn't have to be more than 20 minutes would be like an absolute maximum for a skill session. And you would see vast improvements, particularly if you did that week on week and, and professionals do. That's why they're the best. Whereas amateurs, not saying that they could get to a level of a professional, but it wouldn't take as much to drastically improve their skills. And then, you know, transfer those skills into the high pressure environments of a gamer. You would see a vast improvement. And speaking of games, this is a, this is probably one of the bigger differences that I see between amateurs and professionals with their preseason professionals will have more games. It'll be a huge part of their preseason. I do remember exit achieves a few years back, took like four losses at the beginning of their season because they didn't have any pre-season games for some reason. And. You know, they admitted that that was a huge mistake. Preseason games for professional teams are actually a crucial part of their preseason. In fact, like that's what the preseason is, is there to do. Is to prepare them for the preseason games to prepare them for the season. That's kind of what the point of preseason is. It's not just get fit, get back playing it. Get back playing as prepared as you can get some ideas and then hit the seat, hit the ground running when it comes to preseason. Professional teams can play teams from other leagues, you know, by going on tours. And, and that's a good way to get in a, a lot of match volume quite easily, and also not give away your secrets to other teams. They'll also just have generic, generic, general, whatever pre they'll, just have pre-season matches against other teams. And so professionals will view these games in a slightly different way from amateurs, because they're already gonna be prepared. They'll see them as tactical and technical opportunities. They'll see them as opportunities to work on their skills, work on their tactics, work on different game plans, and play them out in live situations to see how they go and to see what they need to refine. They're not looking at games as opportunities for fitness. Yes, they will gain some fitness and, you know, game fitness is still kind of an important thing because it's, you know, you are gearing your week around playing those games. And so that's a big fitness opportunities. That's why you'll see substitutes that don't play a certain amount of game time, or like, you know, 24th or 25th, man. In squads do extra fitness at the end of the game because they've geared their, you know, their training week around this big burst and of fitness and intensity that they, you know, they can't really replicate. So they'll do that fitness to, to still get in the intensity, still get in the work to allow them to maintain that fitness level. But they're not using those games as fitness to get them to a higher level. Amateurs, usually see particularly preseason games, but games in general, as I've mentioned in the previous video. as their main opportunity for fitness, just because that's, you know, it's done on a weekend where they're not working and it's, you know, 80 minutes or so of small, high intensity actions and long term, 80 minutes of aerobic activity, it's just an intensity and a duration that they're not getting throughout the week. Professionals are using it to sort of top them up and keep them at that level. Whereas amateurs are using that to build fitness week on week on week. And that's why a lot of amateurs get fitter through the season. not just because as I mentioned in the previous video that they actually probably like lower their standards for the game and be more efficient because they can get through less work that way. But also because they'll, they will improve on their fitness if they, you know, just play games week on, week on week. And that's kind of an issue, right. Because. They're not that means that they're not prepared for the games in preseason and they're using 'em as an opportunity to get fit. And that often leads to some injuries because they're not prepared for the games. Professionals will always be prepared for their first hit out of the, of the preseason amateurs. Like it's not uncommon to see some amateur players just rock up for the first, their first week of preseason being that game week, or just show up for that game and having done no preparation for the first three months before that game. And play. And some, if they're lucky, they'll be okay if they're unlucky, they'll, they're gonna be at a higher risk of injuries because they just aren't prepared for that level of not only, you know, high level of fitness and fatigue, but also all the impacts that are going along with that. For a professional, it's just too costly to take that risk, to not be prepared for a game. So they'll be definitely prepared for their games. And then they'll view them as a tactical or a technical opportunity to look at different combinations. Look at different set plays, look at different tactical systems of play and that will, you know, and that will feed into what they use for the season. Whereas. Amateurs, just get a few games under their belt, just so that they get a level of fitness that they wouldn't be at if they didn't have those games there. And they were just doing training, unfortunately that's just the reality and probably the biggest difference or one of the biggest differences between professionals and amateurs when it comes to pre-season is not just the mentality behind the fitness and stuff, but also like the amount of games that they have professionals are going to have more games because they're looking at those combinations because, you know, they just have higher stakes and they need to be ready for the season and it's still not perfect. Right. You know, I've seen all these things that Amit just do that are terrible and, and professionals do that are great. It's not quite like that because you'll see a lot of professional teams where success will happen in spite of tradition. For the most part, that's not going to happen because the higher level you go, the bigger these organizations, the higher stakes there are for their performance. They need to get a higher level of performance because you know, sponsors contracts. I dunno, whatever, you know, you get the point, right? It's a higher stake game when you're playing at higher levels, which means that they they're willing to take less risks. Usually that that's a good thing because that means that they're getting in the best professionals that they know they're getting in the experts they're doing. That are proven and that are useful and that are going to help their team achieve the most amount of wins during the season and get the best result because that's going to benefit the bigger organizations. But that still might on occasion mean that they keep a tradition in just because it's seen as risky as throwing out that tradition. For example, the Bronco, right. People love to do the Bronco because it's just done. And if a coach came in and said, look, the Bronco is a fucking ridiculous test. It is useless. It doesn't really help predict any sort of score for a professional rugby player. It doesn't really make any sense. It, it proves fitness. That's kind of already. But at the same time, it's, it's got nothing to do with rugby. I could go on a huge rant about how useless the Bronco test is as a tool for predicting rugby fitness, but I'm not gonna do that. I'm I'm gonna just direct you to another video, put it in the link above in that little card thing, that'll be above about why the Bronco test is stupid. It's not a good test, but it's still done because you know, other teams do it. And if you come in and you, you throw out a lot of tradit, You know, you also throughout the, you know, the military sort of style of preseason, things that happen, and bringing in the military and flogging your guys again, that's, that's just done because it seen as a risk to abandon that idea and to have faith in your system and say, okay, we're gonna throw this out. We're gonna throw this out. We're gonna throw all these other traditional things out. That's seen often as a risk to throw the traditional stuff out, even though that traditional stuff is actually not. Of any use whatsoever, right? So there still be some dogma within rugby. The more time goes on, the more we're going to get rid of it. You know, it, it goes both ways, you know, NFL still does a bench press test to see how many reps that you can do with a hundred kilos. How that determines whether you are a good NFL player is beyond me. Why they even do that at this stage is beyond. But it's still done. And it's just one of those things. And sport will always have some level of dogma, some level of tradition that is not necessarily a good thing, but it's still there. And so with that in mind, we don't have to look at everything and say, oh, this is going to be a really good idea because the professionals do it. We have to take everything at face value. What is this actually providing? And so sometimes you'll see professionals. terrible shit. And that's just, that's just how it is. But for the most part, again, because there are higher stakes, less likely to happen and they do things, and most of the things that they do will make sense. And actually you know, is part of a bigger plan and particularly compared to amateurs, but it does go to show, even though they do some use of things, they do lots of things that make sense for them as professional squads, but don't quite transfer. And there are lots of things that they do that as an amateur athlete, as an amateur team or an amateur player you should be looking at and taking some things away from that. And hopefully that's what you've done in this. always got to remember that these professional athletes, these professional rugby players, whose professional teams all still have to abide by this, you know, whe whether they're knowing it or not. For the most part, they're not gonna be aware of the rugby physical preparation pyramid, cuz is something I just came up with, but it still makes sense. And it still holds true. Right. And you as an amateur athlete, because you're in charge of your own strength and conditioning, this is what you have to look at. Which leads me onto the final thing I want to touch on with this video is the rugby physical preparation pyramid. Again, I'll link this in the little card thing above my revised version of this rugby physical preparation pyramid. If you're an amateur, if you're a professional, this pyramid still holds true. And that should be another factor when you are viewing a professional's preseason that they are still having to abide by this, but they might already have a high level of stuff at the base. And you as an athlete, particularly as an amateur athlete, that's in charge of your own training, have to view this pyramid and figure out exactly how you should be building it for yourself and what you should be working on to build the best pyramid you have. All right. I think that wraps up this video. It's been a bit of a doozy. Hopefully you found it useful if you have, and you haven't already clicked the thumbs up button, please do. So if you have any comments about your preseason what you'd like to see from the future of the channel, any questions that you have what you've seen from professional preseasons, anything like that, or just a comment for the algorithm? It all helps. Pop it in the comments below. Subscribe. If you are new, if you want to work with rugby muscle, there'll be links to all the services that will provide if they're open or not. And they'll be in the description below. Thank you guys so much for watching and I see you in the next one.