We are live for our first q and a of the new year. First q and a for a long while, as a matter of fact. And the first q and a of this brand new RPY muscle podcast that is coming at you live today from Chuba, Brazil, which is where I am right now. Apologies for it being a bit late this is the first time me, me setting up this setup here. I want to do this at least once a month. The idea here is that if you are new, this is your chance to an ask a question that we can sort of dive a little bit deeper into. and it's something that I'm looking for for the podcast going forward. The podcast will be at least one podcast a week for the future in 2023. That is the guarantee. That's something that I'm doubling down on. I've done a reevaluation of everything that we do here at Rugby Muscle, and we've seen that by far. One of the biggest things that we can do is get back regular podcasting. So we're gonna do that and we're gonna kick that off with today's live q and a. If you've never seen these, Like I said, this is your chance to get your questions answered to in a bit more depth. Just a couple sentences that you can reply on an Instagram story. This is your chance to really get personal questions answered. So whatever it is specifically to you, we can talk into the different nuances of different questions as well. And as you'll see, we've got a few questions already lined up. But if you have a question, if you join us live, pop them in the comments below and they'll be answered on this live. If you are watching after the fact or listening on the podcast, you can always ask any questions. And my my plan for the foreseeable future is to pace every single podcast pretty much that we do. And like I said, we're doing one of those, at least one of those a week on the questions that are being asked. So yeah, rugby Muscle is here to help you guys out. You guys that need rugby strength and condition, wanna get fit or wanna be playing your best, want to get in. And it can kind of overwhelm by the diet. Not really sure what to do. This is the place for you to, to really figure that out and stop stressing, stop being overwhelmed, stop being injured, and get out on the pitch and play your best rugby and really enjoy it their game. So if you have any questions that are gonna help you achieve that, put them in the comments below and we'll over answer 'em on this podcast. If you happen to join me live. If not, then we'll answer 'em on a future podcast. So without further ado, I think what we'll do is we'll get into the preloaded questions I asked. For questions on the email that you can sign up for at robbie dash.com. just by getting our 50 oh no, our five day kickoff, or by downloading our macro guide, you'll be automatically entered into the newsletter. If that's something that interests you just entered a newsletter without those gifts, I mean, why not just get those gifts and be on the newsletter? And I also ask them on the Facebook group, no, on the YouTube community page here. So I've got some questions pre lined up, so I'll get into those first and then we'll get into. Whatever questions we have coming through on the live. So first question I will address is from Luca Bell who asked on the YouTube, he said, how can I manage back pain when back squatting? Do you think squats are better for someone with a bad back? There are, I mean, that's a big question to kick off the, the q and a with Lucas, but it's a, it's a fine question. There are lots of roots we can take with this. First and foremost. Let's, let's deal with why your back is hurting when you're squatting. Is it to do with technique? Because if it's due with technique, then no. Like, I think hone in, like addressing that issue might be a lot better than anything else. And a lot of the time when people have technique issues is because, Unnecessarily trying to put on too much weight onto the bar. And they're sort of holding themselves back technically wise because they, they're, they aren't willing to really lower the ba the weight on the bar. It's, it's a, I think I see it with squats. I mean, I see it with the power lift more often than anything else. Squats, bench and deadlift because you are comparing them to power lifters or to what you see other people. It's so, so, so common for people and doing these movements to load up the weight and, and forget about the technique. You gotta remember as a rugby player, you're doing these movements to improve at rugby. So, you know, even if you just about make parallel and then you get back up, which a lot of people don't when they're really pushing away, but if you. Like, is that giving you the be the full benefit? Could you actually be better off going a little bit deeper and a little bit slower and a little bit more controlled? Yes. You might not put as much weight on the bar, but it doesn't matter because that's not the objective. The objective isn't to put as much weight on the bar and lift it. The objective is to get stronger and play better rugby. So I would really make sure that we we're, we are looking at that first. Then I would look at if your technique or if, if your back is hurt. Because of a previous injury, then, you know, again, light the weight that might help. And if you start to feel it in your quads or in your, in your glutes as well, or in your, just in your legs in general, great. If not, yeah, then maybe we have to switch out. And the other other reason your back might be hurting from it is because your body it's just not built for back squatting very well. It could be that you've got really long legs. It could be that you've got quite a long body. It could be like tall. more often than not, aren't built for to have tremendous back squats. And again, that can be solved by not lifting as much weight or by simply putting a little bit of a hill wedge to allow your knee to come further forward. And that would fix that issue kind of. But to go into the other side of this question where you say are like, are, do you think front squats are better for someone with a bad back? You have so many options. The, it's, I see this quite commonly where people or rugby players will try and either back squat or front squat or, you know, or high bar squat or low bar squat. Like those are just. Two and a half, I guess, different movements that you can do to build strength in your legs. You can do only single leg work and you can still work in the three to five RET range and get really, really fucking strong. You could do that with reverse lunges. You could do that with split squats. You could do that with front foot or rear foot elevated split squats. You could do that with, I'm distracted by the fact that this camera seems to be frozen. You could do. I mean, th those, you can do lots of different variations of those. So you could do your split squats with a front rack that would be minging. You can do all of those movements with a, from a zecha hold. You could just and this is quite controversial, but you could just do leg pressing and you probably miss out on some sort of coordination benefit that you would get from squatting if you really don't squat well. But if you do squat well and you move fine and it just, you, you know, you've got existing back injuries, there may be. Single leg, leg pressing or some sort of specific movement from, or some sort of specific machine might actually work a hell of a lot better for you than any sort of squatting. I've done a video previously on you know, front squats versus back squats, so I suggest to go back on the YouTube channel to check those out. But essentially, you know, the front squat, either of those squats, rarely is it the legs that give. It's usually end up end ends up being like the lower back. Sometimes it can be the legs if you, if you've got really good technique, but more often than not, ends up being kind of like the lower back or the core parti. Particularly with front squats. When people get pinned, it's because they can't hold their core com like upright enough to, in, in a controlled manner to keep that bar on their shoulders. So I would suggest to go back to the drawing board, see what you are trying to accomplish. And ask if back squats are necessary, they're probably not gonna be, but at the same time, you know, address the issue. That is why your back is hurting when you're doing your back squats as well. Because if your back squats or if your back is hurting when you're doing back squats because of a weak back, then we still need to address that, right? Getting your legs really strong, but cuz your core and your lower back are quite weak. Like over time you'd still knew to do some sort of deadlifts or some. You know, a decent amount actually of lower back work and core work to bring that up because that's gonna be a weakness on the rugby field as well. Core. And lower back strength is absolutely massive in rugby and so it's something that you would absolutely have to pay attention to. If you have any follow up to that, of course pop 'em in the comments below and I'll follow that up. Sorry, if you listen to this on the podcast, and I'm gulping really. I've got a new microphone and we're testing it out for the first time today. It seems good. And with this new software that I've got on my Mac, I'm able to have my Mac this side read the questions and have the camera here, which is, I've never done this before for the live as well. So production values are going up. We are investing in these videos, so hopefully you guys are, order them and if you are and you've. Made it past this first question. You're so intrigued to keep listening. Gimme a thumbs up, gimme a comment on in the comments below on the YouTube, or give us a fivestar review either on Spotify where most of you are now, listen to this or on whichever podcast platform you use. And with that, we'll move on to a question that has been asked on the live from Harrison. He's a fellow poll Harrison. I'm assuming with the first name, Harrison, you are a second or third generation pole like myself. And he says Shk, he says What exercise to do for a full body day. Overall, if you are doing two or three full body, that's a great question. First off I'm glad that you are doing full body days. Welcome to like good rugby strength and condition. Like you shouldn't be separating your. You should rarely be separating your, your body parts into chest, back, legs, et cetera. If you are trying to play your best rugby. It just doesn't, that's not the way to get the best stimulation to improve your on field performance. Full body days are always gonna be the best. You know, even if you are heavy, even if you're doing a heavy leg emphasis, there's no reason that you can't do sprinkle in some arm work or some shoulder work or some cool work on those days, you know? And therefore every day becomes a full body day anyway. And that's how we should be looking at training. So Harrison, the answer to this question is basically anything that you want to do. Now that's a crap answer. So let me give you a bit more like of a structure. Essentially what you would want to do is you'd want to cover off a, some sort of some sort of push, like upper body push, some sort of upper body pull. That's about it. If you want to get more in depth, you would do a squat, and then you would do some sort of hinge, and maybe this is overall through the week. So through your sessions, you want to hit these. Depending on how many times you're training a week, these are the movements you're looking for. So you're looking for some sort of squat variation. Now, that squat could also be a split squat. That would be fine. You don't have to do a front or a back or a barbell squat. That squat could also even just be a leg. or a goblet squat. Any sort of squat variation is grand. It could be a step up, something I missed earlier, because those aren't great to load up heavy, but you could absolutely do step ups. Then you would look for a hinge variation, so a deadlift type variation. You could also do hip thrusts in those, but something that's used in more of the past area chain than the, the, the, the front of the legs. So squatting movements usually used in the front of legs. P hinging variations are usually used in the back of the legs, the posterior chain. So we're looking at Romanian deadlifts, split starts, Romanian deadlifts just normal deadlifts Olympic pools those sorts of movements. That would be your hinges. Then you'd look at upper body push, so anything pressing, so hit the front of the body. You could even do, you could split those into vertical and horizontal press. I'm not as into thinking that that's as necessary as I have done in previous years, because I just think if you are doing enough horizontal pushing, you're probably gonna get stronger on the vertical pushing and vice versa, as long as you're doing some sort of, well, if no, that's it, that's that, that should still carry over. And same thing for the pulling. So if you're doing vertical and horizontal pulls, it just covers all the bases for the musculature of the. If you're also a rugby player, you should also at some point be doing some sort of sprinting. You should be doing some sort of movement in different planes. So I'd look. You know, add into your your ingredients, list of exercises that you want to build your recipe, which is your program. You'd look at all the, the movement patterns I've specified. Then you would look at getting at least one or two movements with rotation and at least one or two movements that go with a bit of a lateral emphasis. So, you know, if we're looking at squats, we could be doing. Cossack squats where you sort of squat to the side or you could do lateral lunges, or you could do a lateral step up if you're doing a hinge variation. That would be a little bit more difficult because, but that would be where you would do, you could add in rotation cuz that would be the other one. So you do some sort of lateral movement and some sort of rotation. You could also just do all the movements, sort of like bodybuilding, power lifting, traditional weightlifting style. And then add in some core movements such as you know, Russian twists, even sit-ups or even oblique raises, any sort of lateral raises single arm farmers carries are great for that as well to get in that lateral movement as well. So lots of different stuff there. In addition, you would also want to get some sprinting, some sort of jumping, some sort of explosive upper body. Movement in there as well. So this is where you can see how complex this stuff gets. You could, you've now got an infinite amount of exercises that you can do, and then you've got a, a reasonably big list of exercises that you should be doing now, should you be doing all of those in the same session? Fuck no, because that will take three hours long. That's where periodization comes in. That's where. Having a long-term plan comes in. So, you know, maybe you're not doing as much rotation in this block, but that's okay because you know that's coming up later or you don't even know it's coming up later. But in a later program you address that and you say, oh, okay, this hasn't, I haven't done rotation for a long while. Let's add in that and see how that goes. And you keep progressing in that way. That's sort of. In just to trying to address this question in an efficient manner. You've seen how complex even the most basic of rugby strength and condition can be under the hood. On the surface, you could just have bench press, Romanian deadlift, front squat pull-ups, single arm bent over rose, single arm dumbbell rose, which could actually hit that rotation. Single. Dumbbell push press. And maybe you would do some sort of Copenhagen planks. You could do some lateral planks. You could do some whatever abs you would want to throw on top of that, and you could have a program right there, right? So on the surface it looks really fucking simple. Under the hood, not so much, you know. There's a lot to think about there. I've got a playlist that I will put in the show notes about, let me just make a note to make sure I put that in how to build your rugby program. And so that really talks into in depth of how to do that. The other way that you can also build a really good rugby program is to visit rugby dennis muscle.com and get it built for you because you are always gonna be questioning trust me on this if. Someone that gives a shit about how you perform, you're always gonna be questioning whether you're doing enough. You're always gonna be questioning whether what you're doing is right and whether you're wasting your time. And if you're question, if you're asking that question, then you are not probably gonna commit to the process fully, because as soon as it get hard, you're like, ah, what's the fucking point of this? The brain's not stupid. You can't trick your brains to say, no, no, this is definitely gonna work. Like if you are questioning, if what you're doing is. you are not gonna be, your brain's gonna say, fuck this, we're not putting in a hundred percent effort. And, and then you're gonna get, not get a hundred percent results. And before you know it, you're gonna spin your wheels every three weeks. And that's why I do what I do here at Rugby Muscle. And if you're interested, rugby Dash, Marshall, blah, blah. I knew I'd get this wrong at one point in this podcast, rugby muscle.com for all your needs. Next question comes from the YouTube. Community Tab. Brian Hurley asks, Hey, dj, just like listening to your podcast, and I think it's great. Thank you so much. So my question is, I've played American football for pretty much my secondary and uni years, and a little bit of professional in Japan. I'm 28, soon to be 29. Is it too late to try rugby out? I'd love to play in Japan professionally, but I'm not sure. Yeah, no, it's definitely not too late to try out. Definitely not. Particularly if you're from an athletic background. I would just go, like, I'd say it's very, very, very ambitious to say that you want to play professionally, but it's definitely not out the realm of complete possibility. It, it would just be really difficult. But there's, I'm not here saying, I'm not here trying to quash that. I'm here to say, if that's your sole reason to play rugby is to play professionally. I don't think that it'll happen that way if you, because it just will lead to burnout. It's a long process to get good at rugby. There's lots to do. As far. like lots of different areas. It's not just being a good athlete, it's a, it's a, it's a game, right? It's a sport where there's so much going on. And I think that if you are just saying, ah, I want to be professional cause I'm already a decent athlete. Yeah. Good luck with that. I think we've got a future, we've got a question coming up later in this pod where you see how in depth we can get with rugby. And that's not to. There's no chance of it. That's to say, give yourself time. Give yourself, if you are brand new to rugby, and this is what I say as I coach like my team as a, as a actual rugby coach in the us I'll, I'll pick up quite a lot of guys that, that start rugby in their twenties from similar athletic backgrounds, probably not playing semi-professional or professional in, you know, In other sports, but they'll have a decent background. And I'll say, right. So don't gauge yourself from your previous sport coming into this new sport. Gauge yourself as a complete beginner. Give yourself two years to really be shit. And then if you, if you get good before, then great. Like you've exceeded your expectations, but give yourself two years of sucking and then put some pressure on yourself. So if you are soon to be 29, don't think about any like doing anything until you're at least 30. I'd say, and then think, okay, now by the time I'm 31, am I gonna be physically on my decline? If you are in, if you're doing good with your strength and conditioning, if you're taking good care of yourself, perhaps not. If you take, if you've had a brutal athletic career in American football and you're battered, that might be a little bit more difficult. But if you're taking good care of yourself and you're 31, you could still, especially considering this is all new. Keep improving your physique, but also maintain your physical abilities and just have them be in a place where they facilitate you learning and playing rugby at a higher level a little bit faster than the average person. And so that would be fine, but take two years to really embrace being crap and just enjoying rugby for what it is. And that way, even if you hit 31, 32, 33, And you are, you are not professional. You'll have found a new sport, a new I wanna say new life, because like being a rugby player is really a bit of a lifestyle. It's something that, especially in season takes up a lot of time, but it gives you a, a lot more back as far as like, you know, great group of mates. A community, a rewarding. 80 plus minutes of, of a sport that like what, what other endeavors in life do you get to almost go to war? You know, like physically try and smash 15 other guys with 14 of your mates as hard as you can over that period of time. Like that's just not something that happens in any other walk in many other walks of life. So it's a really cool experience and it's something that you can keep doing as well. If you're in good shape, you can keep doing it well into your. And enjoying it as well. And so I would say look at it from that aspect, like, how can I, like, clearly you, you enjoyed American football, so how can I take the good things from American football and still be able to do them for as long as possible? Well, playing Rupp is a great way to do that as well. And if you reach, reach a really high level, like kudos to you. But I wouldn't set that as the expectation. I'd set that maybe as like a, like a really lofty goal that hopefully, you know, if you really apply yourself in certain sprints, you can get there. All right. That is us 23 ish minutes into this podcast. Shout out to the people that are watching live. Thumbs up, by the way, are always appreciated. I'm gonna just check that the live stream is going swimming. I'm not a hundred percent sure how to do that, actually, to be honest. But whilst I'm doing that, if you have not commented, On this video and you are watching, shout out. Give us a shout out comments. Always help the algorithm even if you don't have a question. But of course, if you have a question, like I said already, we're gonna be making podcasts out of every single question until I, until I can't do it. Every single question that is put as a comment. We'll be in the pipeline for a future podcast. So you know, get in there and bloody get those questions coming. It looks like it's working, but I. confirm that until I click that, oh, this person says it is going well. But that thumbnails pro proper weird as well, isn't it? Okay. Looks like we're good. We'll move on to the penultimate of the preloaded question. Which comes from another Brian who says, what is the best way to stay nimble and quick, but build muscle? So this is a bit more philosophical than like practical. but there is gonna be practical advice in this. So essentially what you're gonna do is if you wanna stay nimble, like, so this question comes out of a, from a, someone that's like had a background of either specifically you've done this or you have heard other people that have done this. Or it's just like, it's in the, it's in the atmosphere as far as like this is what people actually think happens. Rob, building muscle. is not specifically going to slow you down. Building muscle is just building muscle and actual fact, if you just build just muscle, as long as it's relatively fast twitch, as long as you're building it in an efficient way, and as long as you're not, you're not building it through, you know, thousands of dollars of steroids every single month. And with the sole objective of gaining as much muscle as physically possible, you'll actually, I'm, let me pause and take. That muscle is gonna be efficient, right? As long as you're building it in a, in a, in a proper efficient manner, that muscle is going to be efficient. It's going to be quick, it is going to be relatively nimble because muscle in its very nature is nimble because that's what is used to, to provide nimbleness, if you will. The problem is, is that when people, so this is where it becomes philosophical problem is when people try and gain muscle, I don't think they're necessarily taking as much, you know, they're taking the steroids that I spoke about, but they are trying to gain as much muscle as possible and they're, they, they end up going into a traditional cut slash bulk phase. And they end up gaining so much weight, not necessarily just muscle, right? They gain weight and it's the weight that slows you down. It's the weight that makes you feel heavy. It's some weight that makes you less agile, less nimble, slower, not as quick because there's excess fat, which means that when you are moving, you know, when you've got this excess, excess weight going into a certain direction. And to be nimble, right? You wanna be agile, you. Move that weight from one direction into the other. If that weight is fat, then right? If that, if the more weight you have, right, the more weight you've got to redirect. So the more force you need, if you're adding just muscle, that muscle can control that force, right? Because that's, it's, it's, the muscle is given the weight, but it's also the muscle that is used to control the force. So the more muscle you have, the more your ability, the greater your ability is to control that force. So of course, if that muscle, I mean if that weight is muscle, it. near enough work out. If that muscle, if that weight is fat, then it becomes a little bit more difficult. The other way it become can become difficult is if your sole focus, and maybe you don't even gain as much weight or gain as much fat as I've said. But the other field philosophical problem that I see when people do this is that they say, okay, I'm in a hypertrophy phase. And they, they either train completely like a bodybuilder and they do, you know, chest days shoulder days, bicep days, leg days. Side tangent, right? Why? How can you like, look how big your arm is, right? You can, you know, just, just look at your arm right now. So if you're listening to this or you're watching, just take a look at your arms, right? Then put them next to your legs. Look at the size difference. How are you gonna give one day to both of those? Or even worse, look at your shoulders. Take, take your shoulder muscle. If you're watching on the video, look, your shoulder, your shoulder muscle goes, your delta head goes from here to here. That's it. This is your shoulders that. Right. You are gonna give this amount of muscle the same time to develop as all of your legs. Ridiculous. Anyway, side tangent aside, if you are going to do a hypertrophy phase and you're just gonna train like a bodybuilder, more often than not, what I see is when people do that, is that they stop sprinting. Speci especially, but they'll stop doing any sort of jumping work. They'll st stop doing any agility work. More often than not, this is done in the off season. So people don't even, that don't do agility work in general anyway, get some agility stimulus, because they go to rugby training Tuesday, Thursday, and they play games on Saturdays so that. in itself has given you some level of agility, stimulus, right? Because you're, you're, you're, you're training the ability to be agile. You're stepping around people or you're reacting to people to try and make that touch, even if you're just playing touch, right? That's still getting some level of stimulus. A lot of people, when they're in, you know, muscle gaining phases or, or, or bulking phases, they're in the off season. So they're not doing any of these things to, to stay agile, let alone build. So you said stay nimble. So if we're talking about that, like, the best way here is to, to sort of reprogram it and say, okay, I'm still gonna build muscle, but I'm going to also work on my agility and my speed. So maybe it's one or two days of sprints. Maybe it's just one day of sprints and agility combined into one. Maybe it's just doing a bit of explosive work at the beginning of, you know, your four full body weight sessions. all of those are fine approaches. It's about how you manage it. But in general, you, you, you just want to make sure that you are still getting that stimulus in whilst building that muscle. You should, you're never gonna build muscle fast enough. As a natural anyway. I dunno why I said that cuz it's like, that's when you, you hear about people building muscle more often. That comes from rooted up bodybuilders. If you are going to build muscle, As a rugby player, as an amateur rugby player, or even as a professional rugby player, it, you know, you are hoping for, like, what would be huge is if you were to gain three to five kilos of muscle over a year, you're gonna tell me that's gonna significantly slow you down, or you're gonna tell me that you need to, you know, Just do body build exercises for a, a, a 12 week phase just so that that's how you can get the most amount of muscle. No, you still wanna stay explosive or you can still keep staying explosive whilst, you know you don't need all of your volume to be in hypertrophy volume. You can get stronger, you can get more, you can do core work, you can do movement work. You can do so much stuff on top of your hypertrophy and sort of keep that hypertrophy. Sort of running in the background. And that way you're going to continually gain muscle throughout the year, which is what you need to do. And more is, FAC is not more, but it's about 50% facilitated by making sure that you are eating good food consistently. And then on top of that, you know, getting enough volume in to keep the muscles growing. That's how you do it. On the other side of this philosophical question, or the phy philosophical answer that I'm saying sometimes right in spite of everything I've just said. Sometimes, particularly, you know, if we're talking about, you know, you've got a four month off season, there is no reason to stay quick and nimble for two of those, you know, those first two months. There's probably no, not too much reason to stay quick and nimble. You could just focus on getting really fucking strong moving really well, but like, not necessarily explosive movements, but like just focus, focusing on kind of, I hate this word, but mobility, right? But just, just moving really well. And you would be fine because you would still, cuz you have no need to be quick and nimble. You can use the next two months a. Pre-season to rebuild your, your use, your newfound strength and power and potentially muscle and potentially mobility, to not only get you back to where you were as far as, as far as. Agility and quickness goes but actually gets you to a higher level because you've taken some time off. You can re, you can reamp yourself back up, build some speed, work in there, build some agility work in there, and all of a sudden, by the time the season goes, rolls around when you need to be nimble and quick, you are actually faster, more agile and better than before, and you're bigger and you've allowed that time to sort of not just constantly sort of ram your head against the war as far as trying. I dunno, whatever agility or speed work you're doing, but yeah, that don't do ladders as well as another side tangent ladders, do nothing for nimbleness on the rugby pitch. Okay, last question and we might wrap this up within 40 minutes. Probably not, cuz I love to talk. Shout out to the chihuahua or whatever that little shit dog is that's around the. Yapping. Incredibly distracting. Let's see. Sean asks, what are the pros and cons of doing fitness at training? I'm assuming he is talking about rugby training, not only from a physiological perspective, but from a mental perspective as well. Okay, so Shawn's, because I coach his team. We don't do fitness at training. So he's think, he's trying to pick, he's trying to pick my brain as to why I don't do fitness at training and I will tell you. So let's go. Actually, first let's go with the pros of doing fitness at training. So I'm assuming we are talking here about, and I'll address professionals later, but I'm assuming here we are talking about. Your standard club that trains once or twice a week for 90 minutes to two hours a week, bef, you know, outside of preseason, ha, and has a game on every ha has a game every weekend for X amount of weeks. I'm assuming this is what we're talking about because this is a situation for most rugby players. If that's different, let me know in the comments and we can address that as well. And so let's address the pros. So obviously the pros are if you are I mean being fit. I mean, this is why rugby muscle exists. Being fit makes rugby so much easier If. you are, no matter what position you are in, if you are absolutely knackered and gased out of your head, you make poor decisions. Not only do you make poor decisions, your ability to, even if you make good decisions, is gonna be obviously massively impaired, right? So even if you are really strong or really fast, if you are absolutely knackered, then your ability to keep performing. drops and drops, and drops as, as, as long as the game goes on. So if you, if you you know, if you start getting knackered after 10, 15 minutes, that's an extra 70 to 75 minutes, no, 60 to 75 minutes. How did I say? 10, 15 minutes? 72, 65 minutes. Where you are going to be performing all of pretty much all of your skills, subpar. You're also going to be mentally like, Like you are so focused. You know, it is a classic quote from the NFL coach that his name is on the tip of my tongue. Who said fatigue makes cowards of us all? Shout out to him. Comment below the name of that guy. Oh, what is his name? Let me know the comments. Fatigue makes cowards of everyone. It's all right. So if you are reducing that, you are reducing that. That, I mean, if you are, if you are, yeah, you're reducing your ability or you are reducing the probability that your team is going to be cowards, they're going to be more impactful. You're, you're making your team going, they're probably gonna be better in contact situations. They're gonna be better at all of their skills because they're fitter throughout the entirety of the AE minute game. That's easily the pro, right? That's what you wanna do if you're getting a fitter. that's it. That's their, that's their being fitter is going to make everything in rugby much, much easier. Both both ends of the spectrum, right? If you've got good aerobic fitness, everyone becomes easier. If you are, top end ability is also really high. So if you, if you are working, I'm gonna include this, even though this is already gonna go about going to my, one of my con's arguments, but. if we're looking at the high end, so you, you know, your strength, power, and speed, which is also fitness, right? If you've got a real good top end ability, even as your ability diminishes as the game goes on, you are, you are still diminishing to a level that is above where you were previously, right? So if your speed starts slowing down, but you, you are, you are coming from a faster. You're, you are, you are faster than you were last year. Even at the 80th minute. Your 80% speed still might be a hundred percent, 110% of your speed from previously. And so that's something that's really important to take note of. And, and that's also, again, both ends of the spectrum allow rugby to be so much easier. Now, why wouldn't you do this at training? I'll tell you so If you go to a traditional amateur rugby club which is basically everyone listens to this, and even professionals, a lot of professional teams are only run twice a week sessions as far as rugby goes. That's 90 minutes to two hours a week. I mean a session times two a week, which gives you four hours of total rugby trading. Per week. So that gives you 16 hours per month. You've got 16 hours a month to work on and keep well, and let's not even go on a month, let's go on a weekly week to week basis, cuz you've got to keep repeat. It's not like you get one ability and you, you work on one thing one week and then you've got it and then it goes on forever. That's not gonna happen more often than not. You have to work on something for several weeks for it to improve and that not, it is not just. fitness stuff. That's not just strength and condition stuff. That's skill stuff as well. And more especially skill stuff and tactical stuff. And when it comes to tactical stuff, it changes week to week to week because you're playing against different oppositions or you want to evolve your game plan, or you've got a new, you know, you've had injuries and you've gotta change your, your, your team, right? And so in four hours, you've got to touch on the following. rugby skills. So when we look at rugby skills, we're talking about open. We can, we can categorize these into open, I I, if I'd have got this question earlier, and maybe I'll com do a complete breakdown. But let's give this the Cliff notes version and without the notes, but I, I can break this down. Looking at rugby skills, you're looking at open play skills, so you're looking at passing, rocking, tackling. Jacqueline, you are looking at defensive formation. You are looking at moving around the pitch, like running and sprinting. You're looking at carrying, you're looking at offloading different types of offloading, running the right support line. That's also a skill. Kicking, have I said kicking all the different types of kicking. Those are all different types of skills, right? That's skills. So that. right? Remember four hours a week, that's one area of stuff that we've gotta work on. And that, and, and I just said passing is passing, but passing and offloading. But you've got all the different ways that you can pass. Pop passes, short passes, long passes, switch passes different lines. Which leads me to skills. Let's go with set piece skills. So you've got the skills that are involved in, in back set piece. So you've what you're passing, but you've also got the moves themselves that everyone needs to know and memorize. Then you've got your forward set piece. So you've got your scrum, different positions in the scrum different emphasis of of scrum, whether you want a tight head, whether you want a loose head, whether you want a full ball or wherever you wanna dig your feet. That can't just be done in one session. You've got your line out, so you've got your, your better skills of your line out. So you've got the lifting and the jump in and the catching and the moving around to, you know, offput the opposition and so that you can find space to jump. That itself is a skill. It's not easy just to jump or to, to move an opposition line out to where you want it to be so you can jump up and uncontested. Then you've got the, the tactical stuff of, of those. of those line outs. So, you know, actually rehearsing the calls and what they, they means. Cuz it's not just the ability to it's not just the skills that go into line out, it's, it's actually, I think most people when it comes to line outs, you, like, they think it's either all skill as far as like getting up in the air as fast as they can and getting in an efficient jump and lift or it's all the move. You rarely see people working both until you get to real high levels where you. Both are done, but more often, more often than not, I see in club level is people don't work on the basic skill of line outs. They just work on, okay, these are gonna be our calls, these are gonna be the what we're gonna go with, and then they just practice the calls without actually practicing the skills. Practicing the skill of line out lifting and jumping is, is massive. That's gonna give you more leeway, even if your calls don't go perfectly, to still have a positive outcome with the line out. Then you've got your whole team set pieces. So whether you've got, you know, a double phase set piece or whether you've got different set ways of playing in different areas of the field then you've got your open pay tactical stuff. So again, different areas of the field. Where do you look to kick? Where do you look to carry? What sort of lines are you looking for? How are you looking to take advantage of different things that the opposition is showing you? This stuff is really fucking difficult and the higher level you. The more intricate this stuff all gets. And, and I've only spoken pretty much about offensive stuff, so you could do all of what I've just said basically as far as like the, the set piece and the open play and all of this. And I, I'm sort of I have no structure as to where I'm going, like written down this cause I could easily formulate this plan and you could do as well. Listen to this, all the different things. And this is just to give you an example. what's going on in the game of rugby and how complex it is to play a game of rugby. Well, right. And you've got all of this stuff going on with like 15 to 30 different people, all of which can be inserted at any point, all of which have to work together knowing the same thing that's going on so that they get so that they are all in agreement. And so that. you know, again, if we look at the psychological be benefit of, of doing, of not doing fitness, I'd say everyone being on the same page tactically and technically like, would get you a better, more positive psychological outcome than doing a load of fitness together. Particularly if those tactical outcomes become successful. Right? I've seen it with teams where. you know, even if they're really fit. I mean, fitness hasn't got anything to do with this, but they're not on the same page tactically, and so you have a fly half that always kicks and then the rest of the team like moan at him, but maybe they're not fit enough to get to the right position, or they don't know what they're supposed to be doing from certain positions in the field. Whereas if you've got a team that knows, oh, okay, whenever we're in our 22 we kick, or if we're in our own half and we've done four phases and we haven't broken the game line, we kick. that's everyone knows and is in agreement. Therefore, again, psychologically you're a little bit more together cause you know what's going on. You know what's expected technically and tactically on the pitch, you know that's happening. Therefore, you're more likely to get a better chase and have a more positive outcome of that because you all know what's going on, right? And so that's a mini overview of, of what a rugby coach is trying to accomplish. In four hours of training a week, maybe we take 15 minutes of that off for warming up, right? For each session. So that's three and a half hours max. And these are all the things that we've gotta work on. All of these different skills, some of which could be their own sport line outs could be its own sport. Rucking could be its own sport, right? Like these things could be their own sport because they're that in depth. and they kind of are to go back to the rub, to go back to the American football question, right? The whole sport of American football tour running back is just carrying and kind of running plays, right? For an opening to maybe receiver pass or blocking. That's the whole sport for that person or for a wide receiver kind of blocking, but it's just running and then making a catch, right? Those, that's the whole sport for the person in that position, whereas the whole sport for you as as, as a rugby player, Is way more complex. And so where I see fitness fitting into that three and a half, like considering how much time you have to dedicate to fitness, are we then gonna chop into this three and a half hours a week and give 30 minutes of that two fitness? Like why, like fitness fit, fitness can be done individually, it can be done any time of the week. and it needs to be done consistently and it needs to be done consistently, not just through the rugby season, but like forever. You know, like being fit is, is a journey that never really stops cuz you can continually improve. And so I don't think that has a place at rugby training. I don't think that's an efficient use of your time as a rugby team to use that as fitness. coupled with the fact that just playing rugby, just doing rugby sessions itself is very physically taxing. It will make you feel that just playing rugby itself, doing extra fitness on top of that without getting those like, so you just do, if you just did like different game-based stuff to work on your, your, your techniques and your tactics of what you are gonna be doing in a. you're still gonna be running, you're still gonna get a decent aerobic benefit, maybe even an anaerobic benefit if it's like a really intense game. But you're still gonna get a good benefit and you are gonna get the benefit of the skills, of the tactics, of the technical improvements that you're gonna make. Whereas if you're just doing fitness, maybe you'll get a fringe benefit of one of those other things, but more often than not, you're not right. Particularly when they say, oh, we're doing this, this fitness drill where I tackle one of those big foam sausages. Fucking no one, no one's ever got good at tackling because they tackled a foam fucking sausage. You get back at tackling by tackling people because people move and, and people don't want to be tackled. A fucking foam sausage is nothing for you. Okay? So what I think is you need to get fit. You need to play rugby. Well, those two, there is some synergy there, but they should not be implement. at the same time, right? They should not, you should not be trying to synergize your session to improve both. You should be synergizing your week, you should be synergizing your month. You should be synergizing your program. You should be synergizing your life to fit those two together s but you're gonna implement them separately. You're gonna have your rugby time, you're gonna have your your skills training time, and then you're gonna have your fitness time, you're gonna have your strength time, and you're gonna do all that stuff. there are ways that you can improve your skills by doing like real basic passing, you know, in your rest periods and stuff like that. And I've been an advocate of that. But overall, you are not looking to do both at the same time, right? You're, you are, you are, you are improving them both separately. They're separate things and they should be treated separately because that's just the way it is. That's why every single professional team in the world will have a strength and conditioning coach. That person has to oversee their own things. And yes, they'll overlay that and they'll make sure that when you get into the higher ranks of professional levels, the rugby stuff is so intense that you have to taper the strength and conditioning stuff around it so that you don't burn yourself into the ground. It's the opposite problem for for amateur players where you know, you, you've got such little time to do rugby stuff. like that needs to be as focused on rugby as possible. You, you can't have that taken, you can't have that you can't eat into that with your strength and conditioning time. Okay. If you want a more in-depth answer on this, I'm happy to go into it. And I think I, I might do for a whole separate podcast or maybe a deep dive YouTube video if that's something you want. Let me know the comments below. Let me check on the live feed. If we have had any more questions, we've got a couple more likes in. Thank you so much. We do have some live comments, so let me just read them out right now. So Brian Harley. Brian says, thank you as far as he's the former, are you a former professional American football player? Hopefully, yeah. Either way. Welcome to rugby. I think you'll enjoy it. Keep going. I, I, I think you'll really enjoy it, but give yourself time to be crap. Sounds horrible, but trust me, it's, it's, it is liberating. Don't put pressure on yourself. And then we do have one more question, which we're gonna squeeze in before the hour. Remember I said wonder if we could finish that question within 40 minutes. We're now at 52 minutes, so failed at that. Mario says, are there any man mandatory exercises in a strength program, muscle building program, or a certain, yeah. So alright. Actually, let's finish the question. Or are certain movements overrated such as deadlifts and the like? Thank you for everything. Thank you Mario. Thank you for commenting. Thank you for asking that question. This is an easy question to answer. We'll, we'll finish this podcast here with this question. Are there any mandatory exercises? Absolutely not. Not for building strength, not for building muscle, not in those sorts of programs. There are mandatory. The only mandatory exercises I can think of that you need to do if you want to like this, and this isn't strength or muscle building. This is rugby. Strength and condition is sprint. You've got a sprint, but you don't have to. All of the year, you just have to spend some time. In a long-term program, there should be sprinting, right? So if you're doing a four month program, three months of that could be sprinting, it could be four months of sprinting. It could be two months of sprinting. It could be one month of sprinting, but sprinting would be. Part of that, you need to be doing some sort of sprinting. That's not a strength movement, that's not a muscle building movement. Something you need to do to be a better rugby player. Are certain movements overrated? Yes, and deadlifts are absolutely overrated for for strength and condition for rugby. ESP especially because it's, it's probably the movement aside from leg press because leg press is a weird. It's the movement that you can lift the, you know, you can move the most amount of weight. So it's kind of cool, but it's not really efficient at building muscle in any one specific area. It's not really efficient, cuz. The way it's set up, it's not really efficient at you know, building your hamstring or your posterior chain muscles as much as say, Romanian deadlifts. It's not really a as sufficient at building strengthen those airs as such as Romanian deadlifts not as sufficient at building power as things as such as high pools or cleans or snatches. it is however much, much, much more fatiguing than those things. And therefore, deadlift is by far like massively, massively overweight. You do, you could never deadlift, you could never squat, but you could absolutely and probably should never, there's no need to deadlift squats. I could make a case for having to do them lifts I couldn't. So we'll finish on that. Thank you guys so much for watching. If you've made it to the end and you haven't given a thumbs up, I'll, I'll give you two seconds to give it a thumbs up. One, two, if you'd be so kind as to give us a five star review, we will be doing these every, well, not the cute live q and as, but we'll be doing podcasts every single week. Now they'll be uploaded to Spotify. Five star reviews on Spotify are probably gonna be the best way, and if you, what you are listening to, it's really easily done. If you are still listening to Apple Podcast, Five star review there helps, or whatever podcast platform you'll listening to, let me know in the comments below on the YouTube channel. Give it a thumbs up on the YouTube channel, comments below for the algorithm. Always help. Thank you guys so much. I'm, I'm pumped for 2023. I'm pumped to Be really consistent with this podcast. I think this is the thing I enjoy the most and it's the thing that I think I allows me to give you guys the best information. So thank you guys so much for joining me. I'll see you in the next one.