Welcome everybody to another brand new Rugby Muscle podcast. April Live q and a edit. And this is your opportunity to ask any questions that, uh, you have that pertain to your rugby performance, your nutrition, your training, anything that you have that is specific. To your scenario or just general stuff that you want to be answered? I, I do enjoy the more specific questions, but this is your chance to ask any question and get them answered for free. So I can take a nice deep dive into those questions. So we'll get going with those. But before we do that, little bit of housekeeping. Yes. Today is like a little bit later the. Uh, the last q and a we did, I was in, could achieve at Brazil. I'm now back in Denver, Colorado coaching my, uh, men's club here. And, uh, we have our first game tomorrow, so I'm excited for that, but also excited to get into these questions because of the time difference in mountain Time, it's. 2:00 PM here in Colorado, which means it's 9:00 PM in the uk. So we're a little bit late for this one. Um, maybe some of you are already in bed because you've got games tomorrow. Maybe you're in your part, your nighttime routine where you are not watching or not being involved in any technology. If you are, kudos to you. high from the. Of course this podcast will be re-uploaded. But the other thing that we can. To get ourselves or to get the Rugby Muscle Podcast to get this addition. Um, More traction is to spread it with your friend. So you listening. If you have a teammate or a friend that could be, uh, could do with this advice, could do with that. Gets frustrated in the gym or is just getting started in the gym. Or has been in the gym for a while, but potentially is treading water a little bit. Send them the Send 'em to rubbing muscles, send 'em to our. To our YouTube channel, send them our podcast and, uh, have them consume the information so that they can, um, you know, the reason we make these podcasts, the reason that rugby muscle exists is to stop you from wasting your time, but also to stop you from being confused and overwhelmed. Cause obviously everyone is looking to save their time to, to train as efficiently as possible. But what happens is we've got so much conflicting information. Um, that just gets, makes things even more confusing cuz we're always questioning whether we are doing enough. And that's, I mean, that's the point of a lot of the rugby muscle programs. But the point of this podcast and the point of the q and a specifically is to reduce that confusion and overwhelm to reduce that, to give you a level of clarity. That being said, we've got some questions that have been posted up on the YouTube community tab that I'll get into. I've got one that was responded to the email that I sent out two hours ago, I believe. So I'll get into that as well. So I think, we'll the idea here is we'll go for about 45 minutes. Obviously if you'll listening to the podcast, you know exactly how long we're gonna go. And if you're watching on YouTube past the fact, again, you, you know exactly how long we're gonna go. If you're watching on. Again, post up in the comments, uh, any questions that you have, any issues that you've got with your training, get those up and I will answer those as a priority if you are watching in the future. Post up any comments and they will be answered in a future either q and a video or, um, a separate video for itself because we are ramping up for, I told you before, 2023 is gonna be the year of the podcast and the YouTube channel. YouTube has just released a new sort of subsection of podcasts. So we're gonna really be doubling down on that. And so I need your, I need to help you guys out. I need your questions to be answered. So ask those in the comments and of course, If you are new here, hit that subscribe button. If you're watching on the live or if you're watching post by now, give us a thumbs up. It just helps the show and it actually helps so spread to mo more people that want to see. It gives us more, um, avenues to spread the show and help you guys, uh, with as much content as we can. If you want to get involved in rugby muscle of. Robbie muscle.com is the site for the coaching, the programming. If you, uh, visit there and, uh, within the next few days, you can sign up to the newsletter and you'll be the first to be informed about our brand new two week launchpad that we are launching. Could have phrased that much better, but the Robbie Muscle Launchpad is a 14 day program that will be designed to. Like set you up with a launchpad so that you are ready to go, so that you've got complete clarity on exactly how you train. Within two weeks, um, it's, it's been revisited, redone, revitalized, and now I, I do believe I've put this together to give, to be the best free resource for rugby players on the internet. So check that out. If you are listening in the future, again, it's probably already there, so maybe you can just go to rpy muscle.com/launchpad and check it out. But for. That's enough preamble. It's been bloody over six minutes already. Let's get into the questions alright, Luca Bell. Uh, Luca has been Disapp supporting the show for quite a while now, so thanks for the comments and interactions mate. Uh, he says How to manage shoulder pain whilst doing your bench press shoulders in the gym. Having shoulder pain but don't want to rest it too long and lose progress. So for this, it depends on like the type of shoulder pain. There are different, we haven't, we kind of have like a overriding algorithm as how we want to be dealing with pain in the gym. As rugby players, because the reality is if you're a rugby player and you're training in the gym, you're that you're going to, I mean, if you're just someone that just trains in the gym, there are going to be times where you're gonna be sore. Obviously, if you're a rugby player, that's gonna be even more so. So we have to be careful with what we do, but we have to have a process in place so that we can be okay with being hurt and not just say, oh, I can't, you know, I'm hurt. I'm gonna have to skip this. So, To, we have a whole document up there for team rubbing muscle members. It's like three pages long on exactly like the step-by-step process. So I'm not gonna go into that. But I will say for if you are, like, cuz shoulder injuries are probably the hardest to diagnose as well. Right? Because it's such a, a flexible, like ridiculously crazy joint. Lots and lots that go into it. That lead to the, the, you know, the shoulder pain. There's lots that we need to, there's lots of variations that can. Hurt the shoulder, right? And, and cause it to have pain. So I'll cover the broad ones here. Luca, if you are here on the live, you can, we can help to narrow it down or potentially, if you watch his past fact, give us another comment and we can refine this over time, but it depends on the shoulder pain, right? So, uh, if, if. Your shoulder is hurting to make any impact on like, when you're playing a game, then yeah, you, you do have no choice but to like completely, you know, manage that as best you can. You don't do anything to aggravate it. All you want to be doing is getting your shoulder back into a position where you can play rugby, right? So that you can make your hits and so you can get back playing. Like the reality is if you're, if you're in season, if you're constantly getting impacts on your should. That's going to cause it some damage that's going to continually like, Like if you're, you know, if you basically, if you're setting up a barricade to prevent yourself from getting injured every time you're hit an impact. That's, we we're, we're getting impact on that barricade. We we're, we're, we're chopping away at your ability to not only recover and get back to being stronger, but like, just getting back to normal. Right. So there's, you've gotta be aware that if that's the case, like full rest until it's manage. Is probably gonna be necessary. But remember, the goal isn't necessarily to get back to bench pressing. You're not a power lifter if you're a power lifter. Yeah, that's different. We'd have to readdress ways that you could press. We have to readdress ways that. We can manage potential impingement or whatever's going on in the shoulder. So you can definitely get back to bench pressing, but that's not the goal. The goal is to continually get stronger in your pressing movements, right in your upper body pressing. So whether that's vertical pressing, incline pressing, or straight horizontal pressing, even like lower, and potentially with dips, although that can be even more, um, injury, uh, higher risk of injury for the shoulder. Those, that's what you need to get back to be doing, right? So it's not just to get back into, to barbell branch, press as much weight. So, um, with that being said, like. You should be able to find some variation of pressing that allows you to still work your, your pressing muscles, your deltoids and, and your pectoral. So whether that's a machine that sort of adjusts as you come in, you know, there's like hammer strength machines that go wide and they come in. Maybe there's another machine where you're lying down. Maybe it could be dumbbells. It could still be bench pressing, you could still bench press, but you've gotta adjust the way that you grip potentially. I, I do think this, actually, I've, I've always, you know, you've always, he heard it being said with, um, bench pressing. That bench pressing is very hard on the shoulders and that you should probably look to be doing dumbbell bench because it's much safer. I get that, but if you want to press heavy in like the three to five RET range, you're probably going to be better off with a d uh, with a barbell so that you are not like risking, um, those stabilizer muscles at that heavier weight. Um, And I do think everyone can barbell bench press in a way that is going to suit them. So whether that's gonna be closed grip, whether that's gonna be wide grip, it might not even be the variation that you can lift the most amount of weight with, but it, it is gonna be the variation that you can continually do the most and therefore keep improving. So, you know, look at your different grips that you can get on the bar. If it is a machine that, that, that moves with the shoulder, that's absolutely fine as well. If it could even potentially be for now, right? If we're, if we're trying to get back to upper body press in, in order to, um, Keep progressing so that you are not, you know, regressing, you're not losing progress. It could potentially just be weighted pushups. It could be, and there are different ways that you can set that up. You could set a, a weighted pushup with, by, um, being on an incline and having two, like, so you can get really deep so you. Maybe it's not even necessary, but where you can have two benches set up or two boxes set up so that you can get really deep. You can put weights on your back if you have it, if you have your hands on two benches and your feet on a bench as well, so that you're nice and raised up, you could even potentially use a dip belt or you could just get a mate to put the weight on your shoulders. Um, So that's, that's what I would look at in order to keep progressing with your pressing movements. Now, to look at the root cause of what the injury is like, that's, that's probably what you're gonna need to do because if this just keeps like occurring, then there's a long term issue that you need to address, and you need to, you know, not, like, ideally you need to fix it, right? You need to make it better. So what, what I look at is, You know, the back of your shoulder, usually a lot of shoulder injuries come from the scapular. They come from a lot of too much pressing potentially, so that you are, if I go side on here, you are like rounded this way, right? And therefore this shoulder doesn't move us freely. What you want is a real strong upper back that's gonna pull your shoulders from this hunched over position in alignment, and that way they're in alignment. And that way you can really move them around, um, without being injured. So I would look at that, I would look at lots of different shoulder mobility work as part of your warmups, as part of your overall training, um, as a rugby player. Like you should always be managing your shoulder anyway because of the amount of impacts that you do, because of the fact that yes, you do want to keep doing upper body pressing movements. I'd be spending a lot of time looking at, and I do with, with everyone in team rubbing muscle, with everyone in Rubbing Muscle Elite. We do spend a lot of. Uh, we'll do some pressing and then we'll do some stuff to, to keep the shoulders nice and healthy. Whether that is band dislocations where you're, you're getting your band and you're going all the way over. Whether that's band pull parts, whether that's face pulls, whether that's cable face pulls, whether that's, uh, bent over face pulls, whether that's bent over wire raises. You want to look at your rear belts. You want to look at, um, getting your lower traps nice and strong. You wanna look at getting your rom boards nice and strong. That's kind of basic programming 1 0 1. There isn't necessarily. Like a ratio where you should be saying, oh, you should be lifting 5150% of, uh, ruing movements that you should be doing with your bench press. That's kind of arbitrary, but the sentiment is probably right. Um, so that's what I would do. Um, if you have more details on that shoulder injury. All right. Cuz if it's like an AC joint, then that becomes a different issue, right? That's a shoulder injury that's come definitely from impact. Like what I found with a lot of AC joints is that you can't do horizontal pushing, but you can actually do quite, quite a lot of vertical pushing. And so, because obviously the AC joint intersects the peck a lot more than it does the, uh, deltoid. So that, I mean, that's a completely other rabbit hole that we could go down that I'm not going to go down for Now, let's check on the live stream if we've got questions. Ah, Mario, happy Easter to you, my friend. Um, we are in the US that they don't like. Friday's just a normal working day for these people. And on Monday, Monday off either in England, we used to get Easter Friday. I, they still do get Easter Friday and Easter Monday off. Um, but not here. I mean, it doesn't matter for me because this is all my own stuff, but I never get myself the day off. He says, stupid question, but is there any way to use a a butter scheme for building muscle? Not really. Right? So Tabata is always overused. I've done a few rants on previous q and as about Tabata. It's just. Uh, it's not, I don't like it as a system for condition. I don't really like it for, for a lot of things because I think when you are going for 20 seconds and then you're, so, it's a butter for those that don't know. It's four minutes of 20 seconds work, 10 seconds rest, and you go and you go and you go. It was designed by some, uh, I was gonna say some Japanese guy. It was designed by, I think his name was Mr. Tab Butter, right? He designed it as a way. Burn the most amount of fat in the, in the shortest time possible. And it got a lot of clout and it's got a lot of recognition because it, you know, it's finished within four minutes, but there's nothing overly special about 20 seconds on 10 seconds off. In fact, I would prefer rugby players go like 10 seconds on 20 seconds off, because that's, that's gonna be a lot more like a rugby game. You're not normally going, I'm, I'm working at your hardest for 20 seconds and then taking 10 seconds of. Um, but if we ask, if, if I rephrase this question for you here, Mario, and I say, instead of saying, is there a Tabata way to build muscle? I would say, is there a, is there a timed way of building muscle? Right? So where rather than saying, I'm gonna do, uh, 30 kilo dumbbell bench press, Uh, 10 reps or 15 reps. I'm gonna be doing this bench press for 30 seconds. Absolutely. That is a great, what, there is a good, uh, bit of evidence to say that this is a good way to do it. It's also quite fun to do. Um, and there are a number of ways that you can do timed sets. We use them quite a lot in rep muscle. We'll use, um, particularly for our Saturday sessions that often, like if we, if I'm programming, uh, for the, for the team where some people are in off season, some people are in in. Instead of playing a game on the Saturday when you're in off season, we'll do a high intensity session and a lot of times that will be 30 30 where it's 30 seconds of an exercise. Then you get 30 seconds rest to move on to the next exercise, and then you continually move through a, a circuit of say, five to 10 exercises. And that way you'll getting a good bit of like aerobic, which potentially can end up being anaerobic stimulus. And you're also getting a ton of volume. Um, that was obviously gonna help, uh, build muscle, but you're also getting volume in, in a way that could potentially help the aerobic properties of the muscle, which is potentially gonna make you a more efficient rugby player whilst getting in the volume to build that muscle. So yes, there is a way to do that. Um, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't do it to battle wise. The only things I would do to battle wise with that specific scheme is core work because you don't need a long rest to do core work. Um, and with core work, it's very, um, boring, right? And people just end up skipping it. Whereas if you just say, all right, we're gonna do a Tabata, you've got four minutes to get that work done, and, and then you're at the gym. Uh, so thank you for your question, Mario. Um, uh, thank you for saying thank you. Anyone else that's joined us on the live always hit that thumbs up. If you have any questions, ask 'em and they will be prioritized, like Mars was just there. Next question we have preloaded is from Daddy Dutty bio. I'm, I've completely butchered that, but he says, work out for powerful fend slash handoffs in rugby. Haven't had this one for a while, so this is good. Um, I've also revisited my thoughts on this. I used to always say it would be like pressing and explosive throws, right? Just get a strong press and obviously that's the muscles that you're gonna use when you're doing, um, when you're, when you're fending an opponent and. I've, I've sort of dialed that back a little bit and I've said that actually handoff is like the, the fend to get away is more often than not going to be, especially if you're looking at a, if you're a Winer asked in this question. Now there's different ways that you can. Fend off, but we are looking at, if we're looking at the wininger who's trying to beat an opponent and just get that fend away to, to, to beat that last, uh, to beat his opposite number and to get away, or he is like one on one and you use that fend to get away, that's going to actually be a speed and agility thing that allows you to do it because you are going to be much stronger with a locked out arm than you are with a flexed arm. Right. So, By that I mean the per you are gonna prevent your opponent from getting to you. You're gonna use that handoff to prevent that tackle from taking place with a locked arm much, much more efficiently than you are with a slightly bent arm. If, if you use a slightly bent arm, you're pushing against the force and you're pushing, you're gonna have to use your muscles. And, and if they're strong enough, they're gonna swat that away and they're gonna, you're gonna close that distance and make that tackle if you are far enough away that you use a locked. All of a sudden you, they, they're now, they're now trying to fight against bone. That's rigid. That's why a, a fend off comes really quickly because it's just that straight arm that keeps 'em at their distance and stops 'em from being able to make a tackle on you and get you away. And so to create that distance, create that space, that's speed and agility, right? That's getting around the opponent so you can get far enough. That you'll use in a straight arm. If you can only beat your opponent so much so that you've got a bent arm to fend them off, there's a good chance that's not gonna be like, that's a hundred percent, it's not gonna be as effective as if you were to use a straight arm. So the. Think about if you're, if you're using a bench press or, or any, any, any example where you could use loads of examples. But if you're using a bench press, how much can you hold out your front of you locked out a lot more than you can actually bench, right? Because you are stronger here than you are. This looks ridiculously up, far away with the camera looking funky here, but my arms look hands looking huge. Sorry if you're watching it or if you're listening to this on the podcast and don't understand what was going on here, but I'm holding my arms out right in front of me. When I'm locked out, I'm much stronger. So that's the position you want to be when you're executing a fend in rugby and therefore it's a speed and agility thing and it's gonna be more of a, a skill thing. So you, you, you would go and you would practice actually stepping. You would, it is, it's a skill thing. So like the workout to get to, to do it is to you. Do some speed and agility work, ideally with a partner, and then spend some time with that partner one-on-one trying to beat 'em, trying to evade them to create that space, to get that fend working. I'd go at like 60, 70% just to feel, feel out how your movements are gonna feel, feel out how it's like, how you're gonna work out, how to off balance them to get the better of them, and then work that fend. But it's not necessarily. Something that's gonna be, uh, developed in the gym. Now if we're talking about the, the, the sort of handoffs where it's a forward now doing a handoff where you'll run into a group of three people and you're just trying to throw one guy away. Yeah. Then we're looking at being strong in the press because the stronger you are at pressing Right, the, the, the more potential you have for power. Right. If you're someone at 60 kilo that can bench press 60 kilos, um, and could be really explosive with that 60 kilos, it's. Yeah, you're still gonna be held back by the amount of force that you can produce. If you can, if you can bench press 120 plus kilos, then you can start to build on that power. You can do things like explosive throws, explosive pushups, um, any sort of pressing movement's gonna help you have that potential to fend off an opponent. But again, it's still gonna be a little bit about footwork and timing. Um, I guess if you were in the gym and you wanted to be super efficient at this, and this is like your main. There's no reason that, like a lot of gyms have punch bags these days. You couldn't just stand two, three yards away from a punch bag and just work on your footwork. Getting away, transferring that ball and getting that fender just fending away, that punch bag, even maybe that explosive movement. So you're working your feet in a bang, hitting that, hitting that, um, hitting that punch bag. I've done that. Actually when I used to play, we used to do it. Um, in ours we would do bench press. And then we, we would have a partner holding like one of those tackle bags, tackle shields, and you'd just step fem, step fem. Ah, I was hoping to not cough on this podcast, but there you go. I've been a bit sick recently, so hopefully that answers that question for you. Dad bio, but overall, like, do your workout program to be, to be a better rugby player, that's, that's always what I'd say. Um, next question, Kotaro. Yana says, if I remember correctly, I heard you say 5K is a good test for aerobic fitness. Yeah, I did. That's, that's exactly what I said. What is a good 5K time for a rugby player? Well, so I don't like, and this is why you've seen one strength standards video from me before. And even then I was kind of given those like numbers out sort of begrudgingly because they're like, remember why you do these tests? Remember why these tests exist. These tests don't exist to say, oh, you've passed. You are now a good rugby player. The tests exist so that you as the athlete, can see that you are improv. They exist in club environments so that they can see that you, the athlete, are working on your fitness, that you are fit enough that you don't need to, potentially don't need to be doing fitness work in your training or potentially fit enough that whatever fitness work you are doing in your training is working or potentially not fit enough so that hey, crap, we're not fit enough. We, our team's not fit enough. We're losing at the end of the games. Let's do this. Test our crap. We're like, we're not improving. We're actually regress. We need to get our fitness work back up or, um, you, you could be the other way around. We could be losing in the last 10 minutes of a game. Uh, let's do a fitness test to see if we get, if we're fit enough now, oh, we're actually fitter than before. Maybe we're just playing better teams that are playing at higher level and we have to work harder and harder and harder than they do in order to beat them or in order to compete with them. And that's why we're losing games in the last 10 minutes of a game. So all of that is to say, That's the reason that you test is to see your own improvements. So, um, like if you run, if you run your 20 minute or if you, if you run a, dammit, I've given away how, how fast I sh I think it should be. Uh, if you run a 5K in 25 minutes, you know, week one, and then you retest at week six and you run it in 24 minutes or 23 minutes. You know, you're getting fitter, you know, whatever you are doing is working. Now, I would continue to work. I would say that if you can sub 25 K, um, you are fit enough that you don't need to continually work at your aerobic fitness. You can just maintain, and that would be one session a week, and you should be able to maintain that. Comfortably if you get worse than 25 minutes, I'd say it's something that, or worse than 30 minutes, it should absolutely be a f I'd say worse, slower than 30 minutes. It should probably be a, a focus as a rugby player. And then between 20 and 30 minutes is where most people are gonna exist. You should probably continually be improving that. And once you get under 20, like, and again, this would depend on you and your position. And potentially your build, right? Because Rugby's also not just about how fast you are over a long distance, it's about, um, you know, sprint, slow down, sprint, slow down. So you are going to feel like I'm not a big fan of testing any way, right? So if you've heard me say that I'm, you know, I think 5K is a good test for aerobic fitness. You've probably heard me say that You probably don't need to test because you just need to continually improve. So you don't need to do a 5K test if you are doing your slow runs and you're doing, I don't know, You know, week one you are doing seven K in just under an hour, and then you do, you know, you redo it, you know, a few weeks later and you, or you keep going and you see week by week you over the course of four or five weeks, you've had an extra kilometer. Or two kilometers even in that time, then, then you're getting better, you know, and your heart rate staying the same, then you're getting better. So it's a, it's more about seeing your own improvement so that you can continue to progress and you don't need to order anything or seeing where you might have some weak spots where you are regressing than it is. Necessarily about reading too much into the date to say, oh, I'm good or I'm bad. Cuz it would depend there, there's gonna be some professional rugby players that would get worse than five. That, that worse, that would get slower than 30 minutes. Vast majority of them will, prob, will, will be under 20 minutes though. I am liking this. This is like question coffee. Question coffee. We're on a good roll. Um, once again, shout out to those, join us on the livestream. Thumbs up. Always help. And if you have any questions I've got and you've got one more question to go, and then I might take a deep dive in, as I said on the emails to, uh, how many sessions a week you might want to train. I did ask that. I, I didn't know if it comes up in a description, but I did ask in the description how many sessions you train a week and the, and I was gonna expand upon that, but we haven't had anyone ask that. We've just answered that. We've just had Mario's question. It's all good. We've got one more question that's coming from the emails. This person says, if I have the same calories on one day, but I eat junk, why do I feel worse than on days when I eat the same calories but eat super healthy? Uh, so obviously I've always said performance and overall recoverability and overall, you know, gaining, uh, I said those things as well, but more and more than those things. Actually I've said that weight loss, losing fat, um, or gaining muscle is a case of calories in versus calories out. We want to, as best we can quantify our nutrition so that we can give ourselves targets so that we can continually improve our nutrition or stay on track with our nutrition, and that's gonna be the case. Like that's still a thing now when you are have, when you're some now. So this person that feels worse if they stayed on that same, if they stayed on the same calories. You know, for three months and one, yeah. Or versus someone else that stayed on the same calories but ate mostly junk. I would, I would wager that those two people would probably have a very similar amount or, or similar trend in the, the direction of their weight now, probably also the direction of their performance, but there's something that comes in here and there. There is definitely going to be some, uh, Qual qualitative stuff that we have to interpret here. So when we're looking at food quality, we can also quantify this as well, right? The amount of nutrients, the amount of fruit and vegetables that you get in the amount of whole foods that you're eating compared to, you know, we know what junk is by now. Um, we can quantify it, but. The main difference here to answer this question, why you would feel worse when you're eating more junk food, even though you're eating the same amount of calories, is gonna be a case of hormones. So, um, when you are eating junk food, for the most part, like 99% of the time, it's going to be a lot more calorie dense, aka you're gonna take less bites for, for more calorie. Eating and chewing your food and digesting your food is a whole process that sparks off a cascade of hormonal releases that are going to, um, contribute to your overall wellbeing. Right? So if you eat, uh, a burger that's 1000 calories versus, uh, some rice, some eggs, and some vegetables that are 1000. That burger's eaten a lot quicker. The, and that, and because you eat it that much quicker, you're gonna deny yourself the hormonal releases that that happen, that number one, help you feel satiated, right? So if you feel full, which obviously makes you feel better, which makes you feel more energized, um, Uh, you know, which regulates everything else like that, which I mean, not just makes you feel full, but also the opposite stops you from feeling hungry, right? The, you, your hunger hormone is also not released, right? Whereas if, if you take less bites over a longer period of time, you're going to get that hunger inducing hormone released more often. I'm, I'm purposefully not going into the names of these hormones. I might get them wrong, and it's just not necessary. I want to keep it like kind of easy for you to interpret. So it's just, there's just gonna be a cascade of hormonal releases that are done when you are spending quality time eating food. This can also be said for if you are someone that continually eats on the go. So if you are eating in your car and you, uh, or if you're constantly eating, you know, your desk and you are, you are eating whilst working, that can also contribute to this. It could contribute to your, your hormonal releases, your uh, your leptin, your grilling, uh, how full you're gonna feel, how satiated you're gonna feel, how satisfied you're going to feel with your meals, and therefore how good your, your overall like body is going to feel. And therefore how happy you are. How, um, much energy you feel because energy, like what is energy like outside of the calories? It's how you feel. It's if I, you know, You like, like this is a perfect example. This coffee gives me energy, but it doesn't give me any, it doesn't give me any calories. It's the caffeine that gives me a boost of, uh, another hormonal release that makes me feel good, that makes me feel better. And I, I interpret that as more energy. It's not actually more energy, it's just me feeling. That's the main way, um, like why we want to eat a lot more fruits and vegetables. You can also add into that the hormonal releases, and again, the whole body processes that happen when you eat more micronutrients, when you eat more vitamins and minerals. Um, And again, like it's just gonna make you like, those things are going to make you feel better because they're gonna support the hormones that were released that make you feel good and they make you feel recovered and make you feel relaxed and make you, you sleep better. And if you sleep better, again, that's gonna contribute to your overall energy. So it's all of those things going on. Now, it could also be said that potentially, I found this sometimes. Natural foods, uh, are less of a strain on your digestive system, even though it probably can take longer. For some, like vegetables, particularly like real, like thick, like high fiber vegetables, it can, it can be more of a process to digest those foods. It's still more of a natural process. The body knows exactly what it's doing. Compared to, like I say, a fucking cheeseburger or something where the body is just like, this is manufactured stuff. I'm not sure what I'm going on, what's going on here? And that genuinely makes you feel like kind of rough after eating it. That can be the case, although that's a little bit bro sciencey because I've also seen it where like if you look at whey protein, like that's completely manufactured, right? But we could digest it really easily. And if you eat like. Uh, beans, right? That's natural, but it's a fucking disaster to try and digest that shit. So it can go both ways. Um, in general, my advice is always gonna be like 80 20 principle via the volume of food, not necessarily the, the, the, the calories. You wanna make sure that 80% of your food is gonna be whole ba, whole food based. High in, high in vegetables, high fruits, lots of nutrients getting in, all that good stuff. And then, yeah, like you can be flexible to eat some quote unquote junk food around that. And more than often than not, you're gonna be fine as long as you're taking care of those bigger picture stuff. So we're getting in those calories, we're getting in that protein, getting those carbohydrates to recover and train our best. So hopefully that answers that question. I've now switched from. My coffee still to a mug, but it's a mug of water. And shout out to my vegetarian friends and vegan friends. I am a plant person. Okay, that leaves me at the end of my preloaded questions if we don't have any. Uh, questions via comments on the YouTube channel. We will take a quick dive because we've got a few minutes here to discuss how many training sessions a week, uh, you need to be doing as a rugby player. Cuz I thought I want to go into this a little bit deeper on a separate video, but I want to address it. Now so that we're all on the same page. Um, yeah, let's go. So no questions. So yeah. How many sessions do you need to, to do a week to, to continually improve? I'd say as far as weight sessions go. You need two sessions of two quality sessions of weights that is gonna get you and, and like per body part, right? So you can split this up in many different ways, but you can also just do two full body sessions and that's all your weight training for the week done. And that's, that's to improve. That's not to maintain, that's not to stave off regression, that's to improve. You can continually get stronger on twice a week full body. And I am, I'm 100% confident in that. The reason I'm that confident is because that's how like most people will train. Even like if they're doing four times a week, they're doing upper body, lower body, upper body, lower body. That's, again, that's twice a week. If they're doing upper lower push pull legs or they're doing push pull legs, push pull legs, again, they're training six times a week, but actually per muscle group, they're training twice. And then you even look at the bro splits where, you know, they, they train only once a week. They're getting so much volume in Yes. Like they're doing an hour on one body part or two hours on one body part. They potentially like will be getting in more weekly volume, but they're getting in less frequency. I don't, I don't think that's an efficient way, particularly for a rugby boy, for a rugby player to train because you've got lots of other things going. I don't think just smashing your chest is like absolutely worth it at all, particularly when you look at it from a time efficient standpoint. And that is why I, I really do set along twice a week as far as, um, you know, improving your strength, improving your hypertrophy. Um, And it gives you time to work on other things. So you could do two weight sessions for hypertrophy, but then give yourself an a third gym session where your focus is only on power and touch on power. In those other two sessions, you also give yourself a lot more time to work on if you are, if you are, uh, particularly slow or if you know, uh, yeah, if you're particularly slow, if you really want to dial in your, your speed, you want to get faster, you could potentially. At least twice a week for your speed, if not more. As I've mentioned earlier, if you are someone that's not, uh, aerobically very fit, you've got so much more time now to work on your aerobic fitness. Yes, you could incorporate weights into this aerobic training as we've also already discussed, but. You are still, there is no need to do that. You can do that, but there is no need because you're twice a week for your, your strength work and your hypertrophy work is already, then it's already been taken care of and this gives you so much more free time. Now we are influenced a lot when we're talking about fitness stuff, uh, from like the fitness industry that is mostly bodybuilders or power lifters, where their sole concern is gaining. Well, their sole concern is squat, bench, deadlift as as heavy as they can. Now, as a rugby player, you've got power, you've got speed, you've got, uh, anaerobic. A little bit, but mainly aerobic conditioning. You've also got, uh, your power conditioning, your, your, your high end strength, your alactic, how hard you can work within five to 10 seconds. You've also got an absolute ton of different skills that you've got to work on. You've got so much on your plate that you've got to manage, right? In addition to gaining hypertrophy, gaining strength, um, and doing all of those things, the. I understand why these, these bodybuilders, these people wear, that's their only concern train six times a week is to get that extra 10%. But if you are gonna get 90% of the work from a fraction of the time, why would you not do that? And then therefore, rather than, you know, double the amount of work for an extra 10% of gains, just give yourself that much more. To work on all these other areas and know that, you know, yes, maybe you, you've, you know, over this period of these next six to 12 weeks, you've left not even 10%. I'd say it's even less, but 10% of gains on the table for, for, for that six to 12 weeks. Well, where are you gonna go after that in the six to 12 weeks And you're gonna stop lifting? No, you're gonna keep going. And therefore it's just a matter of time until you do get as strong as possible, as strong as you could possibly. Realistically, especially as far as what's gonna contribute to how well you play rugby or how you know? Well, you look as far as building a decent amount of muscle goes, there's no need to rush this process and there's no real need to do more than two weight sessions a week. I think I'll leave it there. We are just shy of 45 minutes. Thank you to everyone that's joined us on the live. Shout to Mario for asking that question on the live shout to everyone that's asked a question. If you have a question that you want to be answered, just pop it in the comments below, even if it's a re-upload on the YouTube channel. Let me know what question I can answer, uh, of yours. Let me know how I can help you with our videos on the Rugby Muscle YouTube channel. If you are listening on the podcast, once again, you've made it all the way here. I, I have already asked for a five star review, but let's, let's do it again. Hit subscribe if you haven't already. But on, on Spotify, give us a five star review. If you'll listen on Apple Podcast, give us a five star review and also type up a few words that makes a huge difference and it takes what, 20 seconds to do. Um, we've had quite a few people start to do that again this year, so that I'm appreciative of that. 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