All right. What's going on everyone? Today's video, as you can tell from the title is Off-Season Strategies for Amateur Athletes. Hopefully this comes a really good time for you, but if not, this is definitely a video that a lot of you can get a lot out of, because I think the current process that a lot of people go through when they get into the, is very, very flawed. So today's video, today's podcast is gonna correct that. Okay, what's going on everyone? Welcome back to the channel. If you are new here, then welcome. This is Rugby Muscle. I'm the guy behind Rugby Muscle. My name is tj and I have been working with amateur rugby athletes for over a decade at this point. I'm a strength and conditions specialist and this is my main focus. And today I'm gonna go through a lot of mistakes, or not a lot of mistakes, just an overall mindset that people have when it comes to their off season. And I'm gonna suggest some different strategies as to what you could do to actually get the most out of your off-season so that you come back to next season or even pre-season before we get playing, far in on all cylinders and giving yourself the best opportunity to enjoy your rugby, stay injury free, and play your best rugby. So as we head into off season, there's a big change of pace, and that's because your training and your rugby matches are no longer part of your weekly schedule. This. removal of these two big things. So training mostly for most people watching this will, might, will probably be Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then your games are most likely gonna be on Saturdays. Now a lot of people train there, there are different schedules that people have. So apply whichever schedule you have to this. But the notion is you miss out on, a good deal of fatigue and juicing work, right? Such, you know, your matches and your, your, training sessions, but also you no longer have to be fresh for those games as well, right? When you are training and you're playing every seven days, you have a game that's seven days where you need to be completely fresh. That means that. You know, you're gonna have to limit your tra your, your fatigue from your strength and conditioning to make sure that you are at your best or at least fresh enough to play. Even if training and, and making games is more important to you than playing rugby. You are not going to be putting yourself through the grinder. On a Friday night. Likewise, a lot of you that are playing, uh, a fairly competitive level of rugby might actually be wanting to be at your freshest for the Tuesday training session or whenever your most intense training session is because you're actually vying for starting spots with someone who is also playing in your position and therefore, You know, you're not gonna just tell your coach, oh, sorry, I had a really tough gym session yesterday and now I'm fatigued from it. That's why I'm playing so poorly. He's not gonna buy that. And even if you're not vying for a position, you still want to be fairly fresh going into your training session so you can get the most out of it. Right? You're not gonna get much out of a a real tough defensive set practice if you're completely fatigued and unable to perform your best. So, These two instances or these two things that come into your training week, your games and your rugby training are no longer there, right? So that means that you can spend more time in a fatigued phase. or in a fatigued state, should I say, that's a, that's a typo, right? And therefore, we might be able to push a little bit harder with our training because we no longer have to be fresh for every single, Saturday and potentially some of those training sessions. At the same time, you are also going to be actually missing out on some of the gains that you'll be getting from that. So a lot of you. I always say this to the teams that I work with, like, your main conditioning session is going to be those Saturday games. So when you miss out on those, you also miss out on that condition. And we'll touch on this a little bit later, but just bear that in mind is that you are not just missing the, uh, fact that you have to be rid of fatigue. By the time you get to your games and your training sessions, you also miss out on the actual, you know, the training effect from those conditioning or from those rugby sessions. Now with that in mind, most people ignore that second part I was talking about, and they just think, okay, I no longer have to play games. I no longer have to be fresh for games. I can really hit the gym. I can, you know, I can stop doing any cardio I was doing, which you, you're already probably stopping, if not all of your cardio. Most of your cardio. By no longer having your rugby training unit matches. And we're gonna go into a big bulk season. This is, it makes sense because a lot of, you're missing out on the fact that you can really push yourself into a fatigued state. You can have like one of those leg days where you can't walk upstairs. That sort of mindset gets into a lot of people and, and they think, okay, we've got to really bulk up. We've gotta just hit the weights, hit the weights, hit the weights, and therefore when we come to our preseason, we're gonna be huge. We're gonna be wrecking balls, and we're gonna play our best rugby in this video, I'm gonna suggest that that's probably not the best approach because when you think about being the best rugby player that you can be, what do you want to achieve? What do you want out of your gym sessions, out of your strength and condition, out of your physical preparation? What is the outcome that you want You wanna be your best, most prepared physical rugby player that you can be. So that come Saturday, come Saturday, in the season, you're gonna be playing your best. And so that actually encompasses all the things that we see on this pyramid. It's why I made the pyramid, right? It's all of these things. on each level have fairly equal footing. So it's not just about strength and hypertrophy, it's also about aerobic capacity. It's about movement control. It's not just about getting fast and quick. It's also about using your core and, and having a strong core and using your footwork and I'll put the pyramid video in, the little I box in one of these corners or in the description below, so you can check that out to understand exactly why I made this physical preparation pyramid. But just understand that for now. Our off-season focus is primarily going to be involved in, in, in expanding and improving our base levels, right? That's because the base levels, so our strength and hypertrophy, our aerobic capacity, capacity's been cut off on this video and movement control. These three things are huge and they're the most important things that we can focus on in the off season because these things take a long time to. To improve and, and to get better, right? You don't put on five kilos in one month of, of your muscle. You don't gain 20 kilos to your squat in two weeks. You have to take the time to get stronger, to get bigger. That's why these things are important. That's why these things take so long, and that's why these things should be in your off season. Likewise, we're also applying that to aerobic, uh, our aerobic base, aerobic conditioning, because a lot of people miss out on a massive. Benefit that they can have to their conditioning because they don't have that aerobic base and they spend all their time in rugby matches or in rugby training, just completely gas, and they can't think through what they're trying to do because they are so gas and because they're relying mostly. On their, lactate system, they're relying on trying to push their lactate system to keep them going. That's why they're always breathing heavy and they can never get a foothold in the game after the first 20 minutes. You need to have a strong, robust aerobic system in order to play your best rugby. And that system takes a long time to develop. Now, luckily, in your off season, you've got a long time to divert those things, and same thing for your movement control, right? how well you squat, how well you move, how well you jog, how well you sprint, all these different things. This is definitely something that takes a while to get. We've all seen that person that really, is kind of awkward of all of their movements that can be trained out, but more common than not, it's not really trained out because it's just, it takes such a long process. So, so some of you that are not quite physically terrible when you do your movements, you can still refine that over time and it takes a long time to get. But working on your quality of movement is definitely something I would focus on in the off season. Now, not only do these improvements take longer to actually obtain, but they also stick around for much longer. Even with minimal or little or zero training, we probably, you, you are either familiar with someone that spent a long time running when they were younger or, or doing lots of aerobic work when they were younger. Or someone that spent lots of time lifting and then once they've got older, they've just stopped lifting. But they've still kept a lot of that muscle and a lot of that strength or the person that was running has still, is still really fit, even though they don't do much to maintain it. And that's because again, the base level of the pyramid, these physical abilities stick around for longer and therefore they can carry over to when you get into your pre-season, into your season of rugby. And those benefits will stick around and, and keep you improving at your game, even if you're not training them directly as much. So we want to keep those in for as much as possible, and the off-season gives us that chance as we get higher in the pyramid. These things can be worked on. If they are, uh, a, a, a major focus. Say you're someone that's really slow or you've got a really weak core, maybe you can, you know, spend some time, you know, a, a good dedicated 12 weeks. Working on these in the off-season could be, uh, huge for you, but for the most part, these things are gonna be really improved by your base, right? If you're getting stronger, there's a good chance that you end up being faster or at least more explosive. If you move better, again, same thing, you're gonna be more agile. You're gonna, your footwork is gonna improve. If you are aerobically fitter, you might like that might have a huge benefit on your speed and power output because you're no longer constantly gas and you get to actually express that speed and power that you never saw before because you were always so gased. So I would really make a focus of developing your base as best as possible and maybe touching on a few things, particularly as you get into pre-season or as you start to approach pre-season. Then maybe we start touching on the things a little bit higher in the pyramid, because then again, things higher on the pyramid don't stick around for as long. So you want to make sure that you are not training at the beginning of off season at least, or or building into pre-season, right? You don't give yourself a long period of out training. Now. Overall, you just pick one or two focuses and you know, still try and touch on the other, especially the stuff on the base. You still wanna try and touch on everything in the base of the pyramid and continually be working on it. But it's okay to take a big focus on one or two of these things. And then, so if you look at weights as a focus, it makes sense. Not thinking about it, this is the common approach that most rugby players will take. Um, and potentially, I get it right. You, you can use time away from heavy weights to really like sort of. Get rid of the strain on your body, any joints that are feeling beat up. You don't have to push the heavy weight. You don't have to really worry about, you know, expressing your strength on a weekly basis. So maybe you can go for a little bit of a lighter block and again, add weight, add uh, weight via volume, but also weight, like absolute weight, and work in lower and lower rec ranges as you get closer and closer to pre-season and the actual season, so that you are really being able to express that strength when you need it on the pitch. this would probably be one of the only times I'd come away from my full body spits and maybe do some upper body, but I still don't think that any more than four times a week in the gym is necessary. And I'll explain why in a little bit, because actually I'll explain quickly now, and then I'll, I'll go dive deeper in a little bit after that. So like, once you've trained, once you're in the gym four times a week, you are easily getting enough volume to consistently, get bigger and get stronger. Any more than that, like it's negligible how much benefit that's gonna bring you. Now, any more than that in any of the other areas is gonna give you a huge benefits. It's not just adding in an extra session. It's actually adding in a brand new session. Maybe you weren't even doing any aerobic work. Now you are doing aerobic work and you're gonna get all that benefit of doing, you know, 12 weeks or a full off season of aerobic work. Now you're gonna get the benefits from that. And I think this is a big thing that a lot of people don't understand and they don't, they miss the forest through the trees because all they're focused on is hitting the weights and getting as big and strong as possible. And then like you end up having to lose some of that strength or lose some of that, uh, muscle mass that you potentially have added because you've gotta do so much more running because you've not been fit enough for preseason. You come in preseason under prepared. Especially when you look at this, uh, graph here, you can see how little extra gains are to be had from extra sets. Right. Once you've done. 10 training sets. Uh, I think that's bur body part, but like, you know, you are including bench, uh, bench press for your triceps. You're including pull-ups for your biceps once you've gone past 10 sets a week. You are barely getting, like adding in, adding, going from or going from zero to five is clearly your biggest bang for your butt, right? You're getting the vast majority of your gains. You're getting a little bit more by doubling your workload from five to 10, like doubling, not just like adding in a couple more sets, you're doubling your workload from five to 10. Five to 10 sets it's bloody easily done across four sessions. It's fairly easily done across two to three sessions going from 10 to 15. Now we might have to add four to five sessions of weights. And for what? Are there any gains in that line? Can you see any, any increase in how much, uh, muscle growth you're gonna get or how much strength gains you're gonna get? It's not a lot and it's not really worth it when you look to the other areas to see how much you can gain now and actually, I think aerobic conditioning should be. The, if not the main focus, because it can sort of run in the background. It should be an important aspect of every rugby players off season. And that's because, just because of the, the, the constant continual benefits it's gonna give you. It's marginal gains. So for the investors out there, you know, you, you're probably familiar with this graph here on the right, uh, marginal gains or compound interest. Is that marginal gains, is that the same thing? I might have butchered that. Clearly I'm not an investor, but you get the point, right? If you increase your, uh, aerobic conditioning base, you are just gonna increase your opportunity to be better in every single area. The fitter you are, the more, I mean, even when we're looking at getting through and doing as much weight sessions as possible, getting through as much volume in our weight sessions, we're able to recover from those sessions. Better if a aerobic conditioning is better, we're able to recover from every single set better if aerobic conditioning is better, so you can get through more work without sacrificing any more time because you are that much fitter. You don't have to sit around for five to 10 minutes to, to wait for your next set to get your breath back. No, you, you are fitter. You can keep doing more, you can do more speed sessions, you can do more sessions throughout the week or you can do more in every single session. So your aerobic conditioning, not to mention the fact that it makes you one hell of a rugby player is. Your condition should be a focus, and it's something that isn't anywhere near as sexy as the gym stuff, but it's something that makes a huge difference on the rugby pitch. My man, Matt Simons here is a perfect example of this because the man was a machine on the rugby pitch, and actually when I played with him in youth, he was a good player, but he, you know, you would, no one would've toted him to be a super rugby winner and a a premiership winner because of how good he was at rugby. He actually took, uh, I think it was. Four years away from rugby and his sole focus was on rowing. And from there he was able to circumvent a lot of, like when he actually, I think he got an injury and because of that, he was able to, uh, go back to rugby. And because he was so bloody fit, he was able to improve his rugby like ridiculously fast and, and go straight to the professional level. Having not done rugby for like four years, he went straight to Isha and then from Isha he went down to New Zealand. Played for the chiefs and the rest is history. This guy was a machine because he was so, so, so fit. This doesn't mean you have to be a rower, you have to do anything crazy. It just means that you need to get fit and see the benefits that gives you as a rugby player. Of course, if you're someone that that wants to focus on your movement, that is also something that can have a huge benefit. Like, you know, I'm not talking about like doing yoga, but just generally focusing on moving better. So doing low level jumps or different squats, like, you know, you could do your cost act squats or you could do not necessarily awkward movements, but focusing on moving as. Perfect as possible. If your squat is ugly, just clean that up. Make it look a little bit prettier, whilst not necessarily getting weaker, but whilst accepting that you are not trying to push for new One rep Maxes. Doing this as a focus is gonna help you stave off lots of injuries for all the awkward positions you're gonna find yourself in during rugby. It's also going to allow you to gain more strength in the long term, right? If you are someone that, again, go to that, back to the example of someone that squats really ugly. If you can squat a little bit prettier, we'll kind of know what that looks like. You're able to recruit more muscle, you're able to lift more weight in the long term. Now, initially, because your movement feels kind of awkward in it, you're not as comfortable with it. Yes, your, your weights that you are using are gonna have to go down. That doesn't mean you're getting weaker. It just means you're accommodating for this new, better, more efficient movement. And then eventually, later down the line, you're going to be able to lift. More weight, and that is involving in you doing more work efficiently, which actually gets you stronger, but also gets you fitter because you are not using as much muscle to move around. That also then gives you potential to learn more skills because I've seen people that move really well. I've taught them how to jacke. I've taught them a new rucking technique and they pick it up like that. Those people that don't move well, they don't pick it up like that at all. They don't pick it up at all, and they struggle in rucks. They struggle in contact situations, so, looking at movement as a focus for your off season is definitely something that is very underrated. It's something I don't see a lot within the rugby community. Again, it it's mostly just the weights, right? This is why you need to have a bit of a rounded focus because if you, if I go here, you'll be able to see it. This means that from the graph that you've seen before, from that line chart that you saw before, you noticed that most of your gains are gonna gonna come from the first zero to five sets that you are doing in the gym. Maybe the first zero to 10 sets you're in doing in the gym past that. And that's per, per muscle group ish. Right. And it's fairly arbitrary, but it's more of a. An idea that you can wrap your head around right. From that, you are able to then understand that you don't need to spend that much more time in the gym. You don't need to spend more time in the gym at all. In fact, I would use this off season to have a rounded focus, to focus on a few different areas and be able to potentially just push that boat a little bit harder. Right? Once you've got that round of focus, you're not having a, you're not, you're not losing any anything, uh, as far as your muscle and your strength gains. You're actually just dialing it in, doing what's necessary, and then freeing yourself up to train the other areas, particularly your aerobic system, right? So if you see from these three different, or four different pie charts that I've made up here, you've got your weight session five times a week. This is just someone, anyone that's training five times a week now. It doesn't have to be five, it could be four. You could replace this with three sessions and you would still see the same sort of effect. If all of those sessions are dedicated to weights, great. But you can see that there's definitely room, like what are you getting out of those, fourth and fifth sessions compared to if you did just four sessions and one aerobic. All of a sudden we're doing now doing 12 weeks of aerobic work. Or even double that we're doing. You know, instead of doing 12 weeks of aerobic, we're now doing 24 sessions In those 12 weeks, 1224 sessions of aerobic work in 12 weeks is gonna have a huge benefit to you. Once you get to pre-season a 24 aerobic sessions behind your back, by the time you get to pre-season, you'll be able to fire on so much better. You'll be able to play your best. You'll be able to breathe. You'll be able to feel so much better during pre-season and play much better rugby. And again, at the cost of no extra muscle strength gains that you could have potentially got, had you been doing and spending more time in the gym. You could also. Theoretically just drop that down to two sessions. Still keep those two, those 24 aerobic sessions through those 12 weeks and add in a speed session. And now you're doing 12 speed sessions before you've got to pre-season. And that's just in this arbitrary 12 week block that we've given ourselves. It might be more time. And therefore you'll go like, think about if you like from you now and you 12 speed sessions later, there's no way, you are not gonna be faster. There's no way that, that you being that much faster isn't going to improve you as a rugby player. So let's get out of this mentality that we need to just be spending all of our time in the gym and that's the only way that we can prove in the off season we need a rounded focus. So it's just basically more of the same that we should be doing in our in season anyway. And just room to really double down on those things. Room to really double down on let's push the heavy weights. And because we're not feeling beat up from rugby on Saturday, we're able, we're able to still do the same work. Not necessarily do more work, but do better quality work. Cuz I'm not no longer having to adjust my back squat because it's, it's my shoulders feeling funky and I have to do a leg press instead. You can stick with this program with minimal interference from your rugby. You're also able to do your aerobic work. Maybe you can do your aerobic work as road work so you're not worried about your, your, your legs feeling a, a one hour run the next day when you've got rugby, cuz you don't have rugby. And you're able to accumulate all of those benefits that you're doing, your, your, you're getting from that long run. And that's, that's the approach I would advise you do through the off season. Keep it well rounded. And keep improving yourself as a rugby player, and you will feel a huge benefits versus just doing weights in the off season when it comes to preseason. Now, of course, you don't need to think about this stuff. If you join Team Rugby Muscle link in the description below, you'll be able to improve on all of those areas. Stepping in the gym without thinking about it. You don't have to. Or stepping in the gym or step into the field. It doesn't matter. It's all organized for you. It's based around two conditioning sessions, two weight sessions with scope to do a little bit extra in each of those areas. Now, more is not necessarily better, but if you've already allotted that time, let's take advantage of that. You could also actually with team Rugby muscle, we give you some skill sessions. You could also spend that time working your skills. What if you spent 12 weeks? Just rebuilding your left-handed parts, how much better of a player would you become pre-season? I think a lot better now, that will finish this video podcast for today. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I hope you guys learnt a lot. If you have any questions or any thoughts on this, Let, let me know in the comments below. If you don't have any questions or thoughts, still write something in the comments below. It really does help the YouTube channel grow. If you are listening to this on the podcast, make sure you do check out the YouTube channel because sometimes watching these things helps you understand it a little bit better. And if you are still on the podcast, give us a five star review, subscribe. If you're new, hit that thumbs up button on the YouTube channel. I didn't ask that until the very end. That's a mistake. So hopefully you can show me the error of my ways by still clicking it and saying, okay, tj, I'm gonna give you this one chance to not ask for the thumbs up at the, uh, beginning of the video and just give it to you at the end. Anyway, I'm ling on now. The link for team rubbing muscle is in the description below Again. You'll be able to improve all facets that you need to as a rugby player through your off season without having to think about it at all. All of your rugby strength and conditioning is taking care of you via team rugby muscle. So that's my offer to you guys. I'll see you guys in the next one.