All right. What's going on everyone? TJ here from Rubbing Muscle. I don't want to catch you doing these exercises because they're bloody overrated. Let's get into it. All right, so what's going on everyone? It's TJ here from Rugby Muscle. I am a strength and conditioning coach who specializes in working with amateur rugby athletes. And today, as you have already found out and know by now, we are gonna be discussing some overrated exercises. This is stuff that I see people doing in the gym, and I just think it's most of the time. Misapplied, and it's not because people doing them are idiots, it's just because, I don't know, they're just, they're just done too, too often and you are not getting it raw. And with each specific exercise, I will get into the specifics of why I believe it's overrated, whether there is indeed a use for them. We have a list of, I believe, seven different exercises, and with those, I'll get into them why I think they're overrated, maybe why they're done in the first place, but why they're specifically overrated, why you should be avoiding them. And that way, you know, you should be able to decipher and find out better alternatives. Before I do that though, please give us a thumbs up. I'm gonna ask it nice and early in this video. If you're watching this video, give it a nice thumbs up if you are. listening on the Spotify podcasts, you're doing a great job. I'm seeing lots of five stars. That's really making me feel good. But if you listen on Apple Podcasts and you haven't given us a five star review and actually typed up a review, that also helps out massively. One final ask of you is that if you enjoyed this video and if you have any comments, maybe towards the end, put them in the comments below. I'll ask exactly specifically what comments I wanna see and what your reactions potentially might be to these exercises that I've suggested. But, you know, if you can, if you brief type that comment in now, then you can just hit return by the end of this video anyways, let's get into the exercises. Actually, before I do that, We've gotta have some special mentions. So first and foremost, these exercises aren't necessarily because they're terrible exercises or because, they don't work for anyone. It's just that they're overrated for rugby. First special mention is going to be the power clean, just because it's so easy to, to really mess up. Like, this guy's done here. It tends to lend people to try to. put too much weight on the bar and just see themselves as an Olympic weightlifter. A lot of you have done this, including myself. Actually. A lot of us, should I say, have done this where we've, you know, we've started introducing the power clean for rugby and the benefits that it gives us, and then we've gone away from that and we've just tried to load up as much weight as possible and then potentially ended up being like, Weightlifters and that's not the goal of strength and conditioning for rugby, back squat and bench press, you could replace what I just said for power clean and Olympic lifting with power lifters, right? These lifts are technical. These lifts just give you a bit too much fatigue and it's just not like necessary. Yes, you could do all three of these, particularly, these particular exercises. You could definitely do all three of them and it would be okay if you are good at them. But they, they're not 100% necessary as people think. People think, oh yeah, you're doing, you're a rugby player. Okay, let's get you doing some back squats. Let's do get you doing some bench presses and power cleans. It's just, they can be done. It's just that they're not 100% necessary, and that's why they're overrated. That's why they're in the special mentions category of being overrated. Really high box jumps to next just because of the unnecessary risk. Again, really overrated. Like you can just jump really high without having to put your feet on a box. You can measure it with your hand to see how high you jump, like seeing how high you can, higher A box you can jump on isn't necessarily a feet of anything other than how good a hit flexion you can get into, which isn't that much of a carryover to rugby. Yes, jumping high is very good. But you don't need to jump on a box, and you don't need to risk that high of an injury, especially if you are just stacking boxes on top of each other or stacking weights on top of each other like these, or like this guy is doing here. Next up, we have anything of an AMRAP nature. Just because there are so many people that get this wrong. Maybe this would be even its own video look, but when you're doing stuff that's am rap, that's as many reps as possible in a given time, you are rushing through and more often than not, right, that given time is gonna be from what, 30 seconds to or a minute. To like five minutes or 10 minutes. That's just not the way rugby has played. It's not, rugby is not getting as many, uh, consistent action as possible in a period of time. It's doing one short, high intensity burst and then recovering. So if you're doing stuff of an amrap nature, potentially consider another method and then kettlebells. Just because I like to pick on kettlebells people, I just think they're overrated, that people swear by kettlebells, they will do kettlebells for everything. Just think they could be a potential useful tool, but those people that you know, pray to the altar of the kettlebell, nah, mate, you're in this list overrated. And with those six out of the way, let's get into the actual overrated exercise. I'm getting ready for the hate already. Ladder drills, man, ladder drills absolutely suck. These might be the worst on they're the reason, these potentially get more and more controversial as we go. And the reason ladder drills are up first because it's fucking obvious by now that they suck. Okay? You should know this. my biggest issue with them is, is that it's not anything like how you move your feet in a game. You don't do lots of little bitterly steps on the floor. It just doesn't, that's not how you move around, right? You, you move around, particularly when you're looking at, on, agility, by planting your feet really wide and driving and pushing force into the ground, into the opposite direction of the way you want to go. That in itself is a skill, and it is not a skill that is honed by tippy tappy, tippy tappy through a ladder. something else that ladders do is promote you. Hitting the ground with as little force as possible. That's not, again, what we're doing in rugby, that's not we're doing in any field sports. You're not trying to like that. You are not given any benefit by hitting your feet into the ground with any force. In fact, you're probably punished because you're gonna skip a few rungs of that ladder. And again, why? Because the ladder is just there. it just doesn't make any sense. Add to that, the fact that when you are doing these leather drills, your head is looking down, hoping that you are getting your feet in the wrongs properly, and you're, you, you are looking at the floor promoting really bad habits. You're promoting the habit of keeping your head looking at the ground. This just doesn't make sense as a tool for anything other than climbing onto a roof. And my final point though I'd have for ladder drills is that if you're doing ladder drills, right, if you're doing any, any specific drill that you think is important to use a ladder for, couldn't you just do it without the ladder and just encourage this type of footwork? Of course you could. So just do that. Like you don't need these ladders. They are complete and utter waste of time. The only, the only single kind of use I might see is potentially for someone that is in early stage rehab, going through some proprioception stuff, maybe someone that's really, really old. This is just not an excuse for a whole, uh, piece of equipment and a whole like, range of different drills for. Regular in-shape, high performing folks to even consider using. Get out with those ladder drills next, and quite controversially, potentially we have deadlifts. So deadlifts make this list not because they are the Kon of old exercises. And I hate people that say such a thing. It's more because they are just unnecessarily fatiguing for quite a little reward. And that's gonna be like, Some somewhat controversial for people to say, oh my God, you're only getting a little bit of reward from deadlifts. You are, when you consider the amount of fatigue that you're get putting in, the amount of weight that you've gotta load up and the amount of risks that you're taking. These are, I mean, deadlift is probably gonna be the most, uh, single or the single most fatiguing exercise that you can do in the gym per. Repetition. Right. It, it's just, that's how it is because you, the, the sheer amount of force that you are pushing into the ground and then you are really ripping up as you are pulling that bar to, in addition to that, they. As you get good at the deadlift, it becomes more and more and more technical, not just technical in as far as efficiency to lift the bar up, but also as far as efficiency, to be able to not put your back at risk. And the tool you get, the higher that risk is, the higher that technicality must become. And of course, when we're looking at rugby players, we're looking at potentially some more taller Lanier people and people that just can't be dealing with this amount of fatigue. And so just the, the fact that. It puts you through all of these risks, right? It not all of these risks, but. Lower bat risk and a really high amount of fatigue could be accepted for the king of all exercises, but it's just not needed when you consider the fact that it just doesn't give you much of a bang for your buck as far as really strengthening. Any musculature of the body and, and nowhere near as much as other exercises can do for way less fatigue. For example, if you want to. Really strengthen up and, and load up your hamstrings. A Romanian deadlift is gonna be much better because it, you, you're not worrying about that knee flexion like your, your hamstrings don't actually get stretched at the bottom of a deadlift because you bend at the knee and therefore your hamstrings don't lengthen or extend and neith and therefore you are just not challenging them through a full range of motion like you would be doing with a R D L. Same thing for your quads. Your, your, your. Quads are gonna get way more challenged doing a squat. And less fatigue doing a squat. And therefore those are potentially better exercises and they're gonna give you better bang for your buck, for your lower body. And then you've got a ton of things that you can do for your lower back or your core, and you've got a ton of things that you can do for your grip and therefore you add all this stuff together and actually consider that all that stuff together actually might take that much more time. Doing than deadlifts, and particularly when we're looking at someone who's gotta get technically good at deadlifts, particularly when we're looking at someone that is technically good at deadlifts and has to load up all that weight on the bar. It just isn't a very good bang for your buck exercise. That is not to say that there is no place in a training program ever. It's just overrated. It's just not the king it's called, like I said already, they call it the king of exercises. So you, that makes you think, oh crap, I've gotta do this, I've gotta do this all the time. Definitely don't do it in season and be careful of doing it outside of your season. It's just somewhat as this video indicates overrated. Next on the list, we have the Turkish getup. Another extremely overrated exercise because people think it's fucking magic and it's not, and it's not even that useful. So much so that I don't think I've programmed it for anyone in the last few years. I can't remember really having anyone do it. And the reason I don't have people do it is because of what I put here in the text. Name one thing that the Turkish get up does for you that no ever exercise can do better. It's just not, it just just doesn't exist. Right? And it just does a lot of kind of, almost stuff, but doesn't really do anything. Kind of like that sentence just then, right? The more one exercise tries to do. The less in, in overall it accomplishes. I don't see where it makes you strong. I don't really see where, what muscle group, it improves. I don't see how like it challenges you because it's kind of bloody awkward. But like, you know, it, it is not a complete exercise. You couldn't just be satis if you had to do one exercise ever. You know, maybe you do it, but that's not a limitation that's based on us and there's just plenty of better ways to train Every single benefit that the Turkish get up gives you. There's just. Nothing in there that is beneficial potentially for some other sports and for some other endeavors it might have a use, but there is no use for you holding up your arm above your head and, and, and standing up whilst you're trying to do that for rugby players, maybe half a Turkish get up that bottom half could be very good. But other than that, it's just a massively overrated exercise. Add to that, the fact that it each set right. Have you ever counted how long it takes to do a Turkish getup? A long bloody time. I haven't counted it cause it took so long and I got bored. Like doing a set of five heavy Turkish getups is gonna take a long time. And it's just, again, not tapping into any system that's gonna give us any benefit. Maybe doing a set of 10 is even worse. Doing a set of three even more pointless and still takes up a lot of time. But one thing that must be said about the circus get up is that if you can get really good at it and then you can do it with another person holding up. That's a cool party trick and it can make you get some viral videos and I mean, great, right. Maybe I should take it off this list and just give up doing rugby, give up doing rugby, strength and conditioning, and just try and make viral videos. Next on this list we have scrum crawling. I see this a lot and, you know, when people talk about being specific for the scrum, it's just a huge mistake and, and basically wasting your time as a When I'm talking about scrum crawling, I'm talking about anything where your hands are on the ground or on something that is also on the ground. This just takes out the specificity of any scrum work and then becomes, again, a waste of your time. As you can see here, the chap on the top hip. Has his hands on the barbell, and that just means that he's putting way less force through his feet. He's putting hold, having to hold way less force throughout his body because he is not pushing it forward against a, a object and, and applying his force into the ground, but also horizontally, which is where you are challenged in the Scrum if you want to do something where you're pushing force against the ground and challenging yourself vertically. Do some squats, do some leg presses, do some movements that build your lower body strength in order to be able to scrum better, or have the potential to scrum better. And then when you're being specific, don't put your hands on the ground. Do stuff like actual scrummaging or as you can see here, this fella on the, Bottom left. The, the, the, there's, there's two groups here on the bottom left, right? One group where their hands are on the ground. Those fellas are basically wasting their time and kind of challenging their lateral core in a way. The guys that have got the, arms out over their head and they're pushing that, that is actually much better because when you're scrummaging. You want to push you, you, you're pushing forward, right? You're pushing your feet into the ground, but you're not pushing your feet so that you can push yourself up. You're pushing your feet into the ground so that you can push yourself horizontally to push your opponent back, and then you're going to adjust to lots of chaos that happens in the Scrum by, you know, eight different people pushing in all, not necessarily all sorts of different directions, but. A variability of directions that challenges in you, unlike any other gym, exercise, and that means that you just have to practice scrumming. You just have to practice scrummaging. You've seen those old folks that have been scrumming for 20 years and they don't ever lift, and they don't go to the gym and they don't look like anything, but when it comes to the scrum, they can hold their own. That's because they've done a lot of specific strengthening in the scrums themselves, and they've got a good feel for it. I'd wager that no one. Ever in history has ever got good at Scrummaging by doing anything where the hands are on the floor or on a barbell that's on the floor. They got good at scrimmaging by using the gym to get big and strong, and then applying that force and learning how to use that force by actually scrummaging against opposition itself. The other thing that you can do is use a barb and a rack, or as these fellas have done, uh, use a person or just push your hands against the wall in front of you, in front of you, not on the floor, and then you are going to be applying the force in the right direction and be a little bit more specific for Scrummaging scn. Once you consider, that's how you are gonna get good at scrummaging, you're gonna realize that having your hands on the floor or on a barbell doing any sort of crawling to help your scrum is overrated. All right. Coming in next on this list is overhead squats. Something that I used to love and I used to love as a party trick because I could do it with more than my own body weight. I then have since realized that this is a way overrated exercise. It's just another example of trying to do too many things and really doing nothing. The load on the barbell is just gonna be too light to give your legs any stimulus. It's not going to be really challenging. Your core, the only thing that's gonna probably be hurting for as a result of overhead squats is your shoulder gle your upper back, and maybe your shoulders, maybe your pex. If you've got really tight pecks and you can't get into a good squat in position, I. And because of that, you think, oh, that's good for your shoulders. But there are much better things that you can do for your shoulders than overhead squats. And if anything, there's better things that you can do for your overhead squats than to get your shoulders better. And that would be like learning a really good feel for a technique to overhead squat, which is a real highly skilled thing to do, but, Is nothing to do with rugby. It's not a skill that transfers in any way to rugby. The only way I could think about this may potentially having any use is if you are holding someone in a line out or to re who's receiving a kickoff, and then they are telling you that you are holding them too high, and so you have to squat down and then have them catch the ball. That just doesn't happen. So this is, this is an overrated exercise. This is a waste of your time. It doesn't really train anything unless you are trying to be an Olympic lifter, which means you are not trying to be the best rugby player you can be cuz you're spending way too much time doing snatching overhead squats and all that stuff. So this ain't, this ain't about you. If you're mad about, if you like doing overhead squats and you think this is gonna help you snatch, isn't what it's about. This video isn't for you because this video is about being as sufficient as you can with your training for a rugby and over squats. It's just a waste of your time. That is of course, unless you're going down the other route, that I might be going with this channel and giving you different exercises that are gonna lead to cool party tricks, cool viral videos, and you being really popular because of random lifts that you can do. But that's probably, nah, it's overrated. Next on this list is farmers' caries. Again, it, it's just, there's just no real benefit that it gives you for rugby. It works on your grip. It kind of works on your core, but not really It. Is challenging over a period of time. That is definitely not specific for rugby. It can also be very fatiguing on the lower back, and it just isn't going to give you the benefits. You know, you, you're holding long isometrics, which again, are not specific to rugby. What are we trying to achieve? Are we trying to carry heavy groceries from the checkout to our car waste of our time? Are we trying to, like what are we trying to do here? This is one of those exercises, kind of like squat bench and deadlift, except more useless. That's gotten popular because that's what strong people do. We've seen a lot of strongman because it's an event in strongman train. Farmers carries and it becomes really impressive and then we think, okay, that's what we've gotta do. When in actual fact what we've gotta do is figure out what it is that we actually want to achieve like, and then when you figure that out, you realize that farmers carriers just have no place in a. Really well thought out. Strengthen conditioning program. Don't get me wrong, other carries, particularly ones where you're holding a weight out in front of you or single arm can be definitely beneficial for carrying, as in like rugby carry in. Like you're making a carrying, you are not doing a farmer's carry that can give you a good benefit because you're preventing your torso from being, from flexing and from being manipulated into different directions that you don't want it to go. That, yeah, I can get behind Farmers carries with traditional, with like with two hands holding a heavy dumbbell or a couple of heavy dumbbells or a heavy dumbbell in each hand or a barbell in each hand. This gets filed under overrated. The only counterpoint I'm gonna have to, this is when you blow this slide up and you see these two fellas, Yeah, it looks still, it does look pretty cool. So I understand again why you might wanna do this. You're probably not gonna go viral by doing farmer's caries, but you know, everyone in the gym is gonna look at you and go, look at that guy walking around with heavy dumbbells. He's serious. And particularly if you're walking with heavy barbells, then they know you're a hundred percent serious and you're probably annoying because you're taking up two barbells. Next and final one for this list. Woo. Controversial. The concept to rower. I'm gonna say it. I just think this is an overrated, it's not an exercise, but it's a machine. It's a thing that rugby players do, and it's overrated. And I'll get into why I think that in a second, but like, I think it's just one of those things where we've inherited another excise. From another sport because we've seen them do it and we think that's good. Right? When you look at rugby, which is traditionally more of an upper class sport, you look at rowing, which is traditionally kind of an upper class sport. There's probably some sort of crossover there. Probably the fittest dudes from the rugby team were also good rowers because they were good athletes in general. And then they said, oh, what do you do for your conditioning? Oh, I do rowing. Okay, so now everyone's gonna do rowing. And that's probably how we inherited it. And it's just not a, a massively. Like it's, it's good. It's okay. And this isn't to say that you should never do any rowing. It's just that it's overrated. It's just not necessary for you to get in the best shape for rugby. I don't think I've ever really specifically planned any rowing workouts for any of my athletes. If I have done, it's probably more than 10 years ago at this point, because I thought that was what you needed to do back then. But now, no, I never make people use the concept to rower. I put concept to Rowe because it's like the most acceptable one, but you could file actually rowing on a river. You can do the other fan rowers. You can do the, the water rowing machine thing that people use. You just don't need to do rowing for rugby. It's just not necessary. And I see people think that this is the best way to get into shape. New slash it's not, it's not specific to rugby in any way, and in fact because of how technical it is and, and how tough it can be, it just doesn't make sense to do either of your zones of conditioning. and the thing is with rowing is actually it's way more technical than you would think or than actually probably you already know that it's really technical because really good rowers are like tremendously efficient, not just really, really fit. They're on, they are really fit on top of that, but they're also incredibly efficient. Most people don't use the RY machine efficiently whatsoever, and because of that, It becomes really difficult to use that for your zone too, because you just can't do it in a low sustainable way for any more than 20 minutes consistently. I mean, if you row for more than 20 minutes, without stopping like credit to you and I feel sorry for how your ass feels cuz that's just brutal. And again, e even if you do get in like 30, 40 minutes and, and you, you've got really good technique, you're probably gonna feel it in your lower back just because of the compromised position and doing it week on, week on week. Like they're just much better ways to accomplish zone two than using a concept two rower. And in fact, it's probably not possible for the vast majority of people who are watching this video to even do any zone two work on the rower, even if they really, really, really want it to. It's just that hard to, it's just really hard to, to. Get into that like level of, uh, exertion and, and stay there. Most people do Ryan stuff for 30 seconds to five minutes, and then they are absolutely gassed. No real relevance to rugby particularly when you look at the fact that conditioning needs to be done, like for specifically for rugby, in conditioning, you are looking at really, really long, low aerobic building work, or you are looking at really, really short, high intensity bursts and you just can't get to that higher intensity on the rower. So once again, another reason why it's overrated It's just not something that is overly necessary. And again, it's something that's seen as a, a pillar of rugby conditioning when there's no need to do it whatsoever. And actually for every sort of method that you can think of where people like to use a rower, I'd like to see you out running. I'd like to see you using the field. I'd like to see you, if you're going really, really intense, pushing sleds around, I'd like to see you if you are keeping a like low intensity. Go out and run or walk, run, or even use an elliptical or the bike, and that just makes it a lot easier for you to accomplish the outputs that you're wanting to accomplish. By that I mean getting fitter aerobically, or really getting more explosive and more powerful. So yeah, a bit controversial, but definitely I'm, I'm standing by this and if you let, if you think this is controversial, let me know. In fact, let me know any of these exercises that you disagree with and if you use an of these exercises, how do you use 'em? What do you use 'em, why do you think they are so like, useful for you? I'm not saying I'm gonna necessarily disagree, I'm just looking to see if any of you guys have any pushback. What other exercises do you have that you think are overrated that people tell you all the time that you have to do special Shout out to the Bronco if you're gonna already say that. Sorry, I stole that from you, but yeah, I preemptively beat you in the comments, but still, if you were gonna put that, leave a different comment below because the comments really do help this video get out there and help people not waste their time in the gym. Doing these overrated exercises. And speaking of which, if you have an exercise or if you've seen an exercise on this list that you used to swear by that I might have potentially changed your mind, let me know in the comments below. And uh, if you are confused at what to replace it with, I'll help you out with that. Otherwise, if you've made it to the end and you haven't given us a thumbs up, do that right now. Five stars,, subscribe if you are new and if you enjoyed this video, let me know. Cheers, guys. I'll see you in the next one.