All right, so I never program sprint interval work for conditioning for rugby players for any reason. I don't think it's a good idea and in this video I'm going to show you exactly why What's going on everyone, it's TJ here from Rugby Muscle and yeah, this isn't clickbait or anything like that. I mean, I think of a better clickbait headline than just telling you that I don't ever program sprint interval work But it's 100% factual and in this video i'm going to explain to you Exactly my thought process why I don't think sprint interval Training is a good idea whatsoever for rugby players And potentially suggest some sort of ideas as to what you should be doing instead And I'll do so at the end of this video, which of course you can comment on and give a thumbs up at the end, or you can save yourself the time. Give us a thumbs up right away. Hit subscribe if you're new to the Rugby Muscle YouTube channel. We discuss everything. We're starting to discuss a lot of stuff around the World Cup and professional rugby. But we also discuss everything strength and conditioning and nutrition as it pertains to you rugby players. So hit subscribe if I haven't earned that already. And hopefully I will do so in this video. And at any point you can hit subscribe. Comment just for the algorithm, give that thumbs up really does help out. Let's get into the video then, shall we? So first and foremost, let's understand what sprint intervals are. When I mean sprint intervals, I basically do mean high intensity interval training of most kinds. So we're talking about high effort sprints with incomplete rest. If you get complete rest, then I wouldn't call that sprint intervals. I would just call that sprint training. It's usually 10 seconds or more of work and 10 to 20 minutes of total work. So when I say 10 seconds plus of work, that means, you know, 10 seconds of work in time to whatever before you even get a rest. So if you, if you work for less than 10 seconds, there's potential for that to be Something beneficial, but that's not what we're talking about in this video. Normally it's, you know, the work intervals are much more than 10 seconds. You're, you're pushing yourself. You're incurring high fatigue and by nature this ends up being anaerobic type training. They're simple and easy enough to program, to do. And to execute but they are very very tough in nature You never normally you you'll never finish a sprint interval session feeling good or feeling better than you were Before you started that session. You'll always feel nice and tired Some people think that's a good feeling because they feel like they've worked hard. They want to feel like that But are you being effective? That's what we're trying to answer here. And that's what we're trying to get into is Sprint intervals what you should be doing Before we answer that, actually, let's actually give some examples. Sprint the length, jog the width, any of those permutations, where maybe walk the width, whatever it is. Any fartlek type interval training. Fartlek meaning speed play. Everyone remembers that from their school days because fartlek word. Malcoms, so the ones between the tri line and the tri line, the halfway line and the 10 meters, like those sorts of intervals where you're doing shuttles. Coat hangers, as you can see from the video, looks like a coat hanger. I believe that's the only reason it's dumb. Any to batter type and it's about as in air quotes, cause that's not the actual tobacco protocol when we're talking about, you know, 20 seconds of work, 10 seconds of rest, or maybe 20 seconds of work, 10, 20 seconds of rest, any of those and whether they're done sprinting on the field or on a rower or on a bike we're mostly addressing here a few of the points only address when we're talking about sprinting on a field, but these still carry over and these are still things I would never program for my athletes and let's actually get into why first and foremost, if we're talking about sprinting on a field where we're talking about speed, we're going to lose speed if we do too many of these or if we do any of these real Sprint interval type training sessions, because when we're tired, our form drops, as you can see here from the guy in this clip on the top corner, his heel was on the, on the floor. And if your heels on the floor, you're slow. Don't care how like, that's it. You're slow. If your heels on the floor, you need to be driving off of your toes. If you're going to go to anywhere near your max speed. And if we're, if we're dropping our form when we're tired and if we're continually performing sprint intervals, And are teaching ourselves to run when tired, we're teaching ourselves bad technique. And for the most part, I don't see any athletes being able to having the time to dedicate to actual dedicated sprint work. So they try and get the best of both. They try and improve their speed and they try and prove their condition by doing this stuff. And actually what you end up doing. Is getting the worst of both because you're definitely not improving your speed. We'll talk about the endurance stuff in a second. But here you're not getting any faster by doing this work. You're much better off having more complete rest and actually doing speed training. If you want to get faster sprint interval work where you'll get incomplete rest is never going to make you faster. You're just not going to reach the speeds that it takes to be able to push yourself. It's like if you were trying to do a A squat as heavy as you could but you're trying to balance on a balance ball Well, you're holding yourself back by balancing on the balance ball You're holding yourself back with this speed work By being so tired and you're just never going to be able to reach the speeds to get faster and because speed Is such a huge differentiator in rugby Like You you owe it to yourself to work on speed separately. You cannot work speed and condition at the same time. I know so many athletes that I've worked with and including myself when you spend the time to actually just work speed, all of a sudden you feel fitter anyway, and all of a sudden you feel you perform so much better because you're actually getting faster. If you're only doing your speed work knackered, you're not doing speed work, you're getting slower. Next, when we're talking about trying to be game like and they say, Oh, you know, these are the sort of, these are the hard intervals that you would do in a game. It's actually not the case in rugby. And you can see over and over on this channel where I've emphasized this rugby is spent with short, high intensity actions, never lasting more to more than five to eight seconds. Think about when you get a ball and you make a carry, or even if you run a support in line. Any sort of game action lasts 5 to 10 seconds at most, at absolute most, which is then followed by low intensity rest. You win the games, and you, you know, teams are successful by the quality of those actions, not the length of those actions. understand that if you're trying to have more success in a rugby game, you're not having that success by extending that carry by being able to perform a medium high intensity for longer. You want to increase the effectiveness of your carrying, of your high intensity actions and then increase the effectiveness of your recovery between those actions. Now even with all of that said, if we do, like, even if we do like match game intensity or if that's what we think our goal is, is that actually the way to improve is by matching as close to like as close intensities and a closer intervals to what we see in games, is that the best way to improve even with that in place, I would argue it's not because the high effort that you would put in the low rest that you get, like what you'll see in some games, particularly in sevens games or in most training sessions where you're sort of replicating games and when you're doing small sided games or you're doing like intense games where there's little rest or whatever. When you're doing those, like, type of training, like, that's not the best way to train to improve. Unless you're just talking about rugby, but we're not talking about rugby training here. We're talking about fitness training. When you're doing it in rugby, it makes sense because you're, you're trying to replicate the conditions of a game to perform better at the game. When we're talking about physical conditioning, we want to improve the physical conditioning components that will allow us to be better when we perform. So to perfectly highlight this you could just ask yourself Why don't you just spend your rugby training playing rugby if that was the best way to improve is to be as to is to? Replicate the game and be as close to the game as we can Why don't we just do that on a Tuesday? Why don't we just play 80 minutes of rugby on a Tuesday and then play 80 minutes of rugby on a Thursday or whenever your rugby training sessions are It's because number one Right. As we've, as we can see here from the slide, you just will get so much fatigue. You'll be each, you'll, you'll be so beaten up by midweek that when it comes to the game, you're already knackered. It's a similar stuff, really, when you think about your hamstrings, your hips, your quads, your glutes. Even to an extent your back when you're, when you're doing all these sprint intervals when you're doing this intensive training without the rest, you get so much fatigue and that fatigue then just bleeds in and not just affects you on game day, but it limits the amount of other training that you can do during the week, right? If you start out your week with a hard sprint interval session on the Monday. And you've got rugby training on Tuesday, that's going to be impacted. Likewise, if you've just started out your week with a sprint interval training session, and then you've got to do your weights, you're going to underperform for your weight. So that fatigue cost is massive and it probably isn't even necessary because of the other reason that we don't just play matches to improve. The other reason being is that we break it down. If we want to get better at lineouts, we'll just focus on lineouts in training. If we want to learn our backs moves better, if we want to get better at passing through contact, we'll break that stuff down. And we won't just do the game, we'll break that stuff down into the smaller components. Likewise, when we are trying to get fitter and be more conditioned for our rugby games, we break that down into the conditioning components. What are those conditioning components? It would be the high intensity actions that we need to improve our actions, right? The improving those things by being more powerful, by being faster, by being more stronger, explosive, that sort of stuff. And by improving our capability to recover when we're low intensity. That being the aerobic system. Now, when we're training at such a high intensity and for an extended period of time, it's just too intense to be aerobic. Sometimes, like I say, I don't do sprint interval sessions. We do tempo sessions, which is a lower intensity interval, and that will teach you to learn how to get faster because it will teach you the technique. Of speed it will or you could do loads of different skills, but the idea being is that you're working your aerobic system And then you're working your other skills in the in an intervalled manner Whereas when we're talking about sprint intervals that it's just way too intense you're breathing heavy You're pushing yourself really hard and because you are training in such an intense manner, you're just not fulfilling that recovery pathway. You're not working your aerobic system. You're, you're completely anaerobic and therefore you're not Increasing your ability to recover between high intensity actions. Now, of course, maybe you'd think that when you're doing sprint intervals, the focus is on that high intensity action, right? But as we've already discussed, it's, it's just not intense enough to get faster. And it's not intense enough to get more powerful to increase the ability of those actions because of that incomplete rest. If you want to get better at something, you should do it fairly fresh, right? And then you become more efficient, more efficient, more efficient. Then maybe on occasion you put yourself under fatigue and get better. But if you If you increase the power, if you increase your ability to like make those high intensity actions more impactful when you are fatigued, all that means is that your lower percentage is still going to be higher than it was before because you're continually improving it. If you train with this little rest. And that longer work period, you're just not going to be able to hit the heights that it takes to improve, right? If you're working your absolute max speed, that's 3 to 4 seconds of absolute max intensity work. If you're training to improve strength and power, you know, it's three to five reps. That's not 30 to 60 seconds of work. If you're training to you know, be a more dynamic carrier, you don't need to run a coat hanger to be a more dynamic carrier. You need to run. 10 meters 15 meters at most and trying to get up to A higher speed as possible and then being able to step through that and you just don't get to do this stuff When you're doing your sprint intervals because of the length of the work and because of the incomplete rest You're just too knackered to reach that intensity. And so it's just not a good idea And now when we even argue that the the longer plays, you know, those plays where the ball doesn't go out of play for two to three minutes and it goes from coast to coast and side to side and from trial line to trial line, you could potentially argue this is where, you know, you are in that anaerobic zone and where you might be able to have to, or you might need to have to. be anaerobically fit to work this, but I think really number one, if we train aerobically and if we increase our power, we increase our speed. And we still increase our ability to recover between those high intensity actions. This should still be fine because we're going to be operating between pushing as hard as we can and coasting. And because our aerobic system is that better, our coasting speed is that much better, it actually isn't as taxing as it would have been if we were just less fit. Also, even if we are anaerobic you know, you meet these, like, these occasions happen maybe one to two times in a game. Every few weeks at most and even then you're going to probably meet meet those minimal thresholds to get that benefit during your rugby training sessions through those 10 minute intense efforts in a game, which case when you are already improving at the other physical components. During your training, you're actually going to feel the benefit of that during these occasions and feel more confident and more comfortable. So you're not actually, even if you are targeting this one to two times in a game where this happens, You're still way better off doing the other training style. So by working your aerobic system and by working your max power, max intensity separately from your conditioning session or as a separate conditioning session, not combining the two. And when you understand that strength and conditioning is generic by nature, it makes that much more sense, right? We're not trying to replicate the sport. We're not trying to do exactly what is the sport. What we're trying to do is break down the different components. Of the sport and improve those components separately. And then when comes to the sport, all of a sudden we're faster, we're stronger, we are more explosive and more powerful, or we're more aerobically robust so that we're able to continue to learn and improve. And what comes with this stuff is a whole lot less fatigue. If we merge it all together, we're not feeling knackered from day to day to day as we were if we were trying to do, you know, metcons or sprint intervals or overly intense sessions. Day after day and grinding ourselves to dust. Instead, what we're doing is working these physical components separately and getting all of the benefits that come from working them separately in a game, but also not getting any of the fatigue that comes from, you know, the games and the rugby scenarios where these components are combined. Right? None of that stuff is improved when you do combine it. All you get is all of that fatigue. So hopefully that makes sense. Don't combine sprints and conditioning training. Just do your sprints as hard as you can. Get faster. And if you're doing your conditioning training, work the aerobic system or work your max capacity a lactic. So you're working five seconds ish and 10 seconds rest. Now, the way these work together is just too long to be on and beyond the scope of this video. It would depend on your rugby training, your weight training, whatever you're doing. So I can't give specific recommendations and I don't want you just to, that would. Like undermine the point of this video. The point is this is not the way to do it. You need a tailored approach for you And you can get that through the links in the description. If you're interested in working with us at rugby muscle you can do rugby muscle elite one on one coaching. You can join team rugby muscle, or if it's just conditioning you're interested in, we've got the game ready fitness fast track, which we've got two different tracks, the four or the eight week program to get you in the absolute best shape to perform your best on the rugby pitch. If you're interested in that stuff, that will be in the description below. If you've got an idea of what you want to do now, That's great. Just hit the thumbs up on this video. If it did help out, hit subscribe. If you want to find out some more stuff and of course, let me know in the comments below what are some of your go to sessions for your fitness stuff? What have you find being the most beneficial for you? Any feedback in the comments below would be very much welcomed. Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope this was beneficial. I really do. I don't want to just shit on stuff for no reason. I want to show stuff that Isn't working and needs to change and sprint interval stuff Isn't going to help you be a better rugby player. So don't do it. All right. I'll see you guys in the next one