Stop making things so difficult for yourselves as far as your rugby strength and conditioning goes. It's such a common mistake. And in this video, I'm going to explain why it's such a mistake and what you should be doing instead. What's going on everyone? My name is TJ. I am the guy behind Rugby Muscle. If you're interested in our programming or coaching, they'll be in the description below. Otherwise... Thank you for joining me today. Um, hopefully you will learn a lot from this. Hopefully you're not making this mistake to begin with, but if you are, this should open a lot of eyes. I think rugby attracts a lot of quote unquote tough guys because of such, uh, how it is such a combative sport, how it is so, um, physically demanding. And I think that because it is so physically demanding. A lot of lads think that the solution is to push themselves, which I get, but there is a level of difficulty that we sometimes end up falling to, which actually is fundamentally holding us back from making quality progress. And in this video, I'm going to explain why. If this is something that appeals to you, Actually, I know a lot of lads this won't appeal to at all because again, it attracts guys that want to push themselves that want to work harder and harder and harder and feel that reward from doing such hard work. And so I know some of you might like this will fall on deaf ears because you want to push yourself harder. But for those that want to listen, I'm going to explain exactly why you shouldn't be making things so difficult and how you can do better. So. First and foremost, we need to, we need to talk about what you're doing for your strength and conditioning. We need to talk about why you are training in the first place. What is the goal of training? Why are you in the gym, um, especially for your rugby, but why are you in the gym in general? What is the purpose of what you are doing? The obvious answer is the same answer as why you go to work because sometimes you can get caught up in cliches when you're talking about training, when you talk about your work, when you talk about your job, there is a real definitive answer and that should be the similar sort of lined answer as what you're going to say to why you go to the gym. So it's the outcome. Yes, you, uh, I mean, if you're working, it might not actually be for money. It could be for like contribution or fulfillment and those are also fringe benefits. But the outcome is the money you need. That's why you're there or the contribution is why you're there. If you don't need money and even if like you get those other fringe benefits, those things are the outcome. It's not for the community. It's for the different things there. There's a fundamental reason you go there for training. The fundamental reason is that you want the, your body to make adaptations in order to come back stronger, fitter, faster, whatever adaptations you want. From this process. That's the goal. The process itself is not the goal. And definitely making the process difficult is not the goal. The toughness that comes from the process is not the goal. The goal is the physical adaptation, not the mental adaptation, nothing else. It's always going to be the physical adaptation because you're doing it to become physically better. Now the reason we talk about physical outcomes outweighing the psychological outcomes is because the, you know, toughness and whatever you perceive from that is a fringe benefit and it really is such a small benefit that it pales in comparison to the physical outcomes. For example, when you look at the World Cup, you're not going to say that New Zealand are necessarily mentally tougher than any of the teams that they've beaten by, uh, you know, dozens and dozens of points. You're not going to say South Africa are necessarily mentally tougher than the teams that they've smashed. The reality is is that they're more physically capable of winning the game. Likewise, if you were to take an Ironman athlete and you were to put him in an MMA cage against an MMA fighter, that MMA fighter might be really mentally weak, but he has a much, much better chance of winning. The fight, the MMA fight specifically because he has, uh, he is physically superior in that domain. Likewise, you could take the weakest or the mentally weakest competitor at Ironman and have him come up against, uh, a marine soldier who is obviously very tough, but the Ironman athlete is going to win that Ironman race because he is conditioned to do that. We're in the gym to condition ourselves as physically best as possible, and there is so much to be gained from that. over the mental stuff that like it's not even worth entertaining the mental stuff. So you can like there is toughness that comes with it as a fringe benefit, but really why we're in the gym is for those physical outcomes. And we don't want to confuse this because that's how we end up making things really tough for ourselves. For example, We we push up we make things tough for ourselves before we even start right we look for a perfect program or we look to make things a clean slate all the time of this happening we're not we're not actually putting any action we're not actually getting any physically better we do this by letting that boulder roll down the hill by you know having our maybe we miss monday's training session or tuesday's training session and then we let the whole week slide that's so common and it's unfortunately such a huge reason why so many people can't stay consistent because they look for that clean slate because they let that boulder roll down the hill before having to push it all the way back up again and start to get that momentum. Every time you stop, it's difficult to restart. We also do this even when we are training by like fluffing our training out by adding, You know, rather than just doing an hour of what we need, we look for, I don't know, uh, an exotic gym location or we look to do loads and loads of sets because when we, we go, we want to make it worth our while. This, to me, just makes things more difficult. Also, if we're looking to, not just, we can't just have a 40 minute gym session tick the box, we have to go into the gym and we have to also do our saunas or do our ice baths and we do all these extra things for our recovery that make this whole process That much more difficult to keep up and therefore again, we're much more likely to fall off the wagon and have to restart again. We're making this task more difficult than it needs to be. Another thing I see people do time and time again is overthinking their program to exhaustion before ever actually doing anything. The best way to refine a program is to actually do it and refine it from your experience as you go. So many people, and including myself, I've been guilty of this where I'll write a program down and I'll adjust it for three weeks before even starting it. That's not the way to do it. The way to do it is to actually just get down and get to work. Stop overthinking programming. And one way we can solve this is through the Rugby Muscle Academy and such coaching services that we provide. Links in the description below to check that out to stop yourself from overthinking to actually just x focus on executing your training now those are some ways that we make our training harder. But really I want to get into the degree of the training itself. What we do to make ourselves, uh, make training so difficult is we make ourselves tired. And I know you're thinking, well that's, isn't that the goal of training is to be tired? No, that's the same thing as we were talking about with toughness. Being tired is somewhat of a side effect for training, but it is not the goal. In most training, in fact, that's not what you want. It's definitely not the goal, but in most training, it's not even what you want. So think about a game of rugby. Being tired is not a benefit. It is something that costs you. The more tired you are, the poorer decisions you make, whether tactically or technically. Um, you might make a carry into the, or you might miss a pass because you are tired. You might miss a tackle because you're tired. Those are both poor decision making skills and also poor execution of your fundamental skills. Maybe you do lazy passes or you're not in the line because you're tired. That could also be discipline, maybe even for tackles. Teams lose games. When they are tired, so why you would have the goal of being tired doesn't quite make sense, right? Think about when games are won and lost. Yes, we can argue that the team that is fitter Wins the game, but does that mean that they win the game because they're tired? Or is it because the other team are less fit and more tired? So why is being tired the goal? Okay. Also think about the fact that yes, teams might win games towards the end, but what is happening beforehand. I've seen lots of games in the Rugby World Cup itself where it's a tier two team and a quote unquote tier one nation. And for the first 2030 minutes, it's close, but the tier one nation starts to pull away as the game goes on. Now, is that because of superior fitness or is that because the Tier two nation has to work at such a higher work rate because their base rate is lower that towards the end they're just too fatigued and again they're too tired, they make their poor decisions, they have poor execution, maybe they're poor disciplined with their line speed or with their attack in shape and they lose the ball and then they start to get scored upon. Yeah does that make sense? It's not a case of being better at being tired. It's not a case of, um, it's not even that much of a case of being fitter. It's that, it's the case is you have to be better across the board and that's what wears teams down and makes them tired. It's not to do with you being tired. Don't make yourself tired. Don't get confused at the idea that you should be tired in order to produce good things because that's not the case. Okay, so if we can agree that you lose games when you're tired, what is the argument behind continually practicing being tired? Is that a good thing? I'd argue it's absolutely not, right? I would argue that, um, being tired is absolutely the enemy. It's the enemy in games and it's also the enemy in training. Think about when you're trying to execute your skills. What happens to your skills when you're tired? They go downhill. How can you improve something if you're making it that much more difficult for yourself, right? How can you, like, if you were trying to do any other task, you wouldn't make it more difficult. If you were trying to cook the perfect recipe, right? Would you cook the perfect recipe? Whilst trying to swim and being half underwater, would you cook the perfect recipe whilst riding a bike? Would you make things more difficult for yourself or would you set yourself up in an environment so that you can make it perfect? So then you keep making it making it perfect perfect perfect perfect and then over time Right, you could put harder constraints on you and you would be okay, but you wouldn't practice that You would just be able to withstand that because you are so good at the skill itself Does that make sense? So when you're in a skill environment, you should be very, very fresh. And we're talking about passing. We're talking about tackling. We're talking about strength skills. So we're talking about heavy squatting. We're talking about, uh, executing anything, anything like when we're talking about in the gym. Right. Are you moving efficiently with intention when you're tired, right? You're ambling about you just get from A to B whatever way you can whether we're talking about agility movement so you're stepping from side to side or you're moving around a course or you're talking about a Sprint where you're sprinting as fast as you can are you just trying to get there because you're so tired or are you really thinking about your stride and Pushing as with as much force through your toes into the ground Likewise if you're squatting or if you're doing any movement in the gym Are you just getting those reps done or are you trying to make the most out of every single rep and therefore getting that much more, uh, stimulus out of every single rep because you're lifting with intention and you're reinforcing that mechanism to, or that, that squatting pattern or whatever lifting pattern or whatever moving pattern or whatever sprinting pattern you're doing. Which pattern are you reinforcing? Are you reinforcing a tired one? Because if you are you're going to be getting slower You're going to be getting weaker because you're going to be moving inefficiently How much repetition is done when you're tired? How much repetition is done when you're fresh? When are you teaching yourself how to move? Are you teaching yourself when you're tired? Are you learning how to move labored? Right, I see this time and time again with guys that do sprint intervals. Their top end speed goes all the way down because they're just trying to get through it. And that's what their body learns because that's all the reps they get. They don't get any top end speed reps because they're always tired when they're sprinting. So their body learns that that's their efficient way to sprint. Also, when we're talking about training, are we having fun if we're always tired? And if we're not having fun, are we going to stay consistent? If training is every single session a complete slog. I can guarantee you, especially as an amateur athlete, you're not very likely to keep sticking at it. You're very likely to maybe quit altogether, but at the very least, keep chopping and changing your program and just never stay consistent. And if you're never consistent, you're not going to get that stimulus in order to improve. Likewise, you're never going to be able to perform at maximum intensity, which means that your strength and your power and your speed are very capped at your ability to be able to improve. So is being tired in training a good thing? I would argue like from this. No, absolutely not. You should not be overly tired in training. Now I'm not saying to never be tired. I'm not saying that you're never going to push yourself on occasion that you feel like you've had a good session. But it is absolutely not the goal. Being tired in training. Just from this argument here has all these negative effects. Likewise, it has more negative effects down the line. So the next few days, right? If we're talking about someone that is training, trying to train three to four to five times a week, if you're tired during your one session, how are you going to feel for the next day? Are you going to be ready to perform? Are you going to be ready to make more adaptations? Or are you going to be really stiff and really sore? Which is the better environment for making progress? Is it going to be someone that has to warm up for 30 minutes and then maybe is going to be okay? And then how is that going to be the next week, and the next week, and the next week? How are we going to continually progress for months on end if we're just fighting off being able to walk down or up a flight of stairs? Being tired in this situation is not a benefit. And like I say, is your training week on week enjoyable or is it an absolute grind? And if it's an absolute grind and you're okay with that and you think that's the price to pay, are you still able to perform perfectly in your work or even adequately in your work or in your family life or with all your other things that you've got going on? Does it make more sense to pull back a little bit and be able to be present everywhere else in your life and then continually progress with your training year round? What adaptation are you looking for and does fatigue like to this extent even need to be there? I would argue absolutely not. If you want to get stronger, you don't have to be overly fatigued much all the time. Especially if you're not trying to be one of the strongest people like in the country. If you're just trying to get strong enough for rugby, absolutely not. to get faster, I think that being tired is almost the enemy here. If you're trying to get fitter, zone to work is the new hot thing, but it's been around forever because you can do it. Basically, Alex, the artist said it on the podcast years ago, you can do it almost week round and it's almost a completely free lunch. You don't get the fatigue effects, but you get aerobically significantly fitter. So why are we making ourselves tired? I would argue that it's a fundamentally flawed approach, which I understand. I can understand how this has come about because people feel like that, uh, being tired is when bad things happen. So they want to get used to being tired because they want to push themselves there in order to get used to being there because that's when games, but if you avoid that altogether. Get fit and treat your conditioning properly. Don't treat it as an afterthought where you want to ram as much fitness in a 20 minute session as you can. Don't treat it where you want to, uh, even if you're, if you're a ruppy coach, don't treat it whereby you can squeeze it into your, your ruppy training sessions. Cause like you only have a limited amount of time with all the other skills and all the other things to improve. I don't think fitness has a place, especially if you're only training twice a week. Likewise, if you're doing weights, if you're trying to get bigger, stronger, faster, any of this stuff, right, you need to raise those capacities, raise your ability to perform at your best. And if you, um, train with focus and intention and you make those adaptations so that your best gets better and better and better when you're tired, that also gets better and better and better. Much faster and with much more, uh, ceiling than if you continually train tired, if you get as strong, fast, explosive as possible, when you're tired, you're still going to be stronger, faster and more explosive than you would have been if you were training consistently tired and especially if you're training consistently tired to get faster and more explosive and stronger because Your training adaptations are actually going to make you slower, weaker, and less explosive, and less mobile because you're pushing fatigue so high and that high fatigue stops you from making those adaptations. That was my mini note. That was a big rant on being tired. Um, hopefully that resonated with you. Hopefully that makes a lot of sense. Chasing being tired is not the goal. I understand how it happens, but absolutely it is not the goal. It is sometimes on occasion a consequence of really pushing yourself and we take that. But we don't treat it like it's a goal. We treat the adaptations like they are the goal train to win For the most part stay fresh so you can continue to train to win Get better and keep winning games and keep improving your physical performance. Of course, this is the approach that we have at Rugby Muscle. So if this sounds like something that is appealing to you, and sounds like something that you can't quite wrap your head around in order to program yourself, and you want to see what it's like, the Rugby Muscle Academy is now taking on athletes. You can choose whatever program for your situation. I'm not going to sell it here. The links will be in the description below. Hopefully you enjoyed that one. Let me know in the comments and give it a big thumbs up. Subscribe if you are new and I'll see you guys in the next one.