All right, so the off season should be a time where you can level up, you can get stronger, fitter, faster, more durable, just a generally better rugby player. Or you can completely revolutionize yourself as a player as well. Instead, what most players end up doing is wasting it. You get busy, you get lost, you end up spinning your wheels and wondering why come preseason? Nothing has really changed. Back when I played, I did make a ton of errors with my s and c, but I also remember every off season seeing it as a little bit of a mini project, something that I could really, sink my teeth into to come back into pre-season as a newly evolved player. Who am I? I'm tj. I'm the guy behind Rugby Muscle. We cut through all of the BS when it comes to. Strength and conditioning specifically for amateur rugby players, and this is the Rugby Muscle Podcast. And in today's episode, I'm going to give you 15 reasons that your off season training probably sucks. I'm not doing this because I want to be a negative Nancy, or I want the algorithm to pick up because for some reason algorithms pick up more negative stuff than they do positive. The reason I'm doing this is because your off season is your oyster. You can do so many different things. And make it work. So instead what I'm going to do is list out common mistakes that I see rugby players do within their off season. You are welcome to use this as a bit of an audit for your own training, and we'll just see how much your off-season plan really sucks. And look, you don't need to train like a full-time pro in order to get results. In fact, if you just train two to three sessions a week, but you do so consistently with enjoyable, effective, and efficient sessions, there's no reason that you cannot come day one of pre-season a completely new player and shock your teammates with how well you perform on the pitch. It really can happen. Just make sure that you don't fall for any of the 15 mistakes that I will lay out in this episode. Let me know in the comments below. On YouTube or on Spotify, you can now hit the three dots. No, you don't even have to hit the three dots. You can just leave a comment, leave us a comment on Spotify. Let me know which of these 15 mistakes resonate with you the most. I'd love to have some feedback from you guys. This podcast is growing out and you know the comments are always, always, always welcomed, so let's get into it. Number one, you don't have a plan. You just do workouts. Seemingly obvious, but this is still such a huge mistake. The amount of people that show up to the gym and they don't have a plan, they just lift whatever's free, maybe throw in a mobility routine that they saw on Instagram, and then they'll call it a day. You're just never gonna get results. You need to have a plan in place, and that plan needs to last, not just one workout, not just one week. Like it needs to be lasting three to four weeks minimum in order for you to keep progressing and then keep going from there. Ideally. You have an idea for where you want to be, come preseason or even in a year's time, and then you're gonna chunk that down into smaller blocks as you go by. I've got lots of videos on the channel. Explain how this process works, but if you don't have a plan, you are not going to make the most of your off season. Number two, if you do have a plan but it's copied from another sport, then again, you're not gonna make the most of your off season. If you're following a program designed for another sport, then. That means that your program is going to get you better at that other sport, not rugby. Rugby is unique. It is not CrossFit, it is not power lifting, it is not bodybuilding or Olympic lifting. You can take some inspiration from these sports. But ultimately you need a plan that fits Rugby's demands. None of these other sports have the exact same demands as a rugby player does, and particularly as what you do. So you've got to weigh out what you need as a player and make a plan from there, or I don't know, ask someone else for a plan., I know a guy links into the description below. Number three. This is quite classic. You think that off season is bulking time off season? Yes, it is for building, but it is not for getting sloppy. You want to focus on getting quality gains, not just adding kgs to the scale. This is a mistake that I made before the most difficult preseason that I ever had. I gained over eight kilos in the off season, which was a space of about 10 to 12 weeks, which is never, ever a good idea. Ultimately, most of that bulk that I did build was lost by the time that the seasons started. And that's not even a bad thing because most of the bulk that I did build was think about eight kilos in shutter short space of time. That is not muscle. You muscle building is not a fast process, and muscle building is not really the end goal of your rugby strength and conditioning. The end goal is to build strength and power so you can dominate collisions. Muscle is a part of that. You want to get bigger, but the reason that you want to get bigger is because the more muscle that you have, the more force that you can produce. Okay, so this is the priority about producing the force is about becoming more effective in contact situations. Even so, it still takes time. The goal is to build that strength and power not to join the front row club by accident. Number four. Another incredibly common one I see with rugby players in their off season. You do absolutely no condition, and I'm sorry, touch rugby doesn't count. What you need is structured energy system work. I'm talking zone two runs or zone two work in general. Tempo sprints, properly progressive aerobic training. That is what you need to build out your aerobic system that is going to have you be relentless, come preseason and properly prepared that that is gonna build your fitness. Unlike anything else, we can do some other stuff like some other intervals, and there are other different things that we can do for a condition, but this is a really good time to work on your aerobic system. And I'm not saying don't play touch, but if you do, don't spend the whole time on the wing and then count it as a really hard fitness session. Number five, you chase fatigue, not progress. If you think that a session only counts if you're feeling wrecked after it, or if you think that you wasted yesterday because you're not really sore today, you're kind of missing the point. Yes, the off season does mean that you get to deal with a little bit more fatigue from your training because you don't have a game that you need to be fresh for. Every Saturday, but at the end of the day, what you need to do is train for outcomes, not just the amount of effort that you can put in. And so sometimes that means that you still need to pull back so that you can have more quality training sessions throughout the week. Number six. You do endless fluff work to build muscle. I've kind of hinted this already, and accessory work does have its place, but it's not going to replace big, heavy compound lifts that is going to build your strength base, and that is what is going to build the most amount of muscle in my lifting work. I'll spend less than 15 minutes doing accessory work and I'll still get a ton done within those 15 minutes. It's the heavy work that does. The heavy work even if your primary goal through the off season is to build as much muscle as possible, it's still best done as a natural and as a rugby player by lifting heavy weights, whites, Number seven. You think that cleans and snatches are going to be enough speed and power work. I'm sorry, it's just not the case. Olympic lifts can be useful for driving intent, but really they're not everything and really, really, you don't even need them at all within your off season plan. Even if you want to get faster and more powerful, nothing is going to replace sprinting and jumping along with real heavy lifts for building real specific rugby speed and power. I'm not knocking Olympic lifting, I even competed in Olympic lifting myself. I just don't think they are a necessary tool, and for most people that I've seen utilize them. There's just so many better tools that you can utilize, like, the sprinting, the jumping, the heavy lifting, the basic stuff. Most of the time that's going to be a better path to pursue if you really want to build as much strength, speed, and power on the pitch as possible. Number eight, you have no progression within your weights. You've just got sets and reps. If you're not tracking your weights and beating your weights over the course of the program and the weeks, then it's really going to be difficult to know if you're getting stronger. You can aim for linear progression, which is just adding weight to the bar, maybe progressing from RPE seven to RPE nine. Throughout the course of a few weeks, you can start at lighter percentages and add weight, potentially drop in reps as the weeks go by. You can keep hitting singles or fives or threes, but progress through different movements. We do all of these things within rugby muscle. We never just write three by 10 or three by five. We've always got specific rps and percentages that we want our athletes to work for. So that we know that the weight on the bar is progressing and that they're putting, not more effort in, but they're putting more force through the bar, through themselves. They're pushing harder kind of every week Number nine. You don't progress your conditioning. Same thing if you are just doing the same runs or the same intervals with the same outputs. Every single week, you are not progressing. You need to progress volume, density, intensity, duration, or rest. Well, you don't progress rest. You reduce it. You get my point. You need to make sure that you are progressing your conditioning throughout the weeks of your plan so that you are accommodating for the fitness that you have now gained throughout Number 10, you force lifts that don't really fit. See, not every exercise will fit every athlete. You need to find what works for you. There are no special movements. There are no specific exercise that every single player has to do, so don't worry if back squatting really buggers up your shoulders. Don't worry if you've been told that you have to do bench press and pull ups as a superset, but the pull up bar is all the way over the other side of the gym. That might not work, and that's okay. You need to adjust your setup. You need to adjust your exercise to make sure that they do fit your routine, your body, your schedule, whatever the case may be. Number 11. You only train up and down. In rugby, you don't just go up and down. You go forwards and backwards and left and right, and you rotate and you move and you go around and you do lots of different movements. So it'd be important that you incorporate some of these movements throughout your training, particularly in the off season. Sometimes in the end season, it's just enough to go to rugby practice and you'll get that rotation. You'll get that movement, but you don't want to show up to preseason, stiff and sore and awkwardly moving. Because you haven't done any rotation, you haven't done any lateral movement. If you want to become a better athlete, it's also important that you target that musculature and get it stronger so that you can perform better on the pitch. Now if this list is really hitting home and you are realizing that your plan might just be more like a random list of exercises, then now is the time. I'm opening up five slots for one-on-one coaching, specifically for amateur rugby players. In their off season, you'll get a custom plan tailored to your goals, your schedule, and your actual life. And if you're not quite ready for full one-on-one coaching team, rugby muscle will give you a structured program without the full commitment links. For both of those will be in the description. You know what to do. All right, so getting into our last four here. Number 12, you sleep like a uni. Student in exam week, late nights and poor sleep really do kill recovery. Most people are so concerned with recovery but are not getting a consistent seven to nine hours of quality sleep. I implore you to try this for like two weeks and see what a difference it makes with your energy, with your performance in the gym, with your overall wellbeing. All it takes is to shut off Netflix that like one or two hours earlier, have a nice bedtime sort of routine. Get ready to get to bed and be consistent with it. Set yourself an alarm to go to bed early to make sure that you hit that seven-ish hours as a minimum, ideally more. If you do already get seven, experiment with trying to get more and see how much better that makes you feel. Number 13. Your nutrition goal is just to eat healthy. You see in a landscape where everyone is so concerned with recovery, we've spoken about the training volume, we've spoken about the sleep. Nutrition is the third thing that matters when it comes to recovery, and then that's it. And if your diet plan is just to eat clean and then hope for the best, you're really just doing nutrition by vibes, right? Healthy isn't a strategy. You need to dial in your nutrition to make sure that you'll get adequate fuel to make sure that you're training hard and recovering well. But also potentially shedding weight, if that is a goal for you or gaining muscle, if that's a goal for you as well. Either way. If your goal is just to eat healthy, that doesn't really mean anything. Quantify it. Make sure that you are sticking to some sort of plan in order to get the most from yourself. I'm not saying you have to be a Tupperware Tony or track every single bite that you have on MyFitnessPal, but I am saying it is a good idea to know how much protein you're getting in, how many fruits and vegetables on average you're getting in each day, and yeah, how many calories you're getting in because that way you've got some data to tweak and adjust depending on where you want to be. Number 14, an absolute classic I see from rugby players. You grind really hard for three to four weeks and then you just end up ghosting the gym. Short bursts of motivation, don't build results. What you need is consistency over time. Set yourself a plan that you know that you can stick to for the whole of the off season, or have an idea of what you want to be doing through the whole of off season. I'm not saying you have to be training when you're on vacation. What I am saying is consistency is the most important thing when it comes to getting results in the gym as an athlete. And number 15, you constantly second guess yourself. I see this all the time from rugby players that have reached out to Rugby mussel. They want more information because they think that that is going to be the ticket. More information is not always better. Execution really does matter the most. Pick a plan and just follow through,, or if that really isn't working. Invest in coaching or programming to make sure that it is done right. Okay, so that is the 15 reasons that your off season sucks. There is your audit. If several of these hit home, you've got a clear direction. Now, your off season really can be a weapon or a waste, and it is up to you to decide. Application for the off season. Coaching are now open. Team. Rapid muscle is obviously there for you. Links will be in the description below. Otherwise, take action. Stop guessing and I'll catch you in the next one.