Okay, so there's a big mistake that I see from ambitious amateur rugby players all the time, and it's based on a law that is rarely talked about. And once you see it, you'll sort of never unsee it. And once you understand it, it will change the way that you train, you play, and the way that you measure progress Whether you're chasing weight on the bar, whether you're trying to drop kilos on the scales, get a faster Bronco time, or more first 15 experiences, there's a good chance that you are falling foul of this law. But here's the catch. The very targets that you are setting might be the exact thing that is holding you back. So today we're going to unpack what that law is. Why it matters so much and how to stop sabotaging your progress by chasing the wrong things. What's up everyone? I'm tj. Welcome to another Rugby Muscle podcast, our rugby muscle. Our whole mission is to eliminate the confusion and the fluff around rugby strength and conditioning so that amateur players across the world can get stronger, fitter, faster, and more powerful, and more importantly, enjoy their rugby. Now if you're hearing this and thinking, yep, I've been stuck in this sort of cycle over and over again, but you don't have time to go for everything on my channel, go for even this video and piece it all together for yourself. No worries. This is the exact kind of thing that we fix. Through rugby muscle coaching. We don't just give you a program or I don't just give you a program. I dunno why I say we. It's just me and I build your training program around you. We build your nutrition around you. We build everything around how to get you performing better than ever on the pitch without sacrificing everything around your life and spending hours in the gym. So if that sounds like something that interests you, click the link in the bio to work with me directly or to find out more information, and you'll see others that have worked with me and the differences that they notice as well on the pitch. Now, like I said, this law, it is everywhere, but before I spell it out and exactly state what it is, I want to show you how it plays out because once you see it again, you'll start spotting it. Everywhere, maybe within your own training, but you'll spot it everywhere in the world. And the first time I really noticed it was in a game of rugby itself. We just lost a tight game. One of those really, hard battles with someone that was similar. I think we were all going for, uh, promotion within our league. And the stat sheet afterwards was brutal. We'd conceded well over 15 penalties, I believe, and suddenly it became the main focus of the coaches, the captain's attention. They all agreed next week, we need to tighten this up. Let's aim for five penalties or less. And on paper that makes perfect sense, right? But the following week we did that and we had fewer penalties. I don't think we kept it under five, but it was a cleaner game. Job done right? Not quite, because we lost again, and this time it wasn't even close. We were passive at the breakdown. We were slow to commit. We had poor line speed. The defensive effort in general looked flat because we were so focused on being. Squeaky clean, we'd fix the penalties, but it actually had made the team worse because here's the truth, penalties were not the problem. They were a symptom of deeper issues. Maybe lads were getting isolated because their support was too slow. Maybe the defense line was disorganized, so players were diving in for cover. Maybe fitness was poor, and the decisions under pressure just weren't there. It's difficult to decide what that was, but the penalties looked like the problem. But the moment we made that the target, we lost sight of what was really going on. So there's a big hint at what this law could be, but let's keep moving on. So same thing happens in the gym, right? I remember one off season after getting my first semipro contract, I set myself a clear goal. I wanted to bench 125 kilos by the time the preseason had started. So I built my own program, if you can even really call it that. The entire thing was basically. Hit two to three reps and add weight every single week. That was the plan. Simple, straightforward, and for a while. Like a couple of weeks it did work. But real quick, the cracks started to show. My technique was getting sloppy. My shoulder was starting to niggle. I'd bounce it off my chest. Every session was do or die. I remember just caffeine myself up to see if I could push more weight, and worst of all, I was just chasing that, that number. That I wasn't building strength. I never actually got to the 125 after months and months of plateauing, and that's because I wasn't building capacity. I wasn't developing control, volume or recovery. I was just piling weight on the bar and hoping that that meant I was getting stronger. You see, building strength is not the same as expressing it. My goal should have been to build the strength. Capable of benching 125 kilos. Side note, now I can hit 140 at most points within the training year. Sometimes I might need to take a couple weeks to build up to it, but I lift much less in general compared to what I used to back then. Now, another one I see all the time is people that want to improve their broncho time. So the plan, they run Broncos every week. Now for the record, I have never tried to improve my Bronco time myself. It came in probably just a little bit after, as I started to close down my rugby career, and I, I already knew that I wasn't a big fan of the Bronco as a test in general. Now, I. I get that if you have to do this test as part of your team's preseason or whatever, the thinking kind of makes sense, right? If you want to get better at something, you should just keep practicing it, right? But here's the issue. Running the Bronco every single week doesn't improve. Really. Your energy systems, you don't spend enough time because a Bronco is done in a short period of time building real quality aerobic capacity or repeated sprint ability for that matter. It doesn't really address the components that make you faster, more efficient, or even better conditioned. It might might make you better at running a Bronco because you get a good cadence, but most of the time what most rugby players need in order to improve their Bronco is get a better aerobic base. I've spoken multiple times on this channel about how developing a real robust aerobic capacity via mostly slow zone two work is going to dramatically improve your fitness across the board. And this is definitely the case here. You can also increase your like, ability to hit off the mark and sprint. So that's not really a doing a Bronco that is developing. Top end acceleration and speed and power, and also obviously getting better at moving, getting better at stepping, getting better at agility. That stuff is going to also assist with your Bronco . And at Rugby muscle. We regularly have people reduce their Bronco time by well over a minute, within just a few months of focus conditioning work without ever doing a single Bronco in practice. Maybe it's a good idea to do one or two like the week before just to get your cadence up, but really it's, again, it's not the measure that's important. Now, last one, scale weight. Lads hitting a certain weight on the scale as a rubber player makes absolutely no sense if your goal is to play better rugby. Then your goal should be to play better rugby. If you compromise your training by being too heavy or underfeeding yourself and not able to train quality, you are cutting off your nose to spite your face. You might hit your goal weight, but feel weaker or slower or more fatigued or less explosive. You might never hit that goal weight because you discover that you actually perform better at a certain, different weight. Maybe you're lighter, maybe you're heavier. It doesn't matter. The variance is huge. I know some lads that struggle with their energy. If they're under like 15% body fat, and I know others that have to accept that they're small and rather than aim for a certain number that other people in their position hit, they just need to focus on packing on muscle as slow as realistic to actually pack on muscle and not fat and continue to perform like a beast rather than force feed themselves in order to hit a certain number that I'd have no doubt that they'd feel really fat and slow and lethargic at. So once again, we've lost sight of the real goal at play to become a better rugby player. So what's going on here? This is called Good Heart's Law. The law is when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure. Metrics are useful tools.. I love data. We need to collect lots of different pieces of data in order to know that our trend is going in the right direction. But the moment you start worshiping them, you start chasing them for their own sake. You lose sight of what's important, whether that's winning games, performing better on a pitch by getting stronger, fitter, or faster, or to give another example. Imagine a society where school success is judged only by test scores. Teachers would start just teaching for the test. Students would just memorize test answers instead of learning. Schools will gain the system. They'll cheat, they'll lower standards, they'll expel. Kids who drag. The average down grades will go up from those schools. But does that really mean that you're getting a better school? Does that really mean that these kids are going to be better educated? The thing that was supposed to be judged? By the metric of the test has gone down the toilet. So when you make a measure, no matter how useful and how indicative that is of improved performance or improved outcomes, when you make that measurement a target, it no longer is a good measure. And that is good heart's law and it's everywhere. Especially in amateur training, it can be seen on whoop scores. It can be hacked into your brain with gamified streaks on Strava, with your slow runs that you think need to be faster. And now you're getting bummed out because you're not performing as fast as you can be, even though you might be improving. And in fact, you might end up cutting your nose to spite your face again by pushing your runs too fast and then kicking you outta zone two and, and pushing too hard. And that's a. That's a rabbit hole for another time. It just can be really difficult to know what to look for, to understand what to use to tell you to get better as an athlete, and I get that right. So we want to look for pieces of data and we want to look for those things to improve. So my advice would be to understand that many things in rugby are actually really hard to quantify, and that's just part of the game, right? Try to really see and feel you. Are I improvement as a rubber plant? If you feel like you're improving, that's the one thing that really matters. And if you feel like you're not improving over a decent period of time, then you should look to make a change identify where you need to improve of your s and c, whether it's across the board or in one specific area, and then let the improvements come rather than chase them And if you're after clarity on what this really looks like, that is what the Rugby Athlete Blueprint is for. It's a five day online workshop where you'll finally understand how to build real rugby performance as an amateur rugby player. If you want clarity, confidence, some sample sessions to train like an actual athlete, I'll guide you through the whole thing and you'll leave after the five days with a real good understanding. Of how to improve as a player. The link for that will be in a description below. And with that we'll end the episode here. I hope you found this one useful. If you did share it with a teammate, hit the thumbs up button or leave a five star review. That stuff really does help out. My mission with Rugby muscle is to reshape the way that amateur rugby players treat their s and c, and all of that stuff does help so much. If you have any thoughts or examples where you've fallen for Goodheart's Law. I'd love to read about them in the comments. So next time you are tempted to chase a shiny number, make sure to ask yourself, is this really helping me become the rugby player that I want to be? Or am I just ticking boxes and chasing the wrong thing? Thank you guys so much for listening, and I'll catch you in the next one.