Hope everything is great on your side of the world.

Just wanted to let you know that we have moved to: www.SuperRugbyFitnes.com

You can find all the rugby conditioning information you need on the new site!

Rgds,

Stian

 
A lot of people, especially younger guys are only concerned with getting in physical shape.
Yes, it’s great to have a ripped body and look great when you walk on the beach, but will that help you on the sports field?

 
I don’t believe so! I believe it’s more important to have Mental Toughness than Physical Toughness.

 
I’ve seen this on many occasions with rugby boys. You have this Big Boy that spends most of his afternoons staring at himself in a mirror while lifting weights his dad can hardly pick up, but when it comes to training on the rugby field he doesn’t know how to use that strength and size!

 
So you might ask what the hell has mental strength/toughness got to do with it…

 
Let’s imagine we’re busy playing a massive rugby game – to make it easy for visualization purposes I would say it’s the Springboks vs All Blacks. We are of course the Springboks. The All Blacks are hammering us all over the park. They are 2 points ahead in the game and we only have about 3min to play. They are a lot more physical than we are (this is not an understatement as most of you know the size of those All Black boys) and they are tackling us to pieces.

 
If we don’t have any mental toughness we would just give up and decide that losing by 2 points is not that bad, but we do have mental toughness and we decide to take the All Blacks head-on because come hell or high water we will win the game because we are the Boks and we are the BEST!

 
See the difference in thinking patterns?

So why do you think children don’t really have the mental toughness we use to have growing up?

 
I’m sure you can answer that for yourself. Things have become too easy! Just take look around you everyday we have technology making our lives easier.Kids don’t need to endure what we had to!

 
So what’s the idea behind this post?

 
As parents you should let your child toughen up by not feeding them everything with a spoon and letting them experience live for themselves!

 
I would really like to hear your input on this matter as I really feel strongly about my statements and would really like to discuss this…
NEVER GIVE UP!

 
Stian

When is the perfect time to start training for next season?

Obviously you feel tired and you’re looking forward to having a bit of a break. There’s no harm in that and I know you earned a well deserved break, but you would be foolish if you are not thinking about next season (that’s if you are taking your rugby serious and you plan on getting somewhere with the sport).

As a professional rugby player you would have the luxury of 3 different properly planned rugby “seasons”. These seasons consist of:

Off-Season
Pre-Season
In-Season

As a school boy rugby player you are not as lucky and you will have to take care of the off-season and most of the pre-season parts yourself.

We all know that most schools only start training rugby in February even though the season starts only a month later in March! This unfortunately gives you little time to:

Build Strength
Increase Speed & Agility
Improve Coordination, Balance and Reaction
And many other skills associated to the game of rugby!

So what should you do?

Create your own little “School Boy Rugby 3-Season plan” – that’s quite a catchy name think I must coin that phrase

How do you do that?

Let’s say your season ends in June and starts again in March. I would do the following:

Off-Season: July – November

I would use July to October to mainly focus on Strength training. I’m not talking about looking good in the mirror and doing muscle isolating exercises like a body builder!

November you can still do a lot of strength training, but now I would start introducing some speed work to create a good speed foundation before the december holidays.

Even though December is a holiday and I’m all for having a break you should try and do 3x 45min workouts a week during your holiday. If you do absolutely nothing, you just wasted 5-months as you will almost be back to square one again. The idea of the december training is to not drop too much from the level you were at in November.

January and February should be used to maintain the strength you have built up, but now you will start focusing more on speed & agility as well as some fitness (when I say fitness I mean you start looking at running for the different types of endurance).

This is just an easy breakdown of the “School Boy Rugby 3-Season plan”, but I will go into more detail about this in a future post!

All the Best!

Stian

We know that a lot of School Boys are taking steroids to get bigger and perform better (or so they think)

Yesterday the Sunday Times published the following article on this subject:

http://www.timeslive.co.za/sport/rugby/article1090811.ece/Steroid-scourge-rages-in-school-rugby?commentsPage=true

Why do I think this is happening?

A lot of coaches are putting too much emphasis on size. Therefor a lot of players use a “supplement” to increase their size. Players are also uneducated because they believe they bigger they are the better they’ll be. This is not true at all!

Every player should follow a LTAD (Long Term Athletic Development) system to achieve size, strength and speed over time!

Would really like to hear your input on this – I will be covering more on this topic in my upcoming book.

All the Best!

Stian.

Hope you are well…

At least the weather is not that cold in Joburg today!  Been working on some ideas for the blog and came across the following:

This speech mimics the one Al Pacino did in the NFL Blockbuster Movie – Any Given Sunday, but was just changed to fit in with Rugby.

I think it is good, but it’s just not the same as the original!

Below is the original:

Which one do you think is better?

All the Best!

Stian

Here is the current log:

It’s good to see the stormers team still up there, but they will need to pull up their socks if they are planning on staying there! They did well to beat the blues in the last minute last week, but next time they might not be so lucky!

So the fixtures for this week is:

As you can see there are some massive fixtures this weekend – i’m sure everyone in Joburg will be sitting under a blanket and watching the games (I won’t be that lucky, will be at rugby from 7am to 3pm on saturday out in lovely cold weather)

My predictions:

Canes to beat the Force

Lions to cause an upset and beat the Highlanders (Gotto back my team!)

Stormers to beat the Brumbies

Sharks to beat the Waratahs

Cheetahs to klap the Bulls (Common Cheetahs can’t let them bulls win)

Crusarders to get back on track and beat the Reds

Hope you all have an awesome weekend and enjoy the rugby!

No beer and biltong this weekend – only Coffee and Biscuits. Sounds like we are in London Mate…

All the Best!

Stian

That is what a youth coach is supposed to do. He must design a plan (the program) on how to achieve long-term athletic development (the house).

I believe that most coaches over think this and believe that designing a program is too difficult and therefore they just “Wing it”. They take it session by session, but don’t really plan it before hand. Maybe some coaches do plan the session before hand, but don’t have a complete long-term program, which still won’t help your player a lot.  Taking notes and doing long-term programming will help you understand the best route to your players’ goals.

How do you do this?

Look at the amount of time you have to achieve the goal and then work backwards. You have to look at what you want to achieve and by which date. Once you have determined this you can start breaking everything down into chunks.

You must look at your sport and what the goal is of you sport. Example. In a rugby match you have 2 halves that consist of 40min each.  What is the goal of the sport? To get the ball from your side of the field across the opponents try line. How do you do this? You have to pass the ball to your teammates with precision that might also include short bursts of speed or sprints. During this time you will also receive resistance from you opponents, as their goal is to drive you backwards towards your line as well as steal the ball.

See how I quickly analyzed the sport? That is just a short example, you will have to go into more detail on what energy system (look at my “what fuel does your sport use” article) your sport uses, skills needed, etc.

This is just a quick example of why program design is so important for long term athletic development.

If you are a youth coach/parent coach take some time on a weekend and watch a game of your sport. Take a pen and paper and make some notes. Try and break the sport down and start to build your plan to ultimate success.

If you don’t understand how to do this, please contact me and I will be more than willing to assist you.

NEVER GIVE UP!

Rgds,

Stian

So many times I see a child looking at his favorite sport hero in a magazine and aspire to be that star. There’s nothing wrong with that, but what happens most of the time is that the child will follow the exact program that his hero is currently doing. A lot of the magazines out there give you “Ready Made” Programs, but is not designed for a child or even the general public it is geared towards professional athletes.

The same applies for coaches that just take a program off the Internet and apply it to his young athlete. The chances are good that you will see and improvement in your athlete because to be honest if you throw anything new at say a High School athlete you will see an improvement. By doing this you are not following the LTAD Principle (Described in one of my previous articles) and your athlete will have a very short sporting career because of injuries.

Let me give you a good example:

The other day I went to an International Rugby Conditioning Seminar with some of the best Conditioning Coaches in the business. It was an absolute brilliant seminar that provided the attendees with a wealth of new information on conditioning and coaching strategies. You could see that these guys new exactly what they were talking about.

So what’s the problem you might ask?

Well 95% of the attendees were High School coaches and the speakers were all involved with Super 14 Rugby (The best provincial rugby tournament in the world).

See the difference? School coaches versus Professional coaches.

You might think that there is not a big difference between the 2, but unfortunately there is a HUGE difference. The Super 14 players do this for a living while the schoolboys still have to develop and do their dreaded homework.

To get back to my point, I can bet you all my money (it might not be a lot) that 99% of theses school coaches are going to apply the exact same training conditionings/principles to their training sessions at school.
It is your duty as a coach to improve your knowledge every time you get an opportunity and it is great to attend seminars like the one I did, but you have to consider whom you are training.

Would you give a little petit lady of 50kg the same training program as a 120kg professional rugby player that needs to improve speed, agility and explosive power?

Then why do it to a child?

All the Best!

Stian

Energy Systems are like the 3 grades of fuel you get: Leaded, Unleaded and Diesel. Every sport uses a different System and sometime one sport can use more than one system.

Now, the million-dollar question: If you have a car that uses Unleaded Petrol and you fill it up with Diesel, what happens…

I’m not a mechanic, but I think you might be able to drive a short while before your car decides to STOP. Luckily if you train the wrong energy system your body won’t just stop working, but it will limit your performance.

Unfortunately most Youth Coaches/Parent Coaches believe (this is not their fault as their true education lies with teaching in the classroom) that running long distances is the best way to get fit for field / court sports like Tennis, Rugby, Cricket, Netball, Soccer, etc.

The 3 Energy Systems:

• ATP-PC System (Short Duration)
• Glycolysis (Medium Duration)
• Aerobic System (Long Duration)

ATP-PC System (“Leaded Fuel”)

This system is used in sports that need INSTANT Energy (1 – 7 seconds). An example of this would be 100m sprinting. The body needs approximately 3-5min Rest to replenish the energy used during the activity. This is the first of the Anaerobic (without oxygen) Energy Systems.

How do we train for this system?
Sprints or a High Intensity activity that lasts for 4-7seconds. The most important aspect of training for this system is to do it at full speed, it won’t help you if you don’t give it your all.

Ex. 3 Sets/10reps of 30m sprints, 30sec rest between each rep and 5min rest between each set.
Glycolysis System (“Unleaded Fuel”)

In a sport that consist 30 seconds – 3minutes of continuous movement the Glycolysis System would be utilized. If you look at rugby – even though a game is 80min you don’t run continuously for 80min. Sometimes you stand at a line-out or a penalty kick, at most you would run for about 3 minutes non stop (like a 400 or 800m event in athletics). This system needs about 90sec rest to replenish the energy used. One of the main goals of training this system is to try and remove the Lactic Acid (the burning feeling you get in your legs, also know as “heavy legs”) build up as quickly as possible. This is done through specific training where you try and increase the time before the lactic acid builds up (a.k.a your “Lactic Wall”). The Glycolysis System is the 2nd Anaerobic System.

How do we train for this system?
Activity/Exercise at a high intensity that last for min 30sec and max 3min.

Ex. 5 reps of 300m sprints with 60sec rest between each rep.

Aerobic System (“Diesel”)
The aerobic system is the one system that everyone always trains, no matter the sport. Sport that uses about 65% effort (of your maximum heart rate) and that lasts for longer than 3 minutes is the perfect candidate for this system.

Ex. Running around the field a couple of times.

Don’t understand the Aerobic and Anaerobic Systems…
The anaerobic system is like a tank with jet fuel – it will give you a sudden burst of energy, but it will be gone in an instant.

The aerobic system is more like the petrol you use in your car – it keeps you going for a longer (depending on the petrol price), but at a steadier pace.

So what does this mean?

STOP just running 5km to get fit for field and court sports – it’s mostly (there is some use in doing this, but don’t just do this for conditioning/fitness purposes) a waste of time and counter-productive.

Energy System training is an important part of the coaching skill that any coach should poses. Always study your sports’ needs so that you understand how to adapt the training program and ultimately create a system for long-term athletic development.

All the Best!

Stian

I think not!

Today I did a couple of basic movement tests with the boys. Not the usual Bench – How many kilograms, Squat – How many kilograms?, 10m Sprint – How fast?

Yes I did do a 40m Sprint for time, but that was more to get a starting point and some norms for future rugby projects.

You see a lot of coaches are too worried about numbers. How fast, how heavy, etc. I’m not, I’m more worried about how the player moves. How does he handle his body-weight when he needs to suddenly change direction? Does he have any mobility in his hips? These are the kind of things I want to improve in a growing player. This is how I will eventually improve his rugby conditioning!

Monday is our next session, will be doing a couple of other tests that determines how the boys move.

Watch this space for some more updates on the Project!

Have a great day!

NEVER GIVE UP!

Rgds,
Stian.