School Boy Rugby’s 3 different seasons…

June 7, 2011 0 Comments

The 2011 school boy rugby season is slowly but surely drawing to a close so the big question on a lot of players’ minds are:

 

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