There are many exercises you can use to get stronger but one of the most common is a squat. A great exercise which loads the whole kinetic chain from your ankles to your upper spine. It greatly develops the strength through your lower body focusing on the thighs and glutes. The nature of a squat exercise is you can relatively safely perform low rep, high intensity strength training. While the benefits to sports performance of regularly performing squats is well known it also brings with it a few problems. These include : – Injury – The Weight itself directly loads the spine and can exa ..read more

I have been quiet on the emails recently over here at Rugby Fitness Training but I am back! Yesterday marked the effective end of the pandemic here in the UK as they announced all rules will be lifted from next week. Assuming nothing unexpected pops up the rest of the world will follow in due course and life goes back to normal. As the pandemic ends we will be able to see what effect it has had on all areas of life. I have seen a few patterns around fitness over the last two years both in my clients, friends and from the population wide data. Some observations and what it means for you. The ..read more

As the Rugby season kicks off it is common to see the fitness efforts of pre-season begin to wane as game focus takes over and you fall into a break even with your fitness progress. This is a shame as there is still a huge opportunity to develop many to most elements of your fitness even around playing games.    There are a little over 13 weeks left in the year and that means plenty of time to still achieve some amazing results. It is enough time to take great improve your base aerobic fitness, e.g. 3km, to add KG’s to your main lifts or transform your body so you are quicker ..read more

This month Christian Wade signed on with the Buffalo Bills for pre-season training. It will be a very interesting to see how he progresses as he tries to make it in American Football. So what will be the differences between the two sports?   One of the immediate differences is the speciality of each playing position. Unlike rugby there is a much greater variety in requirements between the different roles. Regardless of this all rugby positions have a much much higher aerobic fitness demand than american football.   Christian Wade will be playing Running Back. This means he c ..read more

The fitness world has loved Hiit for quite a while and it doesn’t seem to going anywhere anytime soon. For me, I never got into it and still cannot bring myself to be a fan of it .There are some good things to it but these same traits are what I do not like about it.   To those who do not know, High Intensity Interval Training (Hiit) is a short, sharp intense exercise methodology. It is often credited to have stemmed initially out of the research findings from the Tabata protocol, which is a 4 minute workout where participants put in a full 100% max effort (using a ..read more

The Six Nations is all set for an exciting conclusion this Saturday! You cannot watch a match and fail to notice how big and fit everyone on the rugby field is at professional level.  While all full time rugby players lift weights it is a misconception that this is the only way you can do resistance training. For many people, they do not have time or access to get to a gym yet still want to progress their strength. This can be done using the your own body weight. The video below was made for Rugby players and how to prepare for competition. It looks at how to use exercises for ..read more

We are on the verge of coming out of lockdown, the last change in the rules allowed outdoor exercise in small groups and sports such as tennis to return. The gyms are expected to be open again July 4th and more outdoor sport likely to be allowed before then. The government gave the green light for me to return to personal training a few weeks ago and almost all my Battersea park clients are back training now. While contact rugby is still a fair bit off at least things are rolling again. So what do you need to consider for your rugby fitness needs?   1) Accept Where You Are – I rea ..read more

In this day and age fitness gimmicks are all the rage and often people train as much to look good on social media as anything else. I stumbled on a great video of Fiji using some old school rugby fitness methods. While the science of athletic preparation and rugby fitness in particular has come on leaps and bounds the basics of intelligent, targeted hard work still remain. Too often players at all levels look for a clever trick or focus on lifting weights at the expense of fitness conditioning work.     In the video below you can see they are doing anaerobic based intervals. T ..read more