Mid-season fitness booster
Tue, 13 Feb 2007 12:42
If you are midway through the season and you feel as though your fitness needs a boost, here are a few tips. All the strength and conditioning you developed during the pre-season may start to fade – you don't feel so strong during games and begin to struggle for energy during the last 20 minutes. What's the answer? A six-week mid-season fitness booster to enhance your performance and reduce the chances of injury.
The Heineken Cup and the European Challenge Cup return this weekend.
Planning your Programme
Developing your fitness during the in-season is challenging, with the need to strike a balance between rugby training, fitness training and recovery. Train too hard and you're too tired for matches, train too little and your fitness and skills don't meet the demands of the game, so your performance suffers, or worse still, you sustain an injury.
The major benefit of competing on a regular basis is improved match fitness. Playing is quite literally your best fitness and skill session of the week. However, elements such as strength, speed and endurance tend to fade as you reach the mid-season point so you need to up your fitness training for six weeks.
At this point, it is a good idea to test your levels of fitness, allowing you to compare levels reached during the pre-season and providing a basis for goal setting and fitness programme design.
If results show that your strength is good but your endurance is weak then your mid season programme must reflect your results and focus on aerobic and anaerobic fitness.
If both strength and endurance require development do not fall into the trap of trying to improve both at the same time, and training so hard that it affects your performance at the weekend. Instead, split your six week phase of extra fitness training into two three-week blocks.
Player Specific
Match statistics clearly illustrate that forwards work for longer and have less rest than backs, particularly outside backs. As a result, forwards require higher levels of aerobic and anaerobic fitness to fuel performance and this must be reflected in the training programme.
By comparison, backs require higher levels of speed and agility to make and break tackles (although it's also great to have big forwards who are fast!) so more time is spent on speed and power training drills. However, a back with poor endurance, identified during fitness testing or early fatigue during matches, should also focus on improving aerobic and anaerobic fitness.
Conversely, a forward with great endurance and strength may focus on speed and power drills. The point is – be player specific not position specific when designing your programme.
Click here for a full six-week mid-season programme!