Common Speed Training Mistakes You Must Avoid
The best time to get faster for rugby is every day. Becoming faster is just as much an attitude as it is a physical capacity to develop.
I say this despite being the person who is responsible for the athletic development and physical performance of a rugby squad... because attitude will determine how you approach training, including (though not limited to):
How diligent you are with your warm-up
Your patience between sprints
Your actual intent and output during a session
Your effort in recovery and down-time
These key components are often dismissed by rugby players because everyone knows: “You Need to Run Fast To Get Fast”. However, these are easy wins and 100% controllable. Besides, you won’t get fast if you just run fast:
To Get Fast You Must Run Fast Consistently.
Now we’ve acknowledged the attitude check, let’s discuss the four common speed training mistakes rugby players (and some coaches) make in the quest to become faster on the field of play.
# 1 Technique Training
Technique is everything.
But technique training might just be holding you back…
I’m all for Wall-Drives, A-Skips and the likes; however, everything has its place and appropriate percentage of training time within a session and season. Are the technique drills positively influencing how you accelerate and sprint?
Using a constraints-based approach to improve technique (which I discuss in detail here) can be a great way to improve acceleration ability and something we incorporate a lot at BRC. For example, the use of heavy sled sprints means a player must organise his body to have a greater torso lean than a free sprint. This can be useful for players who have poor shin/ torso angles during the drive phase because it changes their body mechanics, and therefore 10 metre time.
We’ll typically spend more session time on the prep and skill drills in the early preseason, and phase them out as we bring in more stimulus drills during late preseason and beyond. I outline such an approach in this video.
# 2 Under or Over Striding
This year, a 30-year-old scrum half ran a personal best 10 metre time at Biella Rugby.
It’s extremely rare to improve a player’s speed at the age of 30, provided they’ve had proper speed training in their early years and throughout their career.
So you might think that I had to rely on some cutting-edge research and fancy new tech that allowed us to gain the edge and make that crucial 0.04 s improvement. That was not the case.
“Mate, you’re overstriding. Stop trying too hard and just run fast but relaxed.”
After that comment, the player ran his next three 10 m accelerations significantly faster.
That was it.
# 3 Thinking Rugby Is Enough
During the competitive season we use GPS to look at various metrics around volume, intensity, and density. It is important that within a planned week there are enough exposures to absolute-speed (for backs) and accelerations (for forwards).
Exposures aren’t going to provide enough stress to improve speed, though they will ensure that you can maintain that quality and are physically prepared to get into top-gear on game-day.
A common issue at club level is that players have little-to-zero exposures and then on a random week, for a random reason, there’s a huge speed stimulus brought into training because the coach wants faster players…such a spike in intensity can be risky from an injury-mitigation point of view, not to mention far from optimal from a performance point of view. So this is something that we actively avoid at BRC and our coach is really good at drip-feeding speed exposures into the players’ training week (on a weekly basis).
If you’re a player and/or coach, there are easy solutions:
Think about where the sprints and/or accels are within your weekly training.
These may be part of the session hidden in rugby specific drills (which can work and is great…if you’re getting up to the velocities you need to).In the competitive season, simply arrive 20 mins early to training and complete an acceleration-based warm-up before you go and play touch…
# 4 Identifying the Goal
A common fault in clubland is to turn a speed session into a conditioning session.
It’s important to identify the goal: top speed, acceleration, or repeat-sprint ability? If you’re training to improve either of the former, adequate recover is crucial. As a general rule, for a 10 metre acceleration you want 60 seconds rest; whereas for improving repeat-sprint ability or other fitness based qualities, you would have a very different work : rest ratio.
If you are working on acceleration and need to keep busy between bouts, then a simple static passing drill can work a treat before going into the next rep. Such as this one here.
Remember, speed is about quality reps at 95%+ so adequate recovery is crucial if it’s a capacity you want to develop.
Final Thoughts
Remember that you must run fast consistently to get faster, and your attitude is going to either propel you or limit you because running fast consistently comes at a cost. You must recover well to put yourself into an optimal state prior to a training session and your attitude will determine:
If you turn-up to the first training of the week tired and sore because you didn’t recover well after the game…
If you arrive 20 minutes early to training and diligently complete a speed-based warm up…
Here are a few example sessions with a speed theme:
