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How Many Days a Week Should You Lift For Rugby - Best Training Split · The Rugby Muscle Podcast

• 0:00
  Okay, so if you wanna know the workout split and how many days exactly you should be lifting to gain strength, to gain muscle, and to improve your rugby performance, this is the video for you.
• 0:22
  What's going on everyone?
• 0:23
  My name is tj.
• 0:24
  I'm the guy behind Rugby Muscle.
• 0:26
  We are dedicated at improving amateur rugby performance in the gym.
• 0:31
  And what better way to sort of help you guys out that are looking to improve your performance than by answering this age old question of how many days you should actually be lifting in the gym.
• 0:41
  And how many days you should be working on your strength, your conditioning, your anything that you want to improve for your physical preparation, for your rugby performance.
• 0:49
  Now, before we get into exactly how many days that should be, we are gonna go through a little bit of a process because We've got some considerations that you must wrap your head around and must answer for yourself.
• 0:59
  Because there is no one size fits all answer to this question.
• 1:03
  There are some considerations that you have to well consider in order to answer this question for yourself.
• 1:08
  So we're gonna build through that, work through that together, and hopefully you, by the end of this video, you will have a real solid answer, at least a number of answers, a number of ways for you to solve this issue, and a number of ways for you to really understand what you need to do in the gym.
• 1:24
  As far as how many days you need to commit in order to improve your performance, now of course, as we get into this first thing to consider, I'd like to ask you if you are enjoying this type of video, if this video is going to be useful for you, let me know by hitting that thumbs up button.
• 1:39
  Subscribing if you are new and if you already train in the gym for rugby, which I, I hope you do, but if not, that's also cool.
• 1:46
  Let me know in the comments below.
• 1:47
  Let me know how many times a week you already currently train and what your workout split is and how you find your progress with that, because that helps us.
• 1:55
  We'll have a little bit of a chat and also helps out their algorithm to help rugby muscle grow.
• 2:00
  Everything that we're doing with rugby muscle right now is organic and relies on you guys' contribution and appreciation.
• 2:07
  So the thumbs up button and the comments really do help out.
• 2:11
  Now let's expand this rugby physical preparation pyramid for you to see it in a little bit more detail.
• 2:15
  Because I do think it's really important for you to see what the rugby physical preparation pyramid looks like and how that can affect you and what you are doing in the gym before we even like, Enter the gym.
• 2:28
  We should have an objective.
• 2:29
  What is the goal?
• 2:30
  What are we trying to achieve by going to the gym?
• 2:33
  Now most of you are going to be looking at the base of this pyramid, especially when you're in the gym.
• 2:39
  and for the vast majority of your time in the gym, the vast majority of your career as a rugby player in the gym should be spent improving and widening that base.
• 2:47
  And then over the time as we get more and more, Advanced as we need to.
• 2:52
  We can work our way up the pyramid, but for the most part it's going to be spent, especially, we're in the gym, not out doing our conditioning.
• 2:59
  It's going to be spent working on our strength and our hypertrophy.
• 3:02
  Yes, we're going to add some movement control with that by, you know, our exercise selection allowing us to move better and continually working on that.
• 3:11
  But for the most part, our main thing that we're looking here is for our strength and hypertrophy.
• 3:15
  If you're already massive, if you're already strong, that's going to dictate again how many times you really need to be going in the gym because if you don't need to improve your strength and hypertrophy, maybe like there, it is not unheard of for some really high level rubber players, but to basically, Have never gone into the gym properly or to never at least have worked on their strength and hypertrophy and most of their time being spent on prehab and conditioning.
• 3:39
  And we're looking at you guys that are Polynesians that have the, the best genetics that there is when it comes to strength and muscle.
• 3:46
  Now, of course in the gym you can spend some time building up your speed and your power and obviously your core and looking things further up the pyramid, depending on what it is you need and your need for it.
• 3:59
  As a player, that's gonna dictate, that's gonna be your primary tool for deciding, right?
• 4:05
  This is how many times I need to work on this stuff or what I'm going to be working on, Jim.
• 4:09
  How do I do that and how many times do I need to improve those things cuz different, Physical components will require different, stimuli okay?
• 4:18
  So if you are doing strength, maybe you are going to go into the gym more frequently than if you are only concerned with building muscle or even just retaining muscle.
• 4:27
  That's our first sort of thing that we must consider as players..
• 4:32
  The second thing to consider is, I mean it goes hand in hand with the first is what time do you currently have and how consistently can you train?
• 4:41
  At those times because it, it doesn't matter if the optimal training, split or if the optimal amount of times you can go to the gym is four or five or even six times a week or even three times a week.
• 4:52
  If you cannot make that many times, through your own working family, social life commitments.
• 4:59
  If you can't make, you can only go to the gym.
• 5:02
  When you can go to the gym, it doesn't matter what's optimal, what's perfect.
• 5:05
  What matters is what you can do consistently and not just looking at your calendar as far as your work and your school and your social life and your other things are concerned, but also looking at your history, like maybe you can squeeze these things in here.
• 5:18
  Potentially, but you've never had that momentum before and you've never been able to do it.
• 5:22
  Like, look back on that and learn those lessons.
• 5:25
  So be really, really realistic.
• 5:26
  I, I'd like, if anything in my decade plus and working with rugby app athletes and working with amateur athletes, the key thing that I found to.
• 5:37
  Really elicit the best results is staying consistent in the gym.
• 5:41
  And the key thing to stay consistent in the gym is actually not going to be like doing everything perfect or like being really motivated.
• 5:50
  It's.
• 5:51
  Being able to set yourself the minimum amount of times that you can attend the gym, the minimum amount of times that you can commit to training and consistently hammering home of that.
• 5:59
  If that's just twice a week, if that's just three times a week, you can always pause the video there and say, okay, I'm actually, if it's three times a week, you can, you can continue this video to figure out if actually you don't even need to commit to three sessions, maybe two is actually gonna be your best way.
• 6:13
  And you'll find out further along this video as we work through these considerations.
• 6:17
  To find out whether that is for you or for not, but this is so, so, so criminally underrated.
• 6:25
  So, so many people try to find the perfect training split and it just doesn't fit their schedule.
• 6:30
  Therefore, throw it out, throw it in the trash.
• 6:33
  It's just not necessary.
• 6:34
  It's just nothing.
• 6:35
  It's not something that you shouldn't even entertain in your, in your brain, because then in your head, okay, I'm doing something suboptimally.
• 6:42
  What's the point of me even doing this?
• 6:43
  And that's not the mindset that you should be having.
• 6:46
  Now the third thing that you have to consider, which I touched on already, is going to be how much volume you need to get the effects that you're after.
• 6:53
  So the first consideration was what effects are we after now we have to consider exactly how many or how much volume you need.
• 7:01
  So how many sets, how much work do you consistently need to do in order to improve at the aspects that you want to improve?
• 7:08
  And obviously, if there's multiple things going on, you don't wanna choose the upper end of all of these because that's gonna be impractical, particularly in terms of your recovery.
• 7:17
  So you you want to have a look at.
• 7:19
  How many sets you need in order to really get the most and get the effect that you're after.
• 7:25
  So if you're after power, how many sets a week do you need to do to improve that?
• 7:29
  And how are you going about go about doing that?
• 7:31
  And how are you gonna squeeze these in these sessions?
• 7:33
  Because once you've done that, Then you can play around with the different splits like such as upper, lower, et cetera, et cetera.
• 7:39
  And we'll get into that in a minute in this video.
• 7:41
  So that's something that you really should be paying attention to in order to improve.
• 7:45
  It's not just a case.
• 7:46
  And this is something I probably should have touched on at the beginning of the video.
• 7:50
  You cannot just be copying and pasting other people's training sessions because you haven't considered the things that are important to you and you haven't gone about.
• 8:00
  Actually figuring out what it is you, you want to improve and how you're going to improve those things.
• 8:04
  You've just literally taken someone else's, all of their considerations and sort of plugged it into your own life.
• 8:09
  That's not how physical adaptation works.
• 8:11
  That's not how you can improve as optimally as a rugby player, particularly around your schedule, particularly around the things that you want to improve upon.
• 8:20
  So really consider how much volume it is.
• 8:23
  That you're gonna need.
• 8:24
  But again, and this will also be affected by who you are as a person as far as like if you are, if you are a new trainer, if you are fairly new in the gym, what you need is significantly less than a lot of other people.
• 8:37
  Likewise, if you've got lots of other things to improve, maybe you don't need more volume, maybe all you need is more time.
• 8:44
  Maybe you just need to give yourself more time to adapt.
• 8:47
  So rather than trying to do as many sets as you can and hammer home as much as hypertrophic as you can in six weeks.
• 8:53
  Maybe you give yourself 12 to 18 weeks, or you don't even give yourself a period of time.
• 8:58
  You just continually work on the minimal amount so that you're continually improving and able to utilize other areas or not consistently keep failing as quite a lot of people seem to do.
• 9:10
  So hopefully that makes sense.
• 9:11
  That was a little bit wordy, but you, it's something that you need to understand and, and something that.
• 9:16
  Well, you don't need to understand it, but it is a definitely a consideration for how many times you need to be going to the gym, the amount of volume that you need.
• 9:24
  And a lot of people don't think about this and that's why they hire other people or buy other programs or copy and paste other programs, cuz hopefully those programs have considered it, but they've considered it for the person that they're designing the program for, not specifically for you.
• 9:38
  So it's still been a consideration, just not how you optimally would like it to be.
• 9:43
  bonus consideration is gonna be something that I always try to hammer home to people.
• 9:48
  And something that I always use with athletes I work with at Rugby Muscle is, what is your low hanging fruit?
• 9:54
  Right?
• 9:54
  So if you've got a, a, a different low hanging fruit to strengthen hypertrophy, maybe you, you've been trained in strength, you've been, you've gotten yourself nice and big.
• 10:03
  You've gotten yourself nice and strong.
• 10:05
  But there are some other areas that you could train, then I would focus most of my efforts, if not, a decent amount of effort into those areas.
• 10:13
  And maybe that takes away from the strength and hypertrophy work that you are doing in the gym as far as like the volume and the days that are dedicated to strength and hypertrophy.
• 10:22
  But that's fine because you're already strong enough.
• 10:25
  If you can find the low hanging fruit, it doesn't actually need that much work.
• 10:28
  So it's not necessarily a case of putting all of your focus into those areas.
• 10:32
  It's just a case of making sure that that stuff is done.
• 10:34
  So previously, maybe, and this is something that I get a lot with rugby players, is you are already strong.
• 10:42
  You're already pretty big.
• 10:44
  You've already done a lot of work in the gym, dedicated towards that, but you've done practically nothing as far as your aerobic capacity goes.
• 10:51
  Now, Could you do four sessions in the gym and like still continually grow?
• 10:57
  Yeah.
• 10:57
  And would that be a little bit better than three?
• 11:00
  I.
• 11:00
  Maybe, but with three sessions in the gym plus one aerobic session be huge for your performance as a rugby player and maybe even two in the gym.
• 11:09
  And two, focus on your aerobic capacity.
• 11:11
  Yeah, those things would be considerably better.
• 11:14
  And now because of the low hanging fruit, because you haven't spent that lot, much time working on your aerobic capacity, you would experience a huge increase.
• 11:23
  In your performance as a rugby player.
• 11:24
  And that's something that we take advantage of.
• 11:26
  That's something that I emphasize in the Rugby Conditioning Guide, which you can find in the description below.
• 11:31
  And something I do with my, all of my athletes I work with at rugby, at Rugby Muscle is find out that low hanging fruit and not necessarily hammer it home as far as like doing loads of volume in that, in an effort to build up that, that physical component that you are lacking, but, It will be the primary consideration each week, and maybe that only means a few sets for one session.
• 11:58
  That's fine.
• 11:58
  If it's consistently worked on, then.
• 12:01
  It can be improved consistently, and therefore because it's that low hanging fruit, because it's a component that's not been that touched that much before, it's going to experience a rapid increase, which is going to have a huge effect on your performance.
• 12:13
  So if you've got a low hanging fruit, I would suggest primarily putting that in.
• 12:18
  It doesn't mean that it needs loads of sessions.
• 12:20
  It just means that that is never a session that gets dropped, that is never sacrificed for other stuff.
• 12:26
  Even as important as you might consider those other areas to be.
• 12:29
  So now we're gonna look at what is needed, particularly for, strength and hypertrophy, because that's what a lot of you are after.
• 12:37
  We're looking at how many sets a week you need to improve.
• 12:40
  So as you can see here, when it.
• 12:42
  It comes to, um, sets per week for muscle growth.
• 12:47
  And it's kind of similar for strength.
• 12:49
  It's similar enough for strength that, uh, I wouldn't put a different graph up there.
• 12:53
  We're looking at a big improvement, a huge improvement, astronomical improvement of muscle growth when it comes between zero to five sets and we're looking at a small improvement from five to 10 sets, and then we're looking at after that 10 to 15 to 20 sets.
• 13:10
  Basically no difference.
• 13:11
  Right?
• 13:11
  So we are looking at elite trying to get in a minimum of five sets a week for most of your muscle groups.
• 13:18
  If not, ideally 10.
• 13:19
  10 would be ideal anymore.
• 13:21
  Seems to be like.
• 13:23
  The, the amount of time that we're spending on those sets for muscle growth or for strength could be spent doing other things.
• 13:29
  Now, if we've got old unlimited time and unlimited recovery resources, maybe we could expand that, but to me it just seems like that's not worth our time or our recovery resources to be spent dedicated to recovering from those an any of those sets after 10.
• 13:46
  And then you can see here perin table, which is more to do with strength gain if you're looking at different percentages, different amount of reps per set, and then the, the total volume of, uh, repetitions that you should be doing in a given session.
• 14:01
  You can see here that you, you, you've got different, Amounts of reps that you can hit and different amounts of weights that you can hit in order to continually improve your strength.
• 14:10
  And again, it's not that high.
• 14:11
  It's not that physically demanding per session or per week.
• 14:16
  It is just, again, more about that consistency again, why that schedule is more important than having the perfect program.
• 14:22
  It's not about the perfect program, it's about how well you can say consistent, not just six to 12 weeks, but beyond that, because that's where true strength is gained.
• 14:33
  Where true Progress is made is beyond that like minimal amount of commitment as far as like your duration, not your amount of times per week, but the amount of weeks that you can consistently string together.
• 14:45
  Really, really important fact that you must be able to stomach.
• 14:49
  And then that means that if we're doing, you know, our different body parts, if we're doing all of these different, muscle groups that we're trying to improve as far as our hypertrophy goes, as far as building muscle and and gaining strength, we're looking at probably around 60 to 80 sets per week is not set in stone, but it is a number that I know,, helps you guys wrap your head around what is needed.
• 15:10
  And it helps as far as this table goes.
• 15:13
  And as far as answering the questions, how many sessions a week do you need to be doing in the, the gym?
• 15:17
  So if we consider like our different body parts, so we're looking at arms, we're looking at chest back, lower body, and maybe we're looking even at lower body as far as quads and hamstrings are different.
• 15:27
  How you would.
• 15:29
  Separate your muscle groups up is going to be up to you and up to your weaknesses.
• 15:33
  Again, what do you need to improve?
• 15:35
  Maybe you have a big upper body, but a small lower body, so you would dedicate more time towards that.
• 15:40
  It depends again on what you need, but this is a simplistic way, and this is probably the best way for you to wrap your head around how many sessions a week you should be doing.
• 15:48
  So if we're looking at 10 sets per muscle group per week, we can divide that up in several different ways.
• 15:55
  As you can see from this table here, we could do one session a week per muscle group.
• 16:01
  And just hit that each week.
• 16:03
  Most of the time that's gonna manifest itself just as a bro split, right?
• 16:07
  So we would do our chest on Monday.
• 16:09
  We would do legs on Tuesday, back biceps, triceps, shoulders, something like that, that would manifest itself in six sessions a week.
• 16:17
  You could also do that as five sessions a week.
• 16:20
  You could even do that as four sessions a week, where you would like, probably combine chest and biceps shoulders and back, legs, and then core and whatever's left for that.
• 16:29
  I, I don't know, I don't do bro splits.
• 16:30
  I'm not interested in this stuff.
• 16:31
  You'll see me, dismiss this in a second here.
• 16:34
  And again, even if we were, could only commit two to three sessions per week, we would still fairly easily get in that 10 sets per muscle group per session just by doing 20 sets from for upper body.
• 16:45
  And maybe we could combine arms and legs and we could do 10 sets for the legs and 10 sets for the arms, 20 sessions again.
• 16:52
  Or we could do three different sessions.
• 16:54
  So it could be, uh, legs, push pull, so all of our pulling muscles, all of our leg muscles, all of our pushing muscles, 10 sets per muscle group per session.
• 17:01
  That's one time.
• 17:02
  Per week, per muscle group.
• 17:04
  Now you could also do two, sessions per muscle group per week, and that would, you know, make it a little bit more efficient.
• 17:12
  And that way we could do three to five sets per muscle group per session, and we could combine those in and therefore we get a little bit more frequency, which I'll discuss in a second.
• 17:23
  That way we could do push pull legs, repeat if we were doing six sessions a week, we could also do push pull legs, upper lower.
• 17:31
  If we were doing five sessions a week, that would hit each muscle group twice.
• 17:34
  If we were trying to hit each muscle group twice with four sessions, that would be upper lower if we were trying to hit each muscle group.
• 17:40
  twice, but we only had two to three sessions to do it in.
• 17:44
  We would then do full body, or if we were doing that, that would be for two sessions.
• 17:48
  or if we were doing three sessions, we would do upper, lower, full body.
• 17:54
  That is an underrated one, and I'll touch on that one and also in a second if you stay tuned.
• 17:58
  Next, we've got three times a week and that this is where the frequency.
• 18:01
  Kind of steps up, right?
• 18:03
  And this is where we can get better results in my opinion.
• 18:07
  Again, we're doing three to five sets per muscle group per session, which again results in 10 ish sets per muscle group per week, which is gonna get our optimal amount of growth and strength gains, upper, lower.
• 18:18
  Again, we could repeat that three times for six sessions.
• 18:23
  Whether that becomes overkill is gonna be up to you and how often you can make the gym.
• 18:28
  If we are looking at four sessions a week, you're looking at your full body sessions four times ish a week.
• 18:33
  Now of course, you don't have to hit the full body every time.
• 18:38
  Maybe one time you don't hit the lower body.
• 18:40
  Maybe one time you only do one set and maybe one time you, you know, there's different ways to, make this into a full body session without actually having to hit every single muscle group, every single session.
• 18:51
  If we get down to two to three sessions a week, Then yes, we're looking at full body and we're probably trying to hit each body part.
• 18:58
  And again, we don't have to, there's no necessity to hit the biceps every single session, or there's no necessity even to hit the legs every single session.
• 19:06
  If we're doing three sessions a week, we could still do two sessions per week of lower body, but three sessions per week of upper body.
• 19:13
  And again, that might work for us recovery wise and time-wise and logistics-wise.
• 19:18
  Now, I've touched on it there, but something that you must consider is the frequency that you are touching on a movement and a muscle group per week.
• 19:27
  I definitely think for the vast majority of people outside of, and in fact everyone outside of top level bodybuilders and maybe the people that are running away from the police that are outside my window.
• 19:39
  You should be doing more than one session per muscle group per week.
• 19:44
  Not only is that going to allow you to not blast it with 10 sets.
• 19:49
  Actually let me quickly touch on that.
• 19:51
  If you're doing 10 sets per muscle group per session, the quality of those sets, is going to diminish as though, as you get tired as that session goes on.
• 20:01
  So, What you can actually save yourself or give yourself more productive training sessions is by dividing those 10 sets up into two different sessions.
• 20:12
  Not only is that gonna give you more quality as far as, um, You know the work that you're putting in because you are fresher within those muscle groups, it's also going to give you more opportunities per week to make an improvement.
• 20:25
  Say if you really want to improve your squats, are you only going to do your squats one time per week, or do you think that attacking those squats twice a week or any muscle group, any exercise, any movement, anything like that?
• 20:38
  Is it going to make sense to do it one time a week only, or do you think you're gonna experience more improvement by doing it twice?
• 20:44
  The really clear logic here is twice is going to be better, so let's just get rid of one must, one, set or one session per body part per week.
• 20:54
  That just doesn't seem like it's going to help.
• 20:57
  Therefore, we can combine the muscle groups with through the sessions.
• 21:01
  Plus when we're looking at, at, you know, your rugby performance and your rugby, things that aren't gonna prove you as a rugby player.
• 21:08
  Isolating body parts isn't like necessarily the, the way if you're able to combine body parts, you are able to do big movements as well.
• 21:17
  Big compound movements such as deadlift, such as, clean, such as other different full body power movements.
• 21:23
  That way you can express full body power and not worry about, oh, actually I've gotta train my legs tomorrow.
• 21:29
  I've gotta train my back.
• 21:29
  And this is kind of hitting my back, like, when do I get a rest?
• 21:32
  Those sorts of concerns they're sort of wiped away once you combine into almost full body sessions.
• 21:39
  The only reason those big bodybuilders need those 10 sets is because they need that much fatigue because their muscles are so like high.
• 21:47
  Per growth.
• 21:49
  They're so big that 10 sets is they need that amount of fatigue to really damage the muscle to give it any chance of growing.
• 21:57
  Now, you don't need that.
• 21:58
  You need three to five sets, and that will give you a real good stimulus without causing you that much fatigue.
• 22:05
  If you are doing 10 sets in a given session, not only do those sets diminish in quality, but they increase in the amount of fatigue that you get.
• 22:13
  Which is going to Demi take away from your other areas that you're trying to improve as a rugby player.
• 22:18
  Remember you've got all those other things, your speed, you've got um, aerobic capacity, you've got conditioning, you've got movement.
• 22:24
  All that stuff is that much harder to do with one muscle group that's really fatigued because you've hammered it for 10 sets in a given session.
• 22:33
  So let's get rid of that.
• 22:34
  Let's not worry about doing one session per week per muscle group.
• 22:38
  That's just, we're throwing that out.
• 22:40
  Okay.
• 22:41
  That leaves us with, the options that we've got here.
• 22:44
  We've got, push pull legs for six sessions a week if we're gonna hit each muscle group twice a week.
• 22:50
  If we're gonna do four sessions, I'm not gonna go through'em.
• 22:52
  What am I, what am I doing?
• 22:53
  I've already gone through these sessions, so we've got rid of the once a week.
• 22:56
  Now we're left with, a few different options as far as how many sessions per week you should be doing, you should be doing in the gym.
• 23:05
  The problem with this is when we consider the trade offs that we're gonna make, remember we've got so many other areas I've just touched, just spoken about it.
• 23:11
  We've got these other areas that we need to improve.
• 23:13
  We need to look at spending time developing our speed, develop, developing our power, developing our aerobic system, our our overall conditioning in order to make huge improvements.
• 23:23
  As a rugby player, that is a lot more difficult, particularly.
• 23:27
  When we're looking at, you know, our, our weekly schedule, not only just as far as recovery goes, but as what we've already spoken about as how many sessions you can make.
• 23:35
  Like, I think that if we're spending, I.
• 23:39
  Six sessions a week, or even five sessions a week lifting, that's not going to be worth the trade off.
• 23:45
  Again, if we touch on this, the volume that's needed, you look at this graph again, you, we don't need to.
• 23:50
  Go much further past 10 sets per week.
• 23:54
  And in fact, if we do, yes, we still get a tiny, tiny increase, but that comes at the cost of all the other things that we could be spending our time doing, such as conditioning, such as, power work such as speed work, such as.
• 24:05
  Uh, just relaxing and recovering.
• 24:08
  So five to six lifting sessions per week for me is out.
• 24:12
  It's not, it's not needed.
• 24:13
  It's not, I, I don't do this.
• 24:15
  This is something that, a big lesson that I've learned in my decade plus doing this.
• 24:19
  In fact, when I first started, I did have a lot of guys doing six lifts per week because I thought it was that important because I thought if we spent those six lifts or six sessions a week really lifting, we would get faster results in three months than we would do.
• 24:35
  If we're only lifting three times, I was wrong with that.
• 24:38
  I was, I was really, really wrong.
• 24:39
  The, the, the results are basically the same.
• 24:42
  They may they, and they're not worth the slight improvement that they might be from doing those five to six sessions compared to the aerobic improvement, to the improvement in the other areas that are spent, or even just the like consistency that you can achieve by only having to go to the gym.
• 24:59
  Two to four times a week.
• 25:01
  So five to six lifts is out, and that's where we are left with the options that you have available here.
• 25:06
  You're looking at four sessions a week, maybe if you're doing upper or lower, you could even do two full body sessions and then an upper and lower.
• 25:14
  Or we can look at four, four full body sessions combined in different ways.
• 25:18
  You know, you could do light and heavy.
• 25:21
  You could also do that with two to three sessions and still get really good stimulus.
• 25:25
  But that's, that's what I'm looking at as far as the ways that we're going to be lifting in the gym to improve our rubber performance.
• 25:32
  It shouldn't ever be more than four sessions and it should be, you know, two to three sessions per week if you are looking at other things and your, your time like allows you to do that.
• 25:43
  So, Yes, there is scope for upper lower, but I don't think it should be anywhere near all of your strength and conditioning sessions.
• 25:49
  I think if you're doing upper lower allows you a little bit of time, you know, because you don't have to hammer home so many sets.
• 26:00
  Per muscle group, maybe it takes you 30 minutes or 40 minutes to get done with your upper body work that allows you time to potentially do some conditioning whilst you're already in the gym and keep it within a reasonable timeframe.
• 26:12
  Same for your, uh, lower body.
• 26:14
  You could actually spend time doing speed work.
• 26:15
  And in fact, this is a template that we do quite a lot is we'll do, we'll spend 20 minutes doing speed work and then we'll come in and we'll do some lifts or we'll do some lower body.
• 26:24
  Work earlier on in a day, and then we'll come back before we go to our rugby training session and we'll do some speed work there.
• 26:31
  That way, you know, we are allowing for quite quick sessions to get in and get done, but we're also allowing the time for all the other work that we need to be doing as a rugby player, our conditioning, our speed, our other stuff, I mean our actual rugby sessions.
• 26:47
  That stuff.
• 26:47
  Now that you've got a lot more time to be able to do it and, and really get the results from it.
• 26:52
  Okay, so this leads me to this conclusion and answers to the question of how many days a week should you be lifting in the gym to improve your rugby performance?
• 27:00
  Even, and lemme, I can't stress this enough.
• 27:02
  Even if strength and hypertrophy are your main goals, you only need to be in the gym two to three times a week, maybe absolute maximum of fourth.
• 27:11
  But my general recommendation is two to three times a week, this allows you to, have some time to focus on the other work.
• 27:19
  Yes.
• 27:19
  You could be spending all of your time like, Trying to build up your strength and trying to grow, but actually the majority of that is already gonna be done in these two to three sessions a week.
• 27:29
  And therefore, you're still able to improve.
• 27:31
  Not only you getting bigger and stronger, but you're getting fitter, you're getting faster, you are being able to recover and live a life.
• 27:37
  You, you're living a balanced life where you're not just focused on getting big 24 7.
• 27:42
  All these bodybuilders that go to the gym five to six times a week, they're there to.
• 27:48
  Justify that huge time commitment.
• 27:50
  If that, if that makes sense.
• 27:51
  They're, they're trying to, they don't need to commit that much.
• 27:54
  Right.
• 27:54
  And, and they haven't got other areas that they need to commit to.
• 27:57
  And therefore there's, you know, they play around with it and that's the, the why they result in giving the advice that they give As far as like spending that much time in the gym.
• 28:07
  You don't need to, you don't need to, you need to only spend two to three times a week in the gym if you want to improve your strength, if you want to get bigger and get stronger.
• 28:17
  And again, maximum, yes, you could stretch this out to four, but I don't really see a need for the.
• 28:22
  For anyone else to be going more than four times a week in the gym, particularly if you're trying to improve your aerobic system, if you're trying to get faster, if you've tried to do those things and live a life and have all your other commitments.
• 28:37
  Two to three times a week is the best way to do that.
• 28:40
  And now if you're watching on the video on the YouTube channel, you can see all the different ways that I've split this up.
• 28:45
  So if you're committing to three sessions a week, as per your schedule from before, you could spend that two of those sessions doing weights, one of those sessions doing aerobic work.
• 28:55
  You could, if you're committing four sessions a week, you could do two weights, one aerobic work.
• 28:59
  Uh, one other, so that could be a speed session, that could be core, that could be just a dedicated skill session.
• 29:04
  Or you could do two aerobic sessions as well.
• 29:08
  If you are committing four sessions a week or even five sessions a week, there's still like ways where this doesn't have to be you spending those three or four sessions or four or five sessions in the gym.
• 29:20
  Those, if you're doing five sessions, you could still just spend two, uh, your time doing two weight sessions, two aerobic sessions, one speed session, and again, you've committed five solid sessions to your s and c there, but you're only lifting for two and you're still getting the maximum strength and hypertrophy benefit or.
• 29:37
  Enough of the close to the maximum benefit that you need as a player.
• 29:41
  So it's definitely, definitely, definitely something to consider.
• 29:44
  Two to three times a week is the sweet spot for rugby players to improve their strength, to get bigger, to get stronger, to get more powerful, explosive, and improve their rugby performance.
• 29:55
  Now, as you can see here from these pie charts, there's many different ways that you can go about it, but actually you don't have to think about this stuff.
• 30:02
  It is probably better if you don't, because you can see how complex it can get.
• 30:06
  You can get better in all areas, not just your weak points.
• 30:09
  And in fact, your weak points are probably weak points cuz you are not considering them.
• 30:13
  So it's always a good idea to invest in a program that covers your blind spots that is written by an expert.
• 30:20
  So, You know, you don't have to, not only do you not have to think about it, but it's got areas, or it involves improvement in areas that you haven't even even considered because you are not an expert.
• 30:30
  You are doing your other things, and you're just trying to figure out exactly what it is.
• 30:34
  Don't worry about figuring out exactly what it is.
• 30:36
  Invest in a program such as team rugby muscle here.
• 30:40
  You're gonna understand it.
• 30:41
  Doing more and more and more work is a trap and it's actually definitely not going to improve your performance.
• 30:47
  It's not making you better.
• 30:49
  Better is better.
• 30:50
  And the best is team rugby muscle.
• 30:53
  Uh, year-round rugby strengthen conditioning program for amateur athletes.
• 30:57
  You can find that at rugby-muscle.com/team.
• 31:01
  I'll also pop a discount code in the description below so that you can get access to your subscription.
• 31:07
  To the program so that you can get it delivered right to your phone at a discount and you experience the benefits for yourself.
• 31:14
  Not only do you get the strength and condition program with that, but you'll get recipes, you'll get loads of other benefits.
• 31:19
  You'll get into the insiders members area of rugby muscle, and you'll also get access to skill work.
• 31:25
  So if you, you know, if you're committing to five times a week or even six times a week sessions.
• 31:30
  But you've already maximized the benefits that you can get from yourself in the gym and on the field doing your conditioning, like doing more isn't better, and in fact you'd be better off spending your time doing skill work.
• 31:42
  So we've thrown that in as well.
• 31:44
  That's, that's something extra you can get as part of team rugby muscle.
• 31:47
  Join in the description below.
• 31:50
  If you've enjoyed this video, please and you haven't given it a thumbs up, do so now.
• 31:54
  It really does help out and it also helps out.
• 31:56
  Massively.
• 31:57
  If you leave a comment in the comments below, let me know how many times a week you go to the gym.
• 32:03
  And how that split works out for you, or if you've changed it after watching this video, what your new split is going to be.
• 32:10
  If it's gonna be team rubbing muscle, I'd love to hear that in the comments.
• 32:13
  But if it's gonna be your own program, also let us know in the comments below.
• 32:16
  If you're listening on Spotify.
• 32:19
  Those five star reviews are really helping out.
• 32:21
  We're going to be really hammering home this podcast with longer form content with guests coming on.
• 32:27
  So give us five stars as we prepare for that.
• 32:30
  Thank you guys so much for watching.
• 32:31
  Subscribe if you are new.
• 32:33
  I think that's all done now.
• 32:35
  See you guys in the next one.