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What is the BEST Training Split for Rugby Players? · The Rugby Muscle Podcast

• 0:00
  Okay.
• 0:00
  Yes, let's talk about it.
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  What is the best training split that rugby players should be using for their strength and conditioning?
• 0:08
  Welcome back everyone, to another brand new Rugby Muscle podcast.
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  I'm your host, as always, tj, and we're talking about it.
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  We're talking about the best training splits that rugby players should be using.
• 0:18
  You see this?
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  Arguments sort of pop up all the time, and I absolutely think it's the fitness industry's influence that we have had from bodybuilding culture, right?
• 0:28
  Because.
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  Bodybuilders love to debate whether they should be doing full body, they should be doing upper lower splits or push pull legs becoming more and more common or even, you know, the classic bro split with chest on Mondays, back on Tuesdays, legs on Wednesdays, shoulders Thursdays, and then arms Fridays.
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  Which body part have I miss Abs?
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  And you just rotate through different body parts.
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  And for the most part, this is really just sort of flapping gums and.
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  I'll get into why, and what you should be doing as a rugby player.
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  But first understand that , we have had successful athletes, not just bodybuilder, but athletes use all sorts of approaches and make it work for them.
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  the reason this is an issue or a discussion is because we're only looking at weight training, right?
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  We're not looking at the bigger picture of rugby.
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  When we're looking at conditioning.
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  We're looking at speed work or power work, which are like huge parts of what you should be doing for your rugby, s and C.
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  It's not just a case of stimulating a muscle, moving on.
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  No.
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  You've got different ways that you can also stimulate a muscle.
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  And you can absolutely train the same muscle group multiple days in a row, or at least stimulate a muscle group multiple days in a row and be fine with that, right?
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  You could hit heavy squats on a Monday and then do some running on a Tuesday.
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  You could do a scrum session on a.
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  Thursday and then you could do some neck work on Friday and it would be fine.
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  Like just because you've utilized the muscle does not mean that that muscle cannot do anything for a week.
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  As some, you know, bro, split advocates would tell you, right?
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  It's not, even necessarily about how hard you stimulating, but the different types of stimulus all of your muscles are being used.
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  They're not just accessories or.
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  pieces of, I don't know, show pieces.
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  What would you say?
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  What, what are they called?
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  If you are doing, a yeah, if you're trying to go on stage and, and just show off those muscles, because that's what a bodybuilder is trying to do.
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  With rugby we've got so much else going on, and so it's not just that you can't look at your muscles as being, okay, I'm just training this muscle.
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  'cause What are you doing when you're doing a rugby session?
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  What, what body part would you call that?
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  It would be a full body right?
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  What body part would you be doing if you've gone out for a run?
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  Because you do need your upper body to keep your, body upright, right?
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  You need to swing your arms.
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  And yes, obviously the legs are gonna take more of an impact, but they're designed to take that impact and that's fine.
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  What about if you did a Aurora for a long time, does that mean that you can't do back for the next couple days?
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  There's lots of different things that you have to consider, right?
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  But once you understand these three big things, everything can become a little bit more clear, right?
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  Number one, as I've already mentioned, you can train the same muscle group multiple days in a row.
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  It's gonna be fine.
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  Not only is it like just okay, but you can still absolutely grow from training the same muscle group indefinitely, and you would be fine.
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  Okay, so get it outta your head that once you've trained a muscle group, that muscle group is useless or getting smaller or weaker or whatever, particularly if you train it with low volume.
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  Number two, the split that you do does not matter anywhere near as much as the consistency of which you do it.
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  So if you do, you know, even a potentially more advantageous split for four weeks, eight weeks, someone who does.
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  A potentially worse split or trains less often.
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  And even like, if we look at the, the training from a scientific standpoint and say, this is definitely worse, if that person does that slightly worse training for double the amount of time because it fits in with their life, they're gonna get better results.
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  Okay.
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  The only reason that they wouldn't is because of the third point.
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  It's not about the split, it's about what you do in those sessions, right?
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  So you could organize your split, so it works perfectly, but if you don't train with the right intensity or if you don't train with the right movement.
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  So if you don't train with the right intention with what you are doing with your training, it doesn't really matter.
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  Again, it's just flapping gums.
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  So rather than stress over what the perfect split might be.
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  You need to let the perfect split work its way to you and how you are not only training, but also living.
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  Okay.
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  So let's get into what that looks like.
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  Before I do.
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  Give this, video a thumbs up if you're watching on the YouTube.
• 5:02
  And if you're listening on Spotify, hit the three dots and give us a five star review.
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  That stuff really does help out.
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  And if you are watching on YouTube.
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  Say hi in the comments and let me know what your favorite split to utilize is, and if it changes throughout different seasons, as in, in season versus off season, but also seasons of your life.
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  Let me know in the comments below.
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  We'll have a good discussion about it.
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  So when you're looking at your life schedule, you've got to look at what else have you got going on, not just with your work, your kids, your family, stuff, that stuff.
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  Bloody important, but also your rugby training, right?.
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  Where can you actually fit in your training?
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  And one of the biggest hacks here, this is huge actually for the people that can do it.
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  Training in the morning is as big of a hack as you're ever gonna get if you can do it.
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  Okay?
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  Why?
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  Because you can get in a good high low, , training structure and be really consistent across the week.
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  If you start to have to shoehorn in your training in the evenings around your rugby training, it gets a little bit more difficult.
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  Whereas if you are just training always in the morning, you can train those double sessions on your rugby days and have that be a really high day.
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  The other days can be nice and low intensity, and then you've got your recovery from that, so ideally, you want to be waking up at the same time every single day.
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  If that is not an option for you, if you can only wake up early on the days that you train, I would probably recommend against doing this.
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  But if you can do it, if you can get to bed early, and if you can wake up nice and early, you can train nice and early.
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  This really does work well.
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  We're not like sacrificing sleep to get to the gym nice and early in the morning.
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  We're shifting our sleep earlier and then trying to get our, our training in nice and early and then we can stay really consistent with that training.
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  If this isn't an option for you, don't stress about it, look at, whenever else you can train and be as consistent as you can possibly be with that.
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  . But if you can, training first thing in the morning really is going to open things up for you in a consistency standpoint.
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  Because for the most part, things don't come up in the morning.
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  So you can just wake up, go train, and then you move on.
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  If you're training in the evening, you'll find a lot of time, particularly if you're struggling to stay consistent, uh, meetings.
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  Uh, distractions.
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  Other things come in the way, and then you're not able to get your training in consistently, and that's gonna be what's holding you back.
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  So if you can do it in the morning, even if it's a shorter session, it's gonna help you stay consistent.
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  It's also gonna help you, govern your fatigue, especially if you can get to bed early and get your sleep properly in order, then you can train.
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  High intensity days, low intensity days.
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  You can get your conditioning in, you can get into that habit as well.
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  Works really, really well.
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  And also from a frequency standpoint, again, if you can do it every day, right?
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  If you can wake up early every day, you can train early every day, then you are able to get in five or six sessions across the week.
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  And it's not going to be a bit of a ball lake to organize because you just get it done.
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  And again, if you have to sleep real late, then maybe that's just not an option for you, and instead you just have to train less frequently.
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  And that's okay.
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  Let's look at what your training split and your schedule might actually look like.
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  Now, if you are training less than five sessions a week, every weight session should be full body.
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  You do two full body sessions.
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  At most, right?
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  If you're training four times a week, two full body sessions, and then you've got, either two sessions for your conditioning and for your sprints, One should be heavy strength focused with some power in there, and then the other one should be light.
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  and you can do that either as an explosive session or as rep work, you know, your bodybuilding work, and then you can go from there.
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  That is as clear as I can make it.
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  If you are doing four sessions, three sessions, two sessions, you're only doing full body.
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  That's it.
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  Because you just don't have the luxury of organizing more weight sessions than that, right?
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  It should be two quality weight sessions and then two.
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  , conditioning sessions or one conditioning session, one sprint session.
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  Even if you are someone that lacks conditioning, you could drop that weight session down to one weight session or one and a half where you do, you know, one full body session.
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  get all your heavy work, then you can do one supplemental weight session.
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  Along with half of that session being, some sort of, conditioning as well.
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  So, zone two stuff, low intensity tempo work that could also work really well to pair with that half a weight session there.
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  Now that should make sense.
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  It's not about the different splits that you are doing as far as, upper body versus lower body or push pull legs or the muscles that you're using more so the types of sessions that you're doing.
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  And you , can combine these and, and actually what you could do even more of a hack here is if you can get some way of being able to do your sprint work right before your wait session.
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  That can really work well.
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  Or another thing that you can do is you can do your sprint work right before your rugby training session.
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  And again, that wouldn't impact the way we would organize this.
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  We would still do our two full body weight sessions.
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  one heavier and one lighter, and then we would do our sprint sessions before rugby.
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  Maybe we can do a conditioning session before rugby.
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  Maybe we do our conditioning sessions away, however you want to organize it.
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  There's lots of different ways, there's infinite different ways, really, that you can organize this.
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  Again, it's not the split that matters.
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  It's your consistency and it's what you do within those sessions.
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  Now if you are training five or six sessions a week, then you have a little bit more flexibility to play around with your weight session because now we're gonna get three weight sessions in and we can split one of those two sessions up that we had before, probably the heavier session, and we can split that up into an upper and a lower.
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  and then your weekly schedule could look something like upper body sprints because your lower body's nice and fresh.
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  Now, do some sprint work on that day after, do your upper body, then do some lower body work, then do your condition, then do a full body session, and then maybe another condition day.
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  Again, there's still infinite different ways that we could even plan this.
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  You could do three full body sessions.
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  You could do one explosive session, one heavier session, one rep work session.
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  You can even do one of your weight sessions, be more aimed at getting your, aerobic conditioning up to scratch by doing some sort of conditioning, circuit.
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  Or pump work circuit loads of different ways that we can do it.
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  But again, we're still probably going to be doing either three full body sessions along with our supplemental sprint work and our conditioning work, or we could even do two full body sessions and then a ton of aerobic work.
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  It depends on where you are lacking.
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  So we're not looking at this from what is the perfect split and then figuring out our training.
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  From there, we're looking at what you as an athlete need and what you as an athlete can commit to, and then we're arranging your training all around that.
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  And it's not as simple as saying this is the best split, apart from the fact that you should just be doing full body weight sessions and then your conditioning sessions on other days.
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  Apart from that.
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  Right.
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  It's about figuring out how the perfect split is going to come to you.
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  Okay.
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  I'll leave it there for this podcast.
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  I haven't even touched on if you have.
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  30 minute lunch sessions and shorter sessions.
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  There are different things that you could possibly do with that.
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  If you have that window of, you know, 10 to 20 minutes before rugby, and maybe even if you have an hour before rugby and you're going to your rugby club gym, there's different ways that we can do that as well.
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  But the key takeaway here that I want you to really understand and acknowledge is those three facts from before, right?
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  You can train the same muscle group multiple days in a row, and you're gonna be fine.
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  The split, doesn't matter.
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  It's about staying consistent.
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  The split doesn't matter.
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  It's about what you actually do in those sessions.
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  I hope you got a lot of value out of that.
• 12:48
  If you did, please let me know in the comments below.
• 12:52
  And if you want to work with me at Rugby Muscle, I'll put the links with how you can apply for coaching or join the team in the description below.
• 13:00
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• 13:05
  So I'll ask now.
• 13:06
  Gimme a subscribe so you don't miss out on any future podcast.
• 13:09
  Thank you guys so much for listening, and I'll catch you in the next one.