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Breaking Down Rugby S&C with Keir aka Rugby Strength Coach · The Rugby Muscle Podcast

0:00
Keir: If you're in a sufficiently competitive culture and you want to win bad enough, you'll turn over those rocks to find out what your weaknesses are
0:07
TJ: why did they cause the all blacks do bingo.
0:11
TJ: Yeah
0:12
Keir: There's this trade-off between optimization for, you know, six, seven days from now, every Saturday and the longterm development,
0:23
TJ: Yeah.
0:23
TJ: It's a hundred percent intensity, but some would run into a bag then voluntarily going to the ground.
0:28
TJ: It's just such a, like
0:30
Keir: non-stop In 2003.
0:33
Keir: I hit a rock bag so hard.
0:35
Keir: I broke my collarbone
0:47
TJ: okay.
0:47
TJ: Well, we're going to get into your daily life if you've seen the questions already.
0:52
TJ: So I want to get into that, but, uh, let me, let's start with this.
0:55
TJ: Uh, no caffeine experiment, cause I've tried it.
0:59
TJ: Yeah, a million times.
1:00
TJ: I'm actually in the midst of having about a week and a bit off of caffeine apart from a couple of espresso shots and I'm feeling okay.
1:08
TJ: I don't know how sustainable it is.
1:10
TJ: Um, what's your experience?
1:12
Keir: No, there's no difference whatsoever.
1:15
Keir: It was like, I mean, not as good.
1:20
Keir: I got a whoop band just cause my mess has wanted to do like a training challenge or like, you know, all this BS and obviously the science is pretty ropey with whoop, but tracking, tracking my sleep.
1:38
Keir: I think when I was just like, oh fuck this.
1:40
Keir: And then I was like, right back on caffeine.
1:43
Keir: Just not, not that it was causative, but I started taking high dose magnesium that week.
1:48
Keir: And then my average sleep went up by an hour and a half that week.
1:52
Keir: And obviously there's a ton of different factors, young, young kid, you know, his, his sleep patterns will change.
2:01
Keir: I took magnesium.
2:02
Keir: Maybe I started going to the sauna a bit more, but clearly adding it back in did not detract from my sleep.
2:07
Keir: Um, and I've, you know, I didn't notice any difference whatsoever.
2:10
Keir: So maybe
2:11
TJ: except for life being worse, drinking only decaf coffee, right?
2:16
TJ: Yeah.
2:17
TJ: Yeah.
2:18
TJ: Fair enough.
2:19
TJ: Do you, do you have a time where you have to stop it?
2:22
TJ: Sorry.
2:23
TJ: Do you have a time where you cut out?
2:24
TJ: I know Eric, uh, grandpa a video up recently about, he likes, he goes on about his sleep a lot, then he so,
2:33
Keir: well, that was his PhD.
2:34
Keir: Like his PhD.
2:36
Keir: Yeah, sleep research.
2:37
Keir: I normally stopped about noon.
2:39
Keir: Uh, just the.
2:41
Keir: Um, yeah, unless, I mean, if I'm really tired or it's a really long day, I'll have caffeine later in the day, but normally I just drink it in the morning.
2:49
Keir: And then, yeah.
2:51
TJ: Did you ever do a pre gym or pre BJJ K uh, caffeine hit or is
2:55
Keir: it, I think I'm a BJJ.
2:57
Keir: You got to be careful in case you shoot yourself.
3:01
Keir: That's true.
3:02
TJ: Yeah.
3:03
TJ: Yeah.
3:03
TJ: You don't want to do that.
3:04
TJ: Yeah.
3:05
TJ: Um, okay.
3:06
TJ: So that's your caffeine experiment, but I w I've got you on, cause I mean, I've got you on previously and, uh, that we'll, we'll want to talk about that, uh, fandom episode now that's completely gone, but we got, we got pretty deep on it.
3:21
TJ: Um, but I think I want to get to know a little bit more about like you and how you came to be like who you are now, which is a weird way of putting it.
3:31
TJ: But I think, uh, Like, you're still your, your, your Instagram is popping.
3:35
TJ: And I think the, actually I want to give you a big congratulations.
3:38
TJ: Your meme game at the minute has been, has been on point.
3:42
TJ: And actually that was one of the things we touched on last time was like what, uh, was about how you, you, you do less, which I guess allows you to spend more time making these fucking fire memes.
3:55
Keir: Yeah.
3:55
Keir: I mean, with this, with the social media stuff, it's like a lot of I've, I've done it many ways.
4:07
Keir: I've done this straight.
4:09
Keir: I'm only gonna talk about educational stuff and, you know, whatever I've done that.
4:16
Keir: Fuck around and be an idiot.
4:17
Keir: And really, I think you have to do both because what it is that you're not going to convince anyone to put that hand in that wallet and, um, give you money and hire you.
4:27
Keir: If all you do is post memes, but you're also not going to get any kind of traction on social media platforms that reward that kind of stuff.
4:34
Keir: If you're just like professorial and just teach people.
4:38
Keir: So I feel like it, I mean, if you remember a few years ago, there's a book called jab jab jab, right hook by Gary before he became a complete fucking lunatic.
4:47
Keir: And to me, the, the, the funny stuff and.
4:53
Keir: And there's like, I'll say this, this is a grain of truth.
4:55
Keir: Everything that I do.
4:56
Keir: Like, I do feel like Joel, Seedman selects his exercises by throwing dildos, but I'm just putting, I'm trying to put it across in a way that people find entertaining that the platform that I'm on the rewards, like you'll notice that I don't do dance with it because it clearly doesn't work.
5:12
Keir: It works on the Instagram, just like with, you know, in terms of the long form content providing value or that kind of stuff have a different approach on YouTube.
5:22
Keir: So that's like reactions long form teaching and so on.
5:25
Keir: So I think you it's like old school, Dan Kennedy, he talks about magnetic marketing, the medium, the market, the message.
5:33
Keir: You have to say the right thing to the right people on the right platform or the right.
5:37
TJ: Yeah, and I guess it's more fun to make memes as well.
5:41
TJ: So you're going to be more consistent with it.
5:43
TJ: Like I think sometimes Instagram, I know a lot of other online trainers that think Instagram is a bit of a grind and I'm like, well, that's because you're just doing stuff that you think people want to hear.
5:53
TJ: And you're trying to be Google for them, but like, no one's on, no one wants that.
5:57
TJ: No one wants to scroll through their Instagram.
5:59
TJ: They want to, they want to have a laugh.
6:00
TJ: That's why they don't want to be distracted from whatever they're doing that day.
6:04
Keir: What buys you that, you know, it's up to 60 seconds cause nobody's watching HGTV.
6:09
Keir: Like all they did was create that to compete with YouTube.
6:12
Keir: The reason, well, the, the purpose of those posts is you have up to 60 seconds to buy another five minutes, go
6:21
TJ: check out something else or go scroll through other stuff.
6:23
TJ: Yeah.
6:24
TJ: Each
6:24
Keir: contact that you have buys you the opportunity to ask for a progressively higher amount of time, money, attention that you then get to go.
6:34
Keir: Cause if you go from zero to.
6:36
Keir: Buy my stuff.
6:37
Keir: You're not going to sell anything.
6:38
TJ: So in terms of your, day-to-day, what you do now for a strength coach network is a lot of it on the market inside.
6:46
TJ: Cause obviously that's, that's your, your, your main funnel, right?
6:49
TJ: Just going through your social medias.
6:52
Keir: Yes and no.
6:53
Keir: I mean, like we have the, we have the strength coach network, Instagram, which I don't staff at all.
6:59
Keir: Um, I have a staff member that does that for me.
7:02
Keir: And then we have, we have frameworks.
7:07
Keir: So I struggle with what we do is you included is how do you scale something that's inherently unscalable.
7:16
Keir: So what we have is frameworks of what we know or think works.
7:24
Keir: So we'll have categories of content that we repeat on a schedule, but we changed the content it's.
7:31
Keir: And then we will plan out a month of content in advance and schedule it via apps for all of the social platforms.
7:38
Keir: And then we also have frameworks for repurposing of content.
7:43
Keir: So for example, we'll do a long form video podcast that then gets the highlights of which we'll take chunks from and put into a reels, YouTube shorts, infographics on Twitter, rewritten as a 500 word blog posts, all that kind of stuff.
8:02
Keir: So in terms of the actual content creation, I'm, I mean, I don't even do that now.
8:09
Keir: I've now outsourced the podcast.
8:11
Keir: Like I have other people doing the podcast for me.
8:13
Keir: So, but at that point it would be, I'm kind of like.
8:18
Keir: Not feeding people questions, but you're steering the conversation where this is going to be useful to people.
8:22
Keir: This is interesting, all that kind of stuff.
8:24
Keir: And then what follows from there where we're repurposing and producing content thereafter.
8:29
TJ: So you've given away a bunch of stuff for free.
8:32
TJ: And then what are you doing on the backend that tries to get people I get?
8:35
TJ: Cause I guess that this you don't do, do you still do online coaching for, um, athletes because it's not
8:41
Keir: scalable two years.
8:43
Keir: It's just, you know, there's, there's been a few different like, uh, phases or steps that I've gone through.
8:54
Keir: And I think what happens is, is the, when, when you start out, I mean, some people will never even get out of the employment phase, but like when you're an employee, you're like, well, you know, I want to make more money or it's not enough, or they're paying me or I feel like I could get more trading my own time or, or skillset outside of the.
9:17
Keir: So that's one phase, then you personal trainer, whatever hours for dollars.
9:23
Keir: So that's great.
9:25
Keir: You start making money and you're like, fucking hell, I'm tired.
9:26
Keir: And it's, it's, it's difficult to reach clients in this geographic location and stuff like that.
9:33
Keir: So then you might jump to online and then you might start doing online coaching and then you start running numbers.
9:39
Keir: You'd be like, hang on.
9:41
Keir: You know, it cost me this amount of time to, to write the program, deliver the program, answer the questions, all that kind of stuff.
9:46
Keir: And you realize, well, there's a ceiling to that.
9:49
Keir: Then you try and go to more scalable stuff.
9:51
Keir: And I would say I'm probably not, not at the end, but for sure, there's a cap to what we're doing with strength coach network.
10:01
Keir: And if I want to continue to build more stuff, I'm going to have to expand and do, do bigger things.
10:06
Keir: And I think, again, it's one of those things where you can't necessarily jump from one from the first one to the, to the last part.
10:13
Keir: Unless you, you know, you've got an outrageously developed skillset because it takes years to learn the skills that allow you to do that.
10:23
TJ: Yeah.
10:23
TJ: So real like diverse range of skills as well from which you'd have got from, like, I do think part of coaching is selling.
10:31
TJ: It's like sending the people that the session that they've got to do and making it appear that, and I think it's no, it's no coincidence that a lot of real good trainers are also really good marketers because they sell people the second one.
10:45
TJ: Yeah, definitely.
10:47
TJ: Um, what else are you doing on a day to day basis?
10:49
TJ: Is it all strength coach network now?
10:51
TJ: Because I know you don't do any college stuff, anything else?
10:53
TJ: Um, so
10:56
Keir: I mean, I have real estate, so I'm doing a remodel right now.
11:01
Keir: There's another person I'm trying to evict.
11:03
Keir: I'm trying to line up buying the next, um, you know, real estate deal.
11:09
Keir: Uh, I am a single parent.
11:11
Keir: So when my son's here a lot of the day.
11:14
Keir: Gets dedicated to looking off to him.
11:16
Keir: So if it's, if it's before office hours after office hours, I'm not really doing a lot of work.
11:20
Keir: So I'm looking off to
11:21
TJ: him then a lot of things changed for you when he showed up.
11:25
Keir: Oh yeah, for sure.
11:26
Keir: Um, and then, you know, in the day I, it's not wasteful, but like I'll try it twice in the day.
11:34
Keir: Cause I know I'm not going to get it done anywhere else.
11:36
Keir: So I probably going to have like two or three hours left, full work within the working day.
11:40
Keir: Um, which, you know, I try and I try and read, manage a strength coach network, like you said, but you know, I've actually been spending a lot of time recently on looking at like the, the analytics and the tracking and you know, really trying to like, think about long-term strategies, stuff like that, which again, it's taken.
12:03
Keir: It's taken a while for me to, you know, every, every person that works themselves has this disease where they think they're the only person that can do what they do.
12:12
Keir: And it isn't until you get over that and you give it to somebody else to do that.
12:15
Keir: You free yourself up to think about the other stuff and you know, as well, it takes money.
12:21
Keir: It takes time to do that.
12:22
Keir: Like you start buying, I would say, I probably spend at least a thousand dollars a month in software at least.
12:32
TJ: Yeah.
12:32
TJ: Yeah.
12:33
TJ: I'm not quite there, but we're up, we're up in the hunter.
12:36
TJ: I mean, including
12:37
Keir: you so 500 a month.
12:40
Keir: Yeah,
12:41
TJ: yeah, yeah.
12:41
TJ: And also it's the same for everything really.
12:43
TJ: Like it's the same, like I have a coach for my training because I don't want to spend the time thinking about that or do any of that.
12:51
TJ: Like, it's all that stuff.
12:53
TJ: Like the more freeing you are, the more free you can make yourself the better everyone else is.
12:57
TJ: Right.
12:57
TJ: Cause then you can enjoy your time.
13:00
TJ: Not necessarily like guilt-free, but you haven't got that lingering thing in the back of your mind.
13:06
TJ: You can just focus on what the present.
13:08
TJ: Yeah.
13:09
TJ: Yeah.
13:10
TJ: Okay.
13:10
TJ: But if we're not going to focus on the present though, because we're going to dial back to your back in your rubbish strength and condition days, and you know what you know now, so, you know, you don't have to go back to how you thought then, but if you had like one rugby player to coach who had like a decent background in the game that, you know, whatever level I'm trying to make this hypothetical situation work, um, and they want to make it to the next level, whether that's a, semipro trying to make like the full-time pro, whether that's someone that's amateur wanting to step up into like semipro ranks, um, what would you do?
13:44
TJ: Like how would you take, take me through the process that you would go through in order to get them ready to do.
13:50
Keir: Uh, go online, buy him a ticket to Oakland, driving to Heathrow, and I'd plunk them on a plane.
14:01
Keir: Louis, Louie Simmons died last week and there was all these Louie Simmons quotes going around, which is, you know, what were the limp?
14:07
Keir: Sorry, what were the lame developer?
14:09
Keir: Limp success leaves clues a country of three to 4 million people, half of which are women.
14:15
Keir: So that cuts it down to 2 million people dominating all, you know, Japan's got 130 million people in their country and they still absolutely mop the floor with every other country in rugby on a consistent basis.
14:27
Keir: And you have to look at why that is and it's culture and competition.
14:32
Keir: If you can have nothing else to develop elite athletes, culture and money.
14:40
TJ: Yeah.
14:40
TJ: And that it's that competition that.
14:43
TJ: You have no choice, but to adapt, it's not like you're not pushing and forcing adaptations.
14:48
TJ: You're, you're, you're in that zone.
14:49
TJ: And you know, you can't, if you want to keep playing, you can, or you can just be sort of like one of those sort of passenger players.
14:55
TJ: But if you're someone that wants to move up.
14:57
TJ: Yeah.
14:58
TJ: So surrounding.
14:58
TJ: So I always say that to people that ask if they should play up a level, if they think they've got good enough and I'm like, go there.
15:04
TJ: Yeah.
15:05
TJ: I'm always like go there.
15:06
TJ: Like even if it and expect it to suck, because you've been used to driving this Ford Fiesta forever.
15:12
TJ: And all of a sudden they've given you the keys to a Ferrari, or like, it's going to be difficult to start with, but over time you're going to cope.
15:18
TJ: And you'll like, and if you don't, that's fine.
15:20
TJ: That's an indicator that, you know, you should just go back and enjoy your amateur rugby or whatever.
15:24
TJ: That's fine.
15:26
TJ: Um, but that's, that's a, that's a, that's a fairly simple answer.
15:30
TJ: I was expecting more on the side of, you know, questionnaires and where their weaknesses are.
15:35
TJ: Um, physically, uh, how you'd go about developing them.
15:39
TJ: Oh, I mean, that's
15:41
Keir: where the culture comes in because the culture, which is, you know, even a stop clock is right.
15:47
Keir: Twice a day.
15:48
Keir: If you're in a sufficiently competitive culture and you want to win bad enough, you'll turn over those rocks to find out what your weaknesses are.
15:55
TJ: Yeah.
15:56
TJ: Fair enough.
15:56
TJ: Um, I think there's, there's something to that with the jiu-jitsu community as well.
16:01
TJ: Like it's, it's not like you can easily be sold and, and, and I'll do stuff in the gym, like to try and help my jujitsu thinking, oh yeah, this is going to be a big benefit, but it's not, the reality is like physically, even though it's an entirely physical sport, like actual strength and what you're doing in the gym and weights and stuff is nowhere near as important.
16:22
TJ: It is important that you're doing something I think.
16:25
TJ: And I think that was
16:26
Keir: John trans,
16:30
TJ: like a fucking moron.
16:31
TJ: Yeah.
16:31
TJ: He does like classic bodybuilding bro splits.
16:34
TJ: And he's like, he's by far the best no-gi.
16:39
TJ: Yeah, I by fire.
16:42
TJ: Yeah, I did.
16:43
TJ: Yeah.
16:43
TJ: Like he, he just, he's like, uh, he's like playing with his food and this is with other of like, the rest of them are all top tier it's it's same as New Zealand at rugby, I guess.
16:55
TJ: Yeah.
16:56
TJ: Um, yeah.
16:57
TJ: Fair enough.
16:58
TJ: So I asked you a strength and conditioning question that, uh, to, to a strength and conditioning coach about rugby, and you gave me an answer of buying a ticket to go to New Zealand.
17:08
TJ: So that, uh, leads me really well into like where the SNC industry is kind of like going wrong or what it's got wrong as a fund, maybe fundamentally, and how we can go about approving that.
17:19
TJ: What, where do you think of is a main thing that makes it difficult or, or misleading to be a strength and conditioning coach?
17:32
Keir: There is a natural tendency.
17:35
Keir: Among human beings too.
17:38
Keir: It's a few different biases.
17:39
Keir: One is the need to feel important and to feel valued.
17:46
Keir: Another is to focus on what we can manipulate and change and measure.
17:55
Keir: And I think we have a tendency to gravitate towards what we know and to what we feel comfortable with.
18:09
Keir: So if you read thinking fast and thinking slow by Daniel Cameron, there's this bias called substitution bias, which is ask a complex question without even knowing it.
18:20
Keir: You answer a simple one.
18:22
Keir: So as a field, we've taken the very, very complex question of how to improve performance and we've gone, oh, you just increased their VOT max and their squat and this and that.
18:31
Keir: Okay.
18:32
Keir: Why they still share a sport?
18:34
Keir: Clearly, it's a complex question.
18:36
Keir: Um, and you know, if you look at, uh, university undergraduate, postgraduate education, everything they focus on is the stuff that you can measure.
18:54
Keir: It is easy to improve and you can point to it and say, oh, I improve that because nobody wants to spend, you know, you want to be like, oh, we improve VO two max by half a liter.
19:06
Keir: And we improve the back squat by 20 kilos.
19:08
Keir: And then if you're like, oh, by the way, that speed didn't change.
19:13
Keir: That's the moralizing.
19:16
Keir: And, um, yeah, I th I feel like if we.
19:25
Keir: What should exist should be the old Soviet system where it wasn't, that you had a strength coach, a sport coach, a sports psych.
19:32
Keir: Everyone was just a sport coach.
19:35
Keir: So you realize that everything affects everything.
19:37
Keir: There is no such thing as strength and conditioning.
19:39
Keir: There is just physical preparation, which is a subset of sport performance sport result as a whole.
19:49
Keir: Um, it would just result in a lot of people being unemployed and demoralized.
19:54
Keir: If we move forward with that paradigm.
19:59
TJ: Yeah.
20:00
TJ: It's kind of difficult, right?
20:01
TJ: Because we're seeing in professional sport and actually even like the lower down you go, we're still seeing that as well, where we're getting more compartmentalization of coaches.
20:13
TJ: Um, what do you think about that?
20:16
Keir: Just natural protection of the ego, because.
20:21
Keir: Everybody wants that pound of flesh by definition, if you have a athlete centered program that is always into account the readiness state of the athlete, individual strengths and weaknesses.
20:37
Keir: For example, you have a kid that's an app freak in terms of maximum strength in the gym is the average strength coach you're going to want to ride them.
20:47
Keir: So the wheels fall off and put up all these impressive videos on Instagram, or are they going to push them towards a sport coach and say, well, actually he's way more strong than he needs to be for his sport.
20:56
Keir: It's clearly not a limiting factor.
20:58
Keir: It, his performance.
20:59
Keir: He needs to spend more time
21:00
TJ: with you.
21:00
TJ: Okay.
21:01
TJ: That's so true.
21:01
TJ: Yeah.
21:02
TJ: Yeah.
21:02
TJ: That's so true.
21:03
TJ: You immediately, you're thinking you don't need to be here.
21:06
TJ: Strong kid.
21:07
TJ: Like, oh, you need to be here for 20 minutes just to top up.
21:12
TJ: You know?
21:12
TJ: Yeah.
21:13
TJ: So that's so true, but on the flip side of things, it's, it's like though, you know, yeah.
21:19
TJ: You're, you're also more focused on what you think or what you're already an expert in.
21:24
TJ: So then you think that's more important than it is, and that's the problem.
21:27
TJ: But then I I've seen Eddie Jones recently, like he chops and changes his other coaches all the time.
21:34
TJ: And he also like changes coaches from attack coaches to skills coaches.
21:39
TJ: And does all of this.
21:40
TJ: I know he's, he's pushing the boat as far as like what a coach can do.
21:45
TJ: Um, I don't know.
21:46
TJ: You've had you've, you've had people that have worked with him quite a lot.
21:49
TJ: So, uh, you don't have to give me the inside scoop, but what do you think about like that sort of approach?
21:53
TJ: Whereas like, I guess it's still given because people want names.
21:56
TJ: That's the problem, right?
21:57
TJ: Like
22:02
Keir: my, do you know it's happens right?
22:03
Keir: Anytime.
22:05
Keir: Yeah.
22:05
Keir: So it's happened said to me like 12 years.
22:09
Keir: Your biggest strength always ends up becoming your biggest weakness.
22:13
Keir: So when you, you know, like you see in jiu-jitsu, you have people that their game is focused around one move and they just train it and train it and train and train it until you come up against somebody that just can shut that move down.
22:25
Keir: Oh, fuck.
22:25
Keir: What do I do now?
22:27
Keir: Same thing in terms of your, your skillset as a coach and your personality as a coach.
22:32
Keir: So universally, what people say about Eddie Jones is that he's an obsessive and he he's, uh, blunt and direct and just works people to death.
22:45
Keir: Or there's a story about in Japanese rugby at the college level, um, which is basically just a cottage industry for Fijians and Tongans, uh, at the pro level, you have this system whereby they bring in the foreigners and pay them good money to, to do a certain job.
23:06
Keir: But ultimately you actually answered that.
23:09
Keir: A Japanese person that is managing you, that has, you know, what my ass or their experience in rugby, but they'll, they'll overrules.
23:17
Keir: They know you're not doing this.
23:18
Keir: And the, the legend about Eddie Jones is there's this, I forget what university it was maybe tall guy, but he came in director of rugby gay one, this Japanese guy.
23:28
Keir: I tried to tell him to do something.
23:30
Keir: He walked straight into the president's office or the university with a pre-written resignation law.
23:34
Keir: He goes, right.
23:35
Keir: I'm the head coach tell you to fuck off or I'm out today?
23:39
Keir: No.
23:39
Keir: Okay.
23:40
Keir: So is he successful because of that?
23:46
Keir: Probably like, he's just like he is cutthroat.
23:51
Keir: Yeah.
23:51
TJ: Did you hear about if you had a story as modeling yard?
23:54
TJ: Sorry.
23:54
TJ: Have you had a story about, I think there's yeah, there's modeling and y'all showed up to training or certain up to camp on like a Monday.
24:01
TJ: And it was like the Monday after a game on Sunday.
24:02
TJ: And I think it was a little bit later than everyone else.
24:04
TJ: He shows up about nine or 10:00 AM.
24:07
TJ: And he says, uh, he sees him at the, at of reception of the hotel and he goes, oh, Hey, how you doing?
24:12
TJ: Hey, all right.
24:13
TJ: And, uh, mom's Finn pretty tired.
24:16
TJ: He said, okay, fuck off.
24:20
TJ: Then.
24:20
TJ: I know I'm not, I'm not going a hundred percent say that's absolutely true, but that's, that's what I heard.
24:25
TJ: So I mean, but that's like, that's the person that we're dealing with.
24:29
TJ: And then also the fact that he presents himself very different to the press, uh, like, and the press don't like that.
24:35
TJ: They don't like people being different.
24:37
TJ: They want people to give them a script.
24:38
TJ: There's a
24:39
Keir: video.
24:41
Keir: Uh, oh, what's his fucking name?
24:43
Keir: I can remember his name.
24:44
Keir: And John is his nickname, a Japanese, but you going, it was when he was a head coach.
24:51
Keir: Japan won the game.
24:53
Keir: I forget who it was.
24:54
Keir: They won the game.
24:54
Keir: Is it maybe it hit or set, but like one of our boys at Toshiba was the captain that day as sat next to each other in the press conference.
25:01
Keir: And he is fucking hammering the team.
25:04
Keir: Like he's ashamed of the team, all this shit.
25:07
Keir: He's like hammering the captain and the captain sat there taking it.
25:11
Keir: So I feel like same Sean Edwards.
25:16
Keir: It's it's the, the mentality.
25:19
Keir: And like I said, the culture maybe rather than it is the technical execution that drives the success.
25:28
Keir: And it's also, it's like when you're zigging, well, sorry.
25:31
Keir: When everyone else is zigging, you get somebody that zags it's like a slap to the face and there's momentum for that.
25:36
Keir: And I feel like with Eddie Jones and with Sean Edwards, there's a one world cup shelf life to that.
25:44
Keir: Cause you.
25:46
Keir: It's just, the attrition is outrageous.
25:48
Keir: Like Michael Leach came back from the 2015 world cup and he would freely tell you, it took him a year to get over it.
25:55
Keir: He was fucked.
25:57
Keir: And I do not think the next world cup is going to go for England.
26:00
Keir: Like the last one did.
26:02
Keir: And you sort of wasps, you sort of Wales, you'll see it with France as well.
26:06
Keir: They're fucking flying right now.
26:08
Keir: It's going to run out in my opinion, truly successful coaches can sustain it like a Warren Gatland or an ear McGee can, can sustain it because it's not as attrition.
26:23
TJ: Yeah.
26:23
TJ: Like there's there's coaching.
26:26
TJ: And this goes into philosophies of like, why even coach in the first place.
26:29
TJ: Right?
26:29
TJ: Because it's, it's coaching to win a world cup or that's coaching to win successive world cups.
26:35
TJ: So just stay dominant and
26:37
Keir: his defense.
26:39
Keir: Yeah,
26:40
TJ: I know that's the problem with sport.
26:41
TJ: I mean, he could have done it, you know, a couple of things, a couple of kicks go, right.
26:45
TJ: A couple of scrums got a little bit better, a few injuries or whatever.
26:49
TJ: And we could be saying about how he's, I mean, he wouldn't even be England probably wouldn't be in head coach anymore.
26:54
TJ: If, if you're the one that woke up.
26:56
TJ: Yeah.
26:57
TJ: Who knows.
26:58
TJ: Yeah.
26:58
TJ: But all goes back to the point of like, we love to try to measure things and put, make stuff really quantitative.
27:07
TJ: But at the end of the day, the only way, the only thing that's matters quantitatively in sport is the score.
27:12
TJ: Um, and that's it.
27:14
TJ: And it becomes really difficult.
27:15
TJ: And I've, I've found that the more I've started working with, uh, more people over the years, um, all rugby players of all levels, I've found that like, there is so much more qualitative stuff that that is actually more important.
27:29
TJ: And that's, that's like the coaching aspect of it.
27:32
TJ: I think there's, you know, the, the strength and conditioning.
27:35
TJ: That's you can get methods and stuff from a book, but really it's, the implementation comes from coaching and actually like managing your expectations, managing your mindset and all of that stuff goes into it.
27:48
TJ: It becomes a lot more complex, which is why, I guess being a Shankman condition coaches fucking difficult job, for sure.
27:56
TJ: Yeah.
27:56
TJ: I mean, and again, when you attribute it to what sport, like, you know, you're a strength conditioning coach, and then you've got, you're reporting to a sports coach who doesn't know enough about strength and conditioning.
28:06
TJ: Doesn't really know because probably you're a synchrony condition coach.
28:10
TJ: You've looked at sport from a different aspect of, or a different sort of lens and they have maybe a more complete lens because you're trying to solve the physical problem with how they win.
28:21
TJ: Whereas they're, you know, they completely shut that off because they've got a strength and conditioning coaches.
28:26
TJ: Well,
28:26
Keir: one of the most common problems in sport is that your, you know, more about their bit than they know about you as.
28:33
Keir: Yeah.
28:33
Keir: So I feel like that's like, I've had a conversation a couple of times, where is it?
28:38
Keir: Raymond behavior, where everyone's like, oh, he uses these bullshit terms like, oh, football speed, but it's, you know, minimal rest periods or whatever, but he's talking the language of football coaches.
28:50
Keir: So I feel like that's one thing that I've had to do and that other strength coaches should do, which is when a sport coach uses a certain term that, you know, to be incorrect.
29:04
Keir: But you understand that the intent behind it is not to correct them, but just say yes, and then give them what they need.
29:10
TJ: Yeah.
29:10
TJ: Just go with it.
29:12
TJ: Okay.
29:12
TJ: On that, on that, on that, uh, train of thought.
29:15
TJ: What about if the coach says, well, and I've got athletes at the minute that have got to submit Bronco times for their teams and stuff, what would you, what would you S what is it the same?
29:26
TJ: You have the same approach.
29:27
TJ: Do you actually, before I haven't actually asked you to start writing, what do you think the.
29:33
Keir: This is a messier MAs.
29:37
TJ: Yeah.
29:38
TJ: It's a, it's an awkward, was it one point something?
29:40
TJ: Okay.
29:41
TJ: Yeah.
29:42
TJ: It's just, why did they cause the all blacks do bingo.
29:47
TJ: Yeah.
29:48
TJ: It's easy to, I don't.
29:49
TJ: I know why they do it and they set it up.
29:51
TJ: I just think it's so weird.
29:53
TJ: And then everyone's become obsessive it because they like to, again, we love to have numbers, so then you can compare yourself to
30:01
Keir: yeah.
30:01
Keir: Did you know, people would be like, oh, what's a good Bronco time.
30:04
Keir: And I'm like, if I tell you and you don't hit it or you do hit it, you're going to do what you're going to do anyway.
30:10
Keir: You
30:10
TJ: just want to mention, yeah.
30:13
TJ: So like, do you see any validity validity to the Bronco
30:19
Keir: there's validity to, you know, understanding that.
30:26
Keir: The OTU and lactate threshold can be powerful drivers over pizza printability, which is far more specific to rugby than, you know, sustained medium pace running.
30:37
Keir: And that knowing your maximum aerobic speed can be useful in prescribing subsequent training intensities.
30:45
Keir: What it's not useful for is the sanding.
30:48
Keir: Who's going to be a good rugby player and just using it as a stick to beat athletes with you, you do the test and then you just go back to doing what you're going to do anyway.
30:58
Keir: So in my opinion, all assessments should either give you information that you didn't have before inform subsequent decision-making or prescribed subsequent training activity.
31:08
TJ: Yeah, a hundred percent I've made podcasts.
31:11
TJ: Testing is a waste of time.
31:13
TJ: Like for, for 99% of people, it's not like when you use it.
31:16
TJ: Right.
31:17
TJ: For sure.
31:18
TJ: But you can easily build that into the train and you can easily,
31:22
Keir: and he, you know, you can line up your players against the wall and order them intuitively from least fit to first ask you, like, see, it's like, yeah, but you just
31:33
TJ: wasted an hour.
31:34
TJ: Exactly.
31:35
TJ: You wasted an hour, you built up a bunch of fatigue that now they can't train for the rest of the week, as well as they could over or whatever, you know, it just doesn't make sense when you've got outputs from training anyway.
31:47
TJ: Like why not just use those outputs to inform whatever, you know, that's, that's always how I viewed.
31:53
TJ: I I've really like that's, if there's one who I'm going to have to dial with rubbing muscle is like stop with all the fucking users testing.
32:01
TJ: Um, but as a strength and conditioning coach that's again, that's if you're, if you're, and that, I guess that's for me, because I haven't had it.
32:10
TJ: To know the only teams I've outsourced to.
32:12
TJ: I don't have to prove that we're making any progress.
32:16
TJ: They've paid for a program.
32:17
TJ: They get the program.
32:18
TJ: Whereas if you're a synchrony conditioning coach, a lot of the time you need to do these tests to show to the other coach, Hey, I'm getting better.
32:27
TJ: But I think that's like, that's just a misconception, right?
32:31
TJ: If you're getting better,
32:32
Keir: but here's the thing.
32:33
Keir: You, you can provide that data.
32:35
Keir: Once somebody made up their mind, it doesn't matter.
32:38
Keir: I had a coach, an assistant for me in the collegiate system.
32:42
Keir: She was motherfucking him on the sideline in front of the players.
32:44
Keir: Not fit enough, not fit enough, not fit enough.
32:46
Keir: So we had to have this come to Jesus meeting with him.
32:50
Keir: I was his supervisor, my supervisor and administrator for the sport, the sport coaches, all this kind of stuff.
32:56
Keir: They're not fit enough.
32:57
Keir: And I said, define fitness.
33:00
Keir: And then it was dislike the kind of like the question.
33:04
Keir: I said, do you agree that these things can look like a lack of fitness, but actually have nothing to do with, you know, physical preparation, humidity, hydration, nutrition, status, uh, menstrual stairs, tactics, skill execution, psychological preparation, all this kind of stuff.
33:21
Keir: And she's like, yes.
33:22
Keir: I said very well then what is the lens through which we're going to evaluate their physical fitness for soccer?
33:32
Keir: And she said the 30 15.
33:34
Keir: And I said, very well, then let's look at the data.
33:36
Keir: Are they better or worse than they were before?
33:39
Keir: And they were all across the board, a kilometer an hour better on the 30 15.
33:45
Keir: So I said, from the perspective of his job, he is doing his job, right.
33:51
Keir: They are fitter now than when he started with them.
33:54
Keir: They are more physically prepared for the sports.
33:57
Keir: As she said, they're not fit enough.
34:02
TJ: Yeah.
34:02
TJ: It's I, it's also that when people say it about how fit New Zealand are, we'll go back to your blacks again, like how fit they are, because they always seem to squeeze past teams in the last 10 minutes.
34:15
TJ: And it's not, yeah.
34:17
TJ: It's not a fitness thing.
34:18
TJ: It's, it's a, they're playing opera at an easier level.
34:21
TJ: And you
34:22
Keir: can, you sevens would be the absolute dominant, uh, 17 more.
34:28
TJ: Yeah, absolutely.
34:30
TJ: Um, all right.
34:31
TJ: So you mentioned though that you've been dealing with soccer athletes that you've done, how many years did you do it?
34:36
TJ: Uh, university college,
34:40
Keir: three,
34:42
TJ: uh, has have dealing with all these different athletes changed any of your, your thinking in terms of strengthening conditioning?
34:52
Keir: I mean, you're always learning, like, I, I wouldn't know.
34:57
Keir: It's made me better, some stuff.
34:59
Keir: I think for the most part, working in rugby, there, there is some applications for the specialists, like basically place kickers or people that kick out of hand a lot.
35:11
Keir: But I would say I was not good at school at, uh, rotational sports prior to working in the throws.
35:19
Keir: And I really enjoyed working with the Olympic throws and I feel like that as well, there's transport to golf, there's transfers to quarterbacks.
35:29
Keir: So I feel like I'm more rounded in that regard.
35:32
Keir: Um, and then I would say the other thing was it wasn't because I was working with all the other sports, but like my, my ability to integrate the grappling and flesh out the whole system that I was trying to use for, you know, I'll call it contact based team sports, really.
35:54
Keir: In those three years.
35:56
TJ: Yeah.
35:57
TJ: Um, do you think that that grappling was from jujitsu?
36:01
TJ: Or do you think that that was just, it was inevitably because you you're seeing same way that you did with agility that it's not, we can't just learn this traditional rigid system.
36:10
TJ: We actually have to open, completely open this box up and figure out how to explore and how to get better.
36:14
TJ: That way.
36:15
Keir: It was a lot of things coming together.
36:17
Keir: It was, you know, I had another three years under my belt of training.
36:22
Keir: I met Andy Reiland, who was in charge of the contact, uh, or no, sorry.
36:27
Keir: He's in charge of education for a USA football balm.
36:31
Keir: He was a linebacker at Penn state, played for the Eagles.
36:34
Keir: Very, very, very smart coach.
36:36
Keir: Like he can hold his own with any coach in terms of like pedagogy and coaching theory, Richie gray, who he had worked with South Africa.
36:46
Keir: Um, I want to say one 15 world cup.
36:51
Keir: But he's been everywhere and just, you know, super, super smart guy.
36:56
Keir: And then, you know, I had a long, long leash from, from Eric in the school and putting that all together.
37:02
Keir: That was kind of a coming together of a lot of different things to, to develop it, test it, refine it.
37:09
Keir: And, um, I actually last year working wise with a high school, that was probably the first time that I've really kind of like had a crack at integrating everything together in terms of content prep for high school football.
37:27
TJ: And, um, was that like, so you were just a strength and conditioning coach voluntarily for the high school team contact.
37:37
TJ: Oh, okay.
37:38
TJ: And so, yeah, that, that, I guess that's like, yeah, that's a good way to put it because it is.
37:43
TJ: Contact skills.
37:45
TJ: I think the problem is, is that we come at them from a, just a purely physiological or physical basis, whereas like, you want to be stronger so you can smash rocks, but rarely, and this is something that I do when I coach rugby.
38:01
TJ: The sport is we really go into the technical details of how to clean a guy out and you'll see all the best guys in the world.
38:08
TJ: They'll spend time doing that.
38:10
TJ: Whereas, you know, you're never told that as a rugby player and same probably for like, there's so many different ways that you can make a tackle.
38:17
TJ: And you're probably taught a few times when you're, you know, you're a youth athlete and then you, and then you just go, okay, go
38:23
Keir: and you never as well.
38:26
Keir: I, I certainly never did as a player.
38:30
Keir: And I short of like a few like elite.
38:37
Keir: You know, 50 cap internationals are like top tier internationals.
38:40
Keir: You never come across players or coaches that can articulate exactly what the objectives are.
38:46
Keir: Tactically and technically, you know, so for example, it was, I was 32 before I was like, started reading about tactical periodization.
38:56
Keir: The objective and attack is to create and convert, uncontested scoring opportunities via the creation of time and space using for speed of misdirection.
39:05
Keir: And you're like, fuck, if I'd have known this 10 years ago, that would have given me a much better framework to work backwards from rather than like, oh, I like natural.
39:13
Keir: I'm going to try that.
39:13
Keir: I like that drawing.
39:14
Keir: I'm going to try that.
39:15
Keir: And the same thing in terms of a contact skill, then if you follow me, it's called, um, embodied, grappling on Instagram.
39:24
Keir: He's I want to say he's British and his background is judo, but he's like massively into freestyle, but it's.
39:33
Keir: Looking at contact skill through that lens over the last few years has been a bit of an epiphany for me, which is, well, what, what is the objective of contact skills, rugby?
39:45
Keir: And it basically boils down to putting a resisting human being where they don't want to be.
39:50
Keir: So with the exception of, um, choked tackles, where you want to keep them up on the floor, it mostly means taking somebody out of the game by putting them on the floor.
40:00
Keir: How do you do that?
40:01
Keir: Well, you create instability.
40:02
Keir: How do you do that?
40:04
Keir: Grammy now where the base of support push the center of mass outside the base of support, how the different ways you can do that level one level, two level three, all these of things.
40:13
Keir: And then you kind of like work backwards from that of like looking at, I think it's pretty rare.
40:20
Keir: The say for example, you have somebody with no wrestling or grappling background looking at somebody hunched over a ball in the right, like that.
40:31
Keir: Well, what are rugby players do in that
40:33
TJ: situation?
40:34
TJ: Uh, most rugby players will just smash that person as hard as they can, and we'll dive
40:38
Keir: their head as low as possible and then try and figure out why their legs shut out the back rather than maybe yet on the hook.
40:45
Keir: On one side, I
40:46
TJ: coached this drew yesterday.
40:48
TJ: I coached this technique yesterday last night.
40:52
Keir: And here's the thing you need either very, very good mentors or educators as coaching, or you need to have been taken down a lot of times to realize that, Hey, I am really, really strong this way.
41:04
Keir: I am really, really weak this way.
41:06
Keir: And one of the ways that you can get leverage from somebody is by getting underneath their body and then twisting them.
41:11
TJ: Yeah.
41:12
TJ: That's skin in the game.
41:13
TJ: I literally just did this.
41:14
TJ: Uh, I taught them through it cause I'm like, I set them up and I sent a person over the board and I said, okay, right.
41:20
TJ: What do you do?
41:21
TJ: You're already too late.
41:22
TJ: Addie, can you get lower?
41:23
TJ: And they're like, we can try.
41:25
TJ: And I'm like, you can try, but you're probably going to smash your head.
41:27
TJ: It's going to be difficult late.
41:28
TJ: They're already on the board.
41:29
TJ: This is difficult.
41:30
TJ: How easy is it just to pick up that arm?
41:32
TJ: And all of a sudden they're twisted.
41:33
TJ: They can't hold onto the boat.
41:35
TJ: And when that,
41:35
Keir: when they're super low, I got this from Tom ferry, all a smack that in and then actually hit them on the opposite hip to just create that leverage.
41:45
Keir: Because you know, even when they're, when they're crazy, crazy load, you're not going to get underneath them.
41:48
Keir: I'd say like a level two rock is probably more where you're trying to
41:51
TJ: undertook.
41:51
TJ: Yeah.
41:52
TJ: But I was like, it's something I've been gone on about recently.
41:56
TJ: I think probably one of the things I learned from jujitsu, it's like, it's not, it's not, there's no lack of intent.
42:01
TJ: Like the amount of times people say we're not clearing out these rucks and every rugby coach will tell you, oh, you, you know, you're being a pussy in this rock and they're not, they're trying, everyone's trying as hard as they can.
42:11
TJ: Like, no, one's no one wants to lose a game.
42:14
TJ: Like no one gives up because they see, they want to lose.
42:16
TJ: They just don't have enough skill or expertise or whatever to execute.
42:20
TJ: We like breaking stuff down like that, like taking that single arm hook or doing whatever, like it just begin at the beginning, it seems so foreign because no one ever teaches you that stuff.
42:32
TJ: But in ropy it's, it's, it's weird.
42:34
TJ: Cause it embraces how it's the game of all shapes and sizes and all this nonsense.
42:39
TJ: And then really how do you do with all your problems?
42:41
TJ: Okay.
42:41
TJ: Well you smash people, you run around them as fast as you can.
42:44
TJ: Like that's it?
42:45
TJ: Um, like it is a very technical sport and we, we need to embrace that a little bit, even as strength and conditioning coaches.
42:54
TJ: Um, so I mentioned that one of my things, I guess, that comes from learning from jujitsu.
43:01
TJ: Uh, is there anything that BJJ has influenced the way you view rugby or even just Shanklin condition trading?
43:08
Keir: For sure.
43:09
Keir: Just because I feel like sport is fractal in nature, so.
43:20
Keir: EV everything is like the user loop, observe orient decide act.
43:24
Keir: How do you operate from a position of strength?
43:26
Keir: How do you operate, operate from a position of exploiting weakness you can use for speed misdirection.
43:31
Keir: You have to, you have to leverage all of those tools to achieve a successful tactical outcome.
43:36
Keir: That's true at the level of the sporting organization as a whole, as a team, as a unit, as a sub unit, and ultimately as an individual single play, if every single player on the team wins, every single one-on-one contest you're going to win.
43:59
Keir: So what serves the whole comes from what serves the individual and because rugby and, you know, all team sports is this organized chaos.
44:11
Keir: There's so many moving pieces that you can, you know, not see the forest for the trees.
44:17
Keir: Which is why you see so many line breaks in a game, you see so many bitten defenders, you can sit people down in a room, watch the film and be like, what's going to happen.
44:25
Keir: And they'll tell you they know what to do, but then they still lose it in a game.
44:29
Keir: Because of all this chaos, you can lose sight of the fact of what constitutes an effective one-on-one contest.
44:38
Keir: What are the underlying factors?
44:40
Keir: How do you use for spit misdirection, stuff like that, and also what works and what doesn't work, because within rugby, you can be woefully under prepared, but how 14 other people make you look a lot smarter than you are.
44:54
Keir: Likewise as a coach, you can be a terrible coach and you just got self-correcting players that make you look smarter than you are the feedback in a combat sport.
45:04
Keir: Like jujitsu is a lot more instantaneous, a lot more
45:10
TJ: vivid,
45:12
Keir: and it's going to hurt what it teaches you.
45:17
Keir: Is that stuff.
45:19
Keir: And it also teaches you how unimportant some things are, like you said more force.
45:25
Keir: What's the first thing.
45:25
Keir: What's the thing that you have to spend six months on when you're a white belt,
45:30
TJ: stop using your strength,
45:31
Keir: slow down, breathe, stop using your strength.
45:34
Keir: I think about what you're doing.
45:37
Keir: You see it in boxing, you see it in jujitsu.
45:40
Keir: You see it in MMA.
45:41
Keir: You see it in wrestling.
45:43
Keir: So why is it in rugby?
45:45
Keir: We'll just like, right.
45:46
Keir: Let's go.
45:47
Keir: Right.
45:47
Keir: I'm telling you, Argentina, will you every single fucking game crying in the changing room, crying in the national Anthem, go out and watch those early games in the rugby championship.
45:59
Keir: They would, they would come out absolutely fucking nuts.
46:02
Keir: And they'd be good for 40, 50, 60 minutes.
46:07
Keir: We had to be, you know, you know, they talk about in cool runnings, like the Swiss we have to be.
46:17
Keir: And eventually it would get to the point where we were playing those big teams where guys would just come out and be like, okay, calm.
46:25
TJ: Nice.
46:26
TJ: Yeah.
46:27
TJ: Um, did you ever do any, like, I know, I dunno if this is your area, but, uh, do you do any mindfulness, meditation type techniques with them to, to bring that down or to, you know, we
46:38
Keir: just did a lot with, uh, eyes closed, belly breathing.
46:43
TJ: Yeah.
46:43
TJ: Yeah.
46:44
TJ: We're not into only evidence-based stuff.
46:46
TJ: We're not into this woo stuff, so, yeah.
46:48
TJ: Nice.
46:49
TJ: Um, I do think that's they call BJJ like meditation in your pajamas restaurant around with,
46:55
Keir: um, waking up by Sam Harris?
47:00
Keir: No.
47:01
TJ: So it's a book.
47:04
Keir: Yeah, he's an atheist or whatever, but it's like, it talks about the subtitle is spirituality and the absence of religion.
47:12
Keir: So when you look at, uh, spirituality, what unites the major religions of the world is transcendence and the losing of the self.
47:26
Keir: And one of the things that it talks about, because it's quite an interesting book.
47:31
Keir: It flip-flops between the chapters on neuro neuroscience, all that kind of stuff.
47:36
Keir: And then spirituality.
47:39
Keir: And one of the things I think it's called the default mode network, which is the more, uh, inward the attention is turned.
47:49
Keir: And me, me, me, me, me, this is what I want, all this kind of stuff.
47:52
Keir: The more the default mode network is switched on and generally the unhappier and the more stressed people.
47:59
Keir: If you can focus externally on, if you can focus externally on something that's repetitive or, you know, requires focus.
48:12
Keir: That's where, you know, people talk about losing themselves in work.
48:15
Keir: That's because they're switching off the default mode network, just like jujitsu it's meditative, because you have no choice breathing.
48:24
Keir: You are concentrating on external tasks.
48:26
Keir: And if you think about anything else, you're going to get choked unconscious.
48:28
Keir: Yeah.
48:29
TJ: That was the best thing.
48:30
TJ: Yeah.
48:30
TJ: That was the best thing about it.
48:31
TJ: I always, yeah, I was going through some shit when I first took it up and I'm like, you're not thinking about any of your problems when you, you you've got.
48:38
TJ: Yeah, a hundred kilos bloke on your back, trying to try to strangle you with your own clothes.
48:44
TJ: Um, same thing with rugby as well, if you get it right, like you're no, one's thinking about the tax problems when they're on the pitch, but the reality is
48:53
Keir: alcohol women.
48:59
Keir: Um, escapism,
49:04
TJ: definitely.
49:05
TJ: Um, is there any, like, do you find that the drilling in jujitsu, uh, now we can look at the drilling and jujitsu from the shit lens where it's just repetition against a dead opponent, which is kind of sometimes pointless, um, versus, you know, actual live drilling, but do you think that has a good place to interrupt me?
49:27
Keir: Absolutely.
49:28
Keir: Absolutely.
49:29
Keir: So I, you, you kind of like early to, I would agree with John data, which is.
49:36
Keir: You know, drilling with a corpse.
49:38
Keir: Repetition is not the mother of skill.
49:41
Keir: Purposeful repetition is the mother of skill, and it has to be a degree of realism and, and opposition.
49:47
Keir: If you imagine everything from, uh, from a spectrum of rote repetition, closed environment or solo, all the way up to in jujitsu, it would be sparring and competition in rugby.
50:00
Keir: It would be 15 or 15 games or anything on the one end.
50:05
Keir: You have very tight constraints, complete control.
50:09
Keir: You're going to see what you want to see every single time.
50:11
Keir: And at the other end, you have high realism, but organized chaos.
50:15
Keir: Yeah.
50:16
Keir: It's about, we'll go back to the contact, aerate and rugby.
50:19
Keir: What do you consider to be a good number of tackles for rugby player to make an a, in a high level game?
50:25
TJ: Uh, let's say high
50:27
Keir: teens.
50:28
Keir: Yeah.
50:29
Keir: I mean, if you're, if you're an international back row, you're making 20 tackles a game that has a lot of tackles.
50:34
Keir: How many are you going to make on a Tuesday?
50:35
Keir: Cause they're only doing it on Tuesday 10.
50:39
Keir: Yeah.
50:40
Keir: All right.
50:40
Keir: Is anything going to make your master of anything?
50:42
Keir: Nope.
50:43
Keir: Yep.
50:44
Keir: That you're weak.
50:45
Keir: Sorry that you're weak.
50:47
Keir: Let's say three months a year.
50:49
Keir: You're not doing tackle work because you're in the off season, you beat up all the shit pre-season so you got 48 weeks a year.
50:58
Keir: I'm going to work out the numbers exactly 12 weeks now, not even that 50 to one store, 40 weeks, a year, 40 weeks, a year, times 1200 tackles a year, 1200 of anything is not going to make you a master over a
51:12
TJ: year.
51:13
TJ: And it's 1200, like at, because especially when you're talking about tackling, which is again, yeah.
51:20
TJ: There's so many different ways that you can do it.
51:22
Keir: So what drilling allows you to do is to put sufficient constraints on people that you have the realism and that you can accumulate those around.
51:31
Keir: Uh, because you don't have to wait for the game to come to you.
51:35
Keir: The situation is there as it is.
51:36
Keir: You can also manage the intensity in the structural damage that comes with that.
51:42
Keir: So I feel like it's a great compromise between those two, if it's done correctly.
51:46
Keir: So what you have to do with drilling in my opinion, is structure things in such a way that it feels real.
51:55
Keir: You have to have good training partners that are going to give you those looks and give you the appropriate level of resistance.
52:00
Keir: And it always has to be linked back to a tactical technical objectives.
52:06
Keir: And then you have to provide regular opportunities to express that in game context.
52:10
Keir: But if you, the component pieces of that drill, if you cannot do it by yourself perfectly, or you cannot do it, uh, with a nonresistant opponent, you obviously need to do.
52:25
Keir: Yeah,
52:26
TJ: I think that's, again, one of the biggest problems with rugby is like, you're, you're, you're either doing you're over on one end of the spectrum or competing on the other end of spectrum, where there you've got coaches that are just doing games and maybe even just touch games or that don't even really relate.
52:40
TJ: So all you're passing, all your tackling, all your, whatever, it's completely under pressure and it's, and it's very limited.
52:46
TJ: You have the
52:47
Keir: two to tackle bags, sprint tacos.
52:52
Keir: We see that six times in rugby league.
52:53
Keir: Cause that was the same.
52:55
TJ: Yeah.
52:55
TJ: Or there's other drills where, you know, you're just running, like you practice wracking against bags, which, you know, and it's a hundred percent intensity.
53:04
TJ: Yeah.
53:05
TJ: It's a hundred percent intensity, but some would run into a bag then voluntarily going to the ground.
53:10
TJ: It's just such a, like
53:12
Keir: non-stop In 2003.
53:15
Keir: I hit a rock bag so hard.
53:17
Keir: I broke my collarbone.
53:19
Keir: I was fucking dumb as that.
53:21
TJ: Oh my God.
53:22
TJ: But I mean, geez, you, that you, you must be so good that you'd be a professional rugby player though.
53:26
TJ: If you can hit without force.
53:29
TJ: That's ridiculous.
53:30
TJ: Um, or the other problem that people do is that they'll do.
53:35
TJ: They'll do drills for the sake of doing drills without any, just because that's what other people have done.
53:41
TJ: And then they get so much stuff passing without any context or so many, you know, that sort of rock and drew without any context that, yeah.
53:48
TJ: And I wonder the skills on improvement.
53:50
TJ: And the frustrating thing is, is especially with rugby, is it like once you're in your twenties or any age group, really like people will, will, will put you into a box and I'll say, okay, this is, this is your level of skill.
54:04
TJ: And I'll sort of keep you in there as long as you can, as long as you allow them to.
54:08
TJ: And the sport itself will, we'll keep you there as well, because there's, there's not really any, any means of progression within the team training.
54:17
TJ: Cause it's a real difficult job to prepare a team on an hour and a half, one or two times a week.
54:23
Keir: It's tough.
54:24
Keir: Like once, honestly, I think by like most, most rugby players by 23, 24, 25, the bed is made, they call it.
54:35
Keir: There's this trade-off between optimization for, you know, six, seven days from now, every Saturday and the longterm development, because they compete with one another.
54:50
Keir: When you're talking about six to seven or let's call it five, five to nine to five day, turnarounds is really short.
54:57
Keir: Nine is really long, but you can have a five to nine, five to nine days.
55:01
Keir: You're not going to be like, okay, well we need to go do an hour of, you know, concentrating on level, level, one rock clearance.
55:09
Keir: It's going to be like, right?
55:10
Keir: Who are we playing next?
55:11
Keir: What are they good at?
55:12
Keir: How are we going to count?
55:13
Keir: You know, they're, they're two opposing things and it would be very impressive to see people juggle that and, and continue to push into the, you know, the late twenties.
55:25
Keir: Yeah, but
55:27
TJ: the, yeah, theoretically, there's no reason why it can't happen because people, it would take it, but it takes more ownership on the player to take complete ownership on the player to figure out what it is that they want to improve and go about like making the time to go and do that.
55:44
TJ: I think even, uh, even at like professional clubs, they're still limited on that resources and the time that they can spend with these people doing that, but they'll still do it.
55:51
TJ: Like the best players in the world will still take time just themselves on a couple others and they'll get they'll drag people in and they'll still do.
55:57
TJ: That's
55:57
Keir: actually, it's probably a little bit of a function of the calendar and the amount of time that they have off.
56:04
Keir: But that's one thing that you see in the NFL that I've, I've thought about productizing for rugby, which is for, you know, Browns in Portugal.
56:14
Keir: I was thinking about like, Hey, we're going to rent out Browns for a week, two weeks.
56:20
Keir: And it's only, it's only open to guys in the.
56:22
Keir: It's going to be two or three K, and we're going to put on all your food, all your training.
56:27
Keir: There's going to be speakers coming in, talking about, you know, like financial management, you know, sports psychology, or this kind of stuff.
56:34
Keir: And we're just going to train for two or three weeks for your off season.
56:37
Keir: Yeah,
56:39
TJ: yeah.
56:39
TJ: That's yeah.
56:40
TJ: Problem is with rugby.
56:41
TJ: Is it, there is no, the off season is about four weeks long.
56:46
Keir: Yeah.
56:46
Keir: Well, you know, like I bet Albano better Beto Abano came.
56:51
Keir: This was just as he remember the year he broke out, like I think scored against along the European cup, the off season before he flew out to Tokyo with massive blessing to train, with, to train with me and to train with Toshiba
57:05
TJ: just to, just to, and that's so good because it is as a rugby player.
57:10
TJ: Like you are.
57:12
TJ: You know, you are a cog, but there's, you know, and, and there's, and you have to accept that and, you know, and that's okay.
57:19
TJ: But at the same time, like there's no reason that you can't make yourself the shiniest flashiest most efficient, you can be, you still have to take the time to work on yourself.
57:28
Keir: You are in the business of you and you all your own biggest asset,
57:33
TJ: a hundred percent, a hundred percent.
57:35
TJ: Um, all right.
57:36
TJ: I don't wanna take up too much of your time.
57:38
TJ: Um, this has been a good solid hour.
57:40
TJ: I think people listening to this, I've got some, some real light bulb moments, hopefully.
57:45
TJ: Why isn't he talking about squats?
57:49
TJ: Yeah.
57:49
TJ: That's if they want to know sports, squats and cleans and they can actually like download programs and stuff like that, you know, this is, this is more about the how to apply that stuff.
58:01
TJ: Um, okay.
58:02
TJ: I've got two more questions to finish off.
58:04
TJ: So, um, I've been asked this a few times and now I really enjoy it as a, as a question to ask guests.
58:10
TJ: Um, you're familiar with James Claire and, um, his atomic habits.
58:15
TJ: So he talks a lot about, um, uh, was it marginal gains and he talks about how your habits can be, can do that.
58:25
TJ: Is there any one-off changes that you think athletes can make to, to see marginal gains
58:33
Keir: specific to rugby?
58:35
TJ: Uh,
58:37
Keir: yeah,
58:43
TJ: we can be athletes in all areas.
58:45
TJ: Alcohol.
58:46
TJ: Yeah.
58:47
TJ: Woof.
58:48
TJ: Yeah.
58:50
TJ: Would that, w would it, would that answer change if it wasn't specific to rugby?
58:56
Keir: Um, you know, I was thinking about this the other day, just randomly, you know, I don't have a kid that, you know yeah.
59:07
Keir: I've my drinking is pretty much gone down to zero since having a child because you realize, well now, you know, every, every day that you're all the time that you're drinking you, hopefully I'm not giving time and attention to a child.
59:25
Keir: And every day that you lose to a hangover is, you know, you're being a suboptimal parent.
59:32
Keir: And I realized the other day, it's like, when you drink, it's not just that day that you lose the cost is doubled.
59:40
Keir: Yeah, definitely.
59:41
Keir: If you think about all of the time, and I did this as a rugby player, you think about all the time that you spend recovering from drinking related excess throughout your career, and then add up all of those reps that you missed.
59:56
Keir: All of the training that you could have.
59:58
Keir: Adds up.
59:59
TJ: Yeah, definitely.
1:00:01
TJ: I usually my answer I gave when they asked it was asleep.
1:00:05
TJ: So it's a similar line because I mean, but the thing is, if, if you're boozing you, you're not sleeping well, like that's one of the biggest detriments and it's, and there's not much you can really do to undo that.
1:00:16
Keir: I mean, this is like to the nth degree in college because they, you know, have them up training about five, six in the morning.
1:00:29
Keir: All of their friends are at playing video games.
1:00:32
Keir: They're out drinking until one in the morning.
1:00:33
Keir: They're out trying to get pussy.
1:00:34
Keir: Like you're going to tell an 18 year old go to bed at 9:00 PM.
1:00:38
Keir: I don't think so.
1:00:39
Keir: Make the training to, yeah.
1:00:43
TJ: Yeah.
1:00:43
TJ: Ridiculous.
1:00:44
TJ: Okay.
1:00:44
TJ: Um, and then the other question is, could you describe your overall training philosophy or you can give life philosophy or business philosophy in one sentence.
1:00:57
Keir: Raise the cost of doing violence against you to a prohibitive level.
1:01:05
Keir: So there's a book.
1:01:07
Keir: It took me forever to read.
1:01:08
Keir: It is like I tell you, it is written by, you know, Jacob who smoke.
1:01:12
Keir: No, the politician, the Brexit guy, his dad was the editor of the times of London and wrote this book 25 years ago.
1:01:23
Keir: And it predicts Bitcoin.
1:01:25
Keir: It predicts remote work.
1:01:27
Keir: It predicts like pandemics, all this kind of stuff.
1:01:31
Keir: It is an absolute head fuck of a book, but it makes you, it forces you to realize that obviously a good life is a self-determination the, where you want do what you want, work, how you want, speak, how you want.
1:01:49
Keir: You have, you know, uh, You know, freedom to basically decide what it is you want to do.
1:01:57
Keir: And people's ability to take that away from you relies on their ability to coerce you with ultimately violence.
1:02:07
Keir: So when you think about it, all, all, uh, laws, what do they have at their heart?
1:02:16
Keir: You just say, no, no, no,
1:02:18
TJ: no.
1:02:19
TJ: What's the, what is it you're going to go to, you're going to go to jail.
1:02:21
TJ: You they're going to lock you up.
1:02:22
TJ: Yeah.
1:02:23
Keir: If you don't step into that cell looking at a fucking drag.
1:02:26
Keir: Yeah.
1:02:27
TJ: We're going to take that by force.
1:02:29
Keir: You can, you can be coerced by other people by numerous forms of violence, political violence, economic violence, social violence, canceling people, physical violence, all that kind of stuff.
1:02:43
Keir: And the more you structure your life in such a way that somebody can coerce you against your world to do what you don't want.
1:02:50
Keir: The more poorly you've designed your life.
1:02:52
Keir: So working for yourself, for example, I bet you can speak a lot more freely now than when you're in the MLR, right?
1:03:00
Keir: It was programmed to be that exactly.
1:03:02
Keir: But you've structured your life in such a way that politically and socially, you are harder to do violence against.
1:03:08
Keir: Definitely.
1:03:09
Keir: If you lived in China, for example, and you had all of your net worth in Chinese real estate, which is about to go down the toilet or you had it in Bitcoin and the government can't take it from you.
1:03:18
Keir: You've structured your life, financial in such a way that they can't commit economic violence against you.
1:03:23
Keir: Presumably you do jujitsu to structure your life in such a way that if somebody wants to come up and fucking smack you, they're going to regret era.
1:03:29
Keir: It's going to be a high cost.
1:03:31
Keir: Yeah, it's a head fuck of a book.
1:03:33
TJ: I'm going to, what's the name of the book?
1:03:35
Keir: Sovereign individual.
1:03:37
Keir: Interestingly enough.
1:03:38
Keir: It's.
1:03:41
Keir: That is why this, it was out of print around the turn of the millennium and Peter teal.
1:03:50
Keir: Who's a founder of PayPal first investor in Facebook.
1:03:54
Keir: He is actually paid for it to be republished and reprinted
1:03:59
TJ: because all of his stuff is coming true.
1:04:02
TJ: And because that, I mean, if it's coming true, then it shows that the lessons of the book are important.
1:04:05
TJ: I'm going to, and again, I'm like into,
1:04:08
Keir: yeah, it's very interesting.
1:04:10
Keir: And it, it, it will give you a libertarian streak, but it's pretty interesting.
1:04:14
Keir: Like it talks about like, um, politics versus money in politics.
1:04:19
Keir: If you don't like how things are, you have to get 50% of people on your side and you have to wait four or five years to, to change things.
1:04:27
Keir: Economically you can vote with your wallet somewhere like marketplace.
1:04:30
Keir: It's pretty interesting.
1:04:31
TJ: And it is interesting.
1:04:32
TJ: I'm looking forward to reading it.
1:04:33
TJ: All right, mate, it's been great having you on, um, I'll catch you on the strength coach network.
1:04:38
TJ: Can you tell the listeners where they can find out more about you've got a, a warmup template recently been released as well.
1:04:44
TJ: Right?
1:04:45
TJ: So where can people go find those?
1:04:46
TJ: Yeah,
1:04:47
Keir: the, my, my Instagram, yeah.
1:04:49
Keir: It's got my Instagram, uh, click on the link in the bio and they're free to download, but I'll be, pre-season
1:04:54
TJ: coming up.
1:04:55
TJ: Nice.
1:04:56
TJ: All the tire kick is going to get that, that if they don't want to pay for it properly, my it's been great having you on.
1:05:03
TJ: Awesome.
1:05:03
TJ: Thank you for just giving us your time.