Podcast With Nevin Mills of The Strength Institute of Western Australia

Recently during the off-season from my current role in Japan I was back in Perth with family and friends. I had the pleasure of stopping in and seeing Nevin Mills and his amazing gym The Strength Institute. He invited me to be a guest on his new podcast, to talk all this Rugby Union Strength and Conditioning. It was a great experience and definitely worth a listen, and if you’re in Perth stop by and check out his state of the art facility!

See more of him here https://www.thestrengthinstitute.com/

Links to download and listen below, available through all the usual places.

https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/podcast-1-strength-conditioning-for-rugby-union/id1456347513?i=1000431812222&mt=2&download=true

Lower Body Profiling and Increases in Speed, Power and Strength

If you are following on from my previous blog post, you would know that I have correlated data for many different exercises in the gym and how they relate to sprinting. I have concluded that there are many different strength qualities that relate to speed, and there is not one defining test that will accurately predict a persons speed.

Now that I am aware of the correlation between different exercises and the expression of speed I can go about creating individualised programs based on the athlete's profile to help them get faster! My area of interest lately has been to train the athlete in what they are lacking - or better their weak points. My theory when designing programs has been to ‘fill in the gaps’ and overcome any obvious weak points. So far I have had great improvements in my athletes’ in their respective weaknesses  which has translated to personal bests across the board.

For example, as seen below both of these athletes have drastically different profiles and it is my belief that they should therefore have different training programs. Player A tested to be very powerful, and moderately fast, however lacked maximal strength, so I have been programming him to increase strength in the lower body. Player B tested to be very strong (2.7xBW squat) and moderately fast, but lacked being able to translate his strength into speed and power (shown by his low RSI and average VJ), so his program focused on producing force and included more jumping and plyometric movements.

Here is an example of how I would differentiate the programs to highlight and improve on their weak areas while maintaining and improving their strengths.

Both programs are similar yet with obvious differences. Both contain strength work for the lower body however; different volumes, intensities and exercises are used to stress the system that needs the most work.

After profiling my athletes early in the year, most of the 8 week preseason was spent training on individualised programs similar to the one above. Here is a realistic improvement seen over the course of a preseason with actual players. It is interesting to see how their profiles moved around after specifically training a weakness.

I have found this type of profiling and then programming from it to be very effective to say the least. 49 out of 50 players increased performance in the 10m and 20m tests which I count as a win!