Inhuman's Rugby Training Log

Training Logs
1

Hey all,

I’m a 17 year old freshman at Bowdoin College in Maine and I’m a forward for the rugby team. I’m the smallest forward on the team and gaining weight is a priority at the moment. I’m 5’10", 165 pounds.

I’m going to lay out my goals, short and long term. Right now it’s the fall season and we practice 5 days a week for 2 hours. I’m genetically a really skinny guy, so I don’t gain weight easily when I’m doing what amounts to intense cardio 5 days a week. So basically, my goals for this season are to maintain my weight and strength, and see if I can’t gain several pounds or add some weight to my lifts as well. If intense lifting is burning me out though, I’ve got to just maintain.

During the off season, I’m going to be lifting to grow. My goal here is to put on 10 to 15 pounds (muscle or not but preferably muscle of course) before spring season so I’m around 175/180.

For the spring season, my goal is much the same as with the fall.

After the spring season, I’m going to do some more absolute strength training (1RM stuff) over the summer so that hopefully I can come into my fall season next year with some big lifts.

So basically my long term goal is to about 185 by next fall, with a 1RM bench/squat/deadlift of 275/325/400. Might be ambitious, but I want to push myself as hard as I can.

I’m going to post up my fall season training and my diet next.

2

So I’m going to lifting 2 to 3 times a week. The schedule is random like that because a scheduled lifting day might be on the day I’m supposed to do sprints or the day before a game. This should be okay however because I’m planning on doing a rotating A/B workout schedule. So all going well it’ll look like this:

Week 1
Monday - A
Wednesday - B
Friday - A

Week 2
Monday - B
Wednesday - A
Friday - B

If I have to miss a day, I’ll just pick up where I left off. Here are the workouts:

Workout A
Back Squat - 3X5
Bench Press - 3X5
Barbell Row - 3X5
Hyperextensions - 2X15
Side Bends - 2X15

Workout B
Standard Deadlift - 3X5
Overhead Barbell Press - 3X5
Pullups - 3X5
Dumbbell Shrugs - 2X10
Weighted Crunches - 2X15

I do three warmups for the core lifts, with about 3 minutes of rest between sets (I rest til I’m recovered and 3 minutes is an estimate). The basic idea is just to add 5 pounds to each lift every workout. If I don’t make the full 3X5, I’ll try again next time. If this is too much on top of the 5 days of practice, I’ll drop the assistance exercises, the overhead press, and the rows (So A is squat and bench, and B is deadlift and pullups) and I’ll just progress that way.

My PRs so far:

Squat - 225 X 5
Deadlift - 315 X 1
Bench - 200 X 5
Row - 150 X 5
Pullup - bodyweight + 10 X 5
Overhead - I actually haven’t overhead pressed in a while, I’ve been sticking mostly to incline benching so I don’t know what I can do. I’m assuming its something like 110 to 120. Should I do these seated or standing?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Maybe some of you guys remember training to gain weight on-season for football.

Diet’s up next.

3

This is probably more important than the training, so here it is.

I’m allowed three meals a day on my meal plan. These meals aren’t crappy cafeteria meals either, it’s nice food and lots of it.

Breakfast is as 7:45 most mornings, lunch at about 1, and dinner at about 630. As of now, I’m just eating really huge meals and I don’t get hungry during the day. I realize I’m going to need to fit some other meals in between the bigger ones if I’m going to keep or gain weight. So the plan is this:

-breakfast 8:00
-on most days i can have a brunch with real food at about 10:00, on mondays, wednesdays, and fridays ill need to either drink a protein shake with olive oil and stuff or a weight gainer (which would you guys recommend?) at the same time
-lunch 1:00
-snack 3:30
practice from 4 to 6 (if i end up getting sick to my stomach during practice cuz of the snack, ill push it back and see what happens)
-dinner 6:30
-before bed 10:00

I might be able to put another meal between dinner and before bed. If I need extra food I’ll buy some containers and stash rice and stuff.

For breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I’ll be having large portions of veggies with olive oil (fruit for breakfast), pasta/rice (granola for breakfast), and meat (eggs for breakfast). The other meals will probably either be a protein shake with olive oil, leftovers that ive taken from the cafeteria, or stuff from this little store on campus. Which ever it is, its going to have at least protein and hopefully a good amount of carbs and fat.

I know this is basically a “im going to wing it and stuff my face” plan, but with all the stuff I have to do and schedule changes and whatever else might come up, I won’t be able to stick to a solid plan. Plus I’ve got school work. I’m going to do my best to eat clean as well, not so much to keep from gaining too much fat, but because I’ve had some pretty bad acne and eating clean keeps it down.

Any tips here would also be appreciated. I’m going to start posting my workouts starting Monday.

4

hey good luck.

what position you playing?

by your stats it must be flanker?

Scott

5

[quote]inhuman08 wrote:
Overhead - I actually haven’t overhead pressed in a while, I’ve been sticking mostly to incline benching so I don’t know what I can do. I’m assuming its something like 110 to 120. Should I do these seated or standing?
[/quote]

Bro, if you are gonna be contesting line-outs go standing! :slight_smile: Have you considered including power cleans? Should translate well to rugby.

Best of luck with the training. You sound like a pretty strong guy. What division does Bowdoin College compete in?

6

i second the idea of powercleans.

powercleans and even Snatchs/muscle snatchs are great for line outs.

in defence I now lift the front jumper by myself so it frees up more defenders. this is due to snatchs, and overhead pressing.

also on the diet. bring something with you for directly after rugby training. a sandwich/shake and lots of water. get the about 1L-2L immediatly after a session and eat someting before you even shower.

7

Thanks for the replies guys,

Yup I’m a flanker at the moment, which is kinda funny cuz that’s what my dad played throughout high school and college (in scotland).

I definitely thought about doing power cleans, but I’ve never done them before and it’s my understanding that theyre one of the more technical lifts. I’m going to see if I can’t get a trainer to show my how to do them correctly.

For diet around practice, i was thinking of bringing my own water with some BCAAs mixed in. Dinner is within 15 minutes of practice and we go in all our sweatiness (its a bad thing to the team if we shower before dinner). I could always bring a sandwich to practice though.

8

Good luck with the rugby.

Remember you get out of it, what you put into it. So train hard with the team, and hit the basic lifts hard in the gym.

In terms of lifting, I was doing Wwestside for skinny bastards, got some good results.
Now with all my other training I’m doing a Push,pull, leg split.
Check it out.