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Athlete Training Program
Athlete Training Program
Athlete Training Program
Student’s Name
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Our athlete plays for the Sydney Roosters as the scrump half whose role is controlling
and distributing possession acquired by forwards. Consequently, the position requires endurance
and consistent play primarily involving moderate exertion (75-84%) that props and locks. Scrum
halfs also require speed to accelerate from the scrum, line out, ruck, or maul which necessitates a
demonstration of agility needed to evade the opposition’s tackles. In addition to the specific
positional roles, all players have to compete and maintain position through strength and power.
The Athlete is 27 years old and experienced in resistance training, heavy lifting, and good
technique. Furthermore, he has no history of current or recurrent injuries. During the in-season,
his team has competitive matches on Saturday mornings with Monday scheduled for recovery.
Conditioning, speed, technical, agility, tactical, and quickness training sessions are performed on
Tuesday and Thursday evenings supervised by the Coach. Finally, weight training is scheduled
Athlete Testing
Creating an effective training program requires first understanding the athlete’s strengths
and weaknesses to optimize resource allocation and training outcomes. Moreover, establishing a
baseline allows the coach to monitor performance and progress throughout the program. In this
case, the athlete underwent a test battery to assess various attributes using processes and
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exercises as suggested by… with the results displayed in Table 1 below. A functional movement
screen as developed by Kraus et al. (2014) was also conducted to evaluate general functional
asymmetry and posture, which is a predictor of severe injury in contact sports such as Rugby.
The results reveal the athlete’s strengths as lower body strength and speed with an impressive
back squat. However, he has a weakness in upper body strength, which provides improvement
While the initial assessment demonstrated adequate degrees of lower body strength, it will
continue to be a primary focus in the macrocycle. Multiple studies have confirmed a positive link
between between back squat performance and sprint speed. The complementary focus will be on
improving upper body strength, and total body power. Periodising the training program is
the maximal backsquat during the pre-season period may improve 0-40m sprint times for rugby
players which supports the need for continued lower body strength training. The plan covers a
macrocycle (a year), its constituent mesocycles (up to 4 week segments), and microcycles
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(weekly plans). The current pre-season will focus on general aspects (performance capacity and
Off Season
Due to the rigors of a long rugby season, rest periods are mandatory for the athlete in addition to
unsupervised offsite training before resuming for the preseason. In this transitory period, the
athlete can perform self-directed exercises at a moderate volume and intensity to maintain his
Pre-Season
The pre-season will commence with a 1-week introductory cycle designed to acclimatize the
athlete back into the training program. The period will feature low load and low intensity training
with the focus maintained on correcting technique and standardized completion of repetitions.
exposes the athlete to novel stimuli thus catalyzing physical and physcological adaptations
Although there are individual variations, muscle size functions as a robust predictor of an
athlete’s strength and must be enhanced to optimize performance in rugby. These aspects are
usually handled during the pre-season due to limited time during the in-season. To improve
muscular hypertrophy, the athlete will perform multiplanar and multiangular exercises with a rep
range of 6-12 with some expected to end in failure. Workouts will be divided into dual upper and
lower body sessions to maximize the hypertrophic effect. The second hypertrophy mesocycle
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will feature advanced training methodologies like supersets to facilitate continuous adaptation
and improvement.
Strength training was selected as the basis of specific preparation due to its strong
influence on rugby performance. Therefore, the exercises will also include movements and
muscle actions frequently performed in the sport to enhance transferrability of learning. The
chosen mean intensity is 85% which represents 6RM. Research by Serra et al. Showed that quad
training sessions every weeks have better outcomes than dual or triple. The second part of
specific preparation is optimizing strength conversion into power. Power development can be
further categorized into speed-strength (low load), and strength-speed (High load). Excellent
examples of strength-speed are Olympic exercises like the power clean which requires rapid
reduced resistance such as light jump squats. In this phase, the athlete will have four training
sessions every week with two emphasizing speed strength while the other two focus on strength
speeds. The second mesocycle will also introduce contrast training which mimics the post
exhausted.