Feature Team of the Week: Men's Rugby Union

Feature Team of the Week:

Men's Rugby Union

1. What BUCS League do you compete in?
The Men's 1s compete in BUCS North 1A, Mens 2’s compete in Northern 3B and 3s compete in Northern 5B.


2. What is your training schedule?
Monday

A.M: S&C 
P.M: Rugby Session

Tuesday

A.M: Recovery session

Wednesday

P.M: Compete (or extra Rugby session)

Thursday

OFF

Friday

A.M: S&C
P.M: Rugby Session

Saturday

Optional Weights/Conditioning session

Sunday

OFF

3. When are games?

BUCs games are Wednesday, and some players
compete for local or home teams on the weekends.

4. What kind of training do you do in S&C? 

Our S&C sessions are built around trying to develop well-rounded robust athletes to cope with the demands of Rugby. We try to hit all of this throughout the week including power, strength and aerobic conditioning. Players will often come to sessions with collision injuries from previous games, so individual sessions will be given to keep the players progressing which will involve exercises the physios have given integrated into the team session.

5. How do you feel S&C has helped you develop as athletes?

S&C is helping the team become a lot fitter, faster and stronger, which is helping keep the boys ready for both training and games. S&C allows some players need to focus on their individual weaknesses, whether than is mobility, movement, strength or fitness related.



Jordan Webster, Graduate S&C Coach, leads the Men’s Rugby Union Programme, here’s what he had to say about the programme:

“Men’s Rugby Union this year had a lot of new players and also lost a lot of good players last year. Due to this, a lot of our players haven’t really done strength and conditioning. So as a relatively ‘new’ athletes to strength training, we started basic. I had 3 main objectives to complete by the end of this year:

1. Get the majority of players to buy into S&C and what it can do for their performance. This was made so much easier due to a strong leadership group that were senior players and encouraged participation. This was an important step in creating a performance culture for the team.

2. Build a huge base. As a relatively young and smaller team, we needed to develop a huge foundation of hypertrophy and strength so we can compete with the more physical teams.

3. Educate the players. Teaching/refreshing the players on the basics of recovery, nutrition, hydration and mobility. This is extra important for a team that has such an intense/busy week of training/competing.

A lot of the work we do with the team is develop a solid foundation of movement and strength. We started as basic as you could go, mastering the basics of squatting, deadlifting, lunging, pressing and pulling. We spent the first 3 weeks of our programme with circuit type training, getting the team fit and ready for the high work load that was going to follow. Our programme from the start of the semester into Christmas ran loosely as follows:

Week 1-3: Work Capacity Circuits (30 seconds ON/15 Seconds, 10 different exercises, 3-4 rounds, 2-3 times a week)

Week 4-8: Hypertrophy/Strength (3-4 sets of 6-10 reps, full body
workouts, 3-4 times a week)
Week 8-12: Max Strength (3-5 sets of 2-6 reps, full body, 2-3 times per week)

Our programming follows a linear periodisation model which finishes with Varsity. One of the biggest issues we have with rugby, being the amount of contact injuries we pick up. This isn’t something I can control, so my job is to work around that injury and still train the rest of the body so that we don’t lose speed or power in-season. If the shoulder is injured, there is still many ways to train the lower body including Leg Press, Split Squat variations and Squats. 

If the team does have a big game on a Wednesday, we may reduce volume (NOT intensity) on the Monday session. Although we don’t do this too often, because if we skipped 2 sets of squats every week, we are missing up to 160 sets over the course of the September-April playing schedule. That is a lot of opportunities to get stronger and create an adaptation. This doesn’t mean we don’t react to the athlete’s readiness as they come through the door because we do, but its knowing the difference between ‘cant be bothered’ and ‘NEEDS a recovery session’

Here is one of our Rugby Union 4 week programmes, with an emphasis on Strength and Power using Front Squat, Deadlifts and Bench Press as the main movements of the week.

Feature Team of the Week: Men's Volleyball

Feature Team of the Week

Men's Volleyball

1. What BUCS League do you compete in?

The Men's 1s compete in BUCS Premier North, and the Men's 2s compete in BUCS Northern 2B.

2. You also have a link with a National league programme?

The club has a strong link with the Sheffield Volleyball Club, which has teams that compete at various levels, including Super 8’s and Division 1.

3. What is your training schedule?

We usually have 3-4 court sessions per week, with two team S&C sessions per week, as well as additional drop-ins for individual work and top ups when we don’t play.

4. When are games?

We compete for Hallam in BUCS on Wednesdays and for Sheffield Volleyball Club on Saturdays and Sundays, meaning we sometimes have 3 games a week.

5. What kind of training do you do in S&C? 

We aim to get into the S&C before 7am, so that we’re ready to go. We then usually have a team stretch followed by some activation and dynamic mobility to get us all going, which is quite important when we have training until late the night before! We all work off a team-based programme that usually last around 4 weeks, but we do all have individual work to complete as well to ensure that we’re all working on our individual weaknesses. At the moment our programme has a focus on max strength and power, which has the aim to maximise jump height.

6. How do you feel S&C has helped you develop as athletes?

S&C has given everyone the opportunity to develop physically, not only in the team sessions but also having the chance to drop in for one to one sessions with Aden has helped a lot of the team to develop further and a lot quicker.

Aden Flannagan, Assistant S&C Coach, leads the Men’s Volleyball Programme, here’s what he had to say about the programme:

“Programming for the Men’s Volleyball Team can be quite a task at times, compared to most sports here at Hallam they have quite a high on court training load. When you take the nature of the sport into consideration, some positions may be jumping up to 300 times per session, so potentially 1200 times per week, in training alone. To many this may not seem like a lot, but that’s huge amount of volume, then plus the 3 potential games per week, which can make programming quite difficult.

What we’ve tried to do so far this year is to reduce the amount of impact via jumping based exercises. We’ve had a big focus on landing mechanics as well as emphasising eccentric strength in exercises to ensure that every athlete can manage the training load of Volleyball, in order to minimise the chance of conditions like tendonitis to occur.

Volleyball started with us in the S&C earlier than every other team at Hallam this year, meaning it gave me the opportunity to have a real impact on the boys, by being able to physically develop all of them prior to on court training and games had even started. We usually work off a 4-week block, which we adjust the gym-based training volume based upon how fatigued they are, as well as how many games they may have that week. Very similarly to what Andy uses with Men’s Hockey, I also use 5 repeated jumps to monitor power output on a weekly/daily basis. Using this gives me the opportunity to monitor both individual and team progression, but also to monitor fatigue levels of each athlete.

Above shows the data of how we have monitored the boys throughout the BUCS season so far. As you can see before the Christmas there was a great deal of inconsistency, which is simply due to the team’s training and playing volume, thus causing regular fluctuations. Although as a team they have all got stronger throughout the year so far, because of the jumping volume that they are exposed every training session and game, it causes a neuromuscular fatigue resulting in jump scores being affected.

Over the last 4 weeks we have had a huge focus on trying to develop lower limb max strength, as well as overloading the stretch shortening cycle to maximise jump height. The team in general have a strong work ethic and are in the gym more than twice per week, with some of the boys getting in the gym to train up to 4 times per week, all of which I try to programme for to maximise their athletic performance. You can find their latest programme below to see what we’ve used to maximise jump performance over the last 4 weeks”.

 

Team Hallam S&C supports Winter Olympic Athletes

We are wishing the best of luck to three awesome athletes who are heading out to South Korea for the Winter Olympics. Katie Summerhayes, Molly Summerhayes and Pete Speight have been training with us at Team Hallam S&C for the past few years, and have been really great role models to have around.

 

“These are some of the most dedicated and committed athletes that I have ever seen” Says Andrew Langford, Lead S&C Coach for Team Hallam. “They all bring a great work ethic and help show our students what it takes to compete at the highest levels. Katie has been coming in now since she was 15 or 16 and has really worked on her strength and fitness. When she’s back in England she will come in almost every day of the week and work on different things, with a large focus on injury prevention.”

Snowsports, especially the type these guys do, slopestyle and half-pipe, are some of the most physically demanding events and certainly come with a high injury risk. Indeed, many of the athletes at the elite level have suffered serious injuries, usually due to landing from a great height after doing a series of twists in the air.

“The demands of the sport mean that these guys have to take their physical preparation seriously. These guys are great at taking ownership of their training programmes and making sure they work on the areas they need to. They will spend a lot of time working on landing mechanics and will do a great deal of hamstring work which should help them deal with the physical demands on the slopes.”

Katie will be competing on Saturday 17^th February from 4:00am in the Women’s Slopestyle

Molly will be competing on Tuesday 20^th February from 1:30am in the Women’s Halfpipe

 

Pete will be competing Thursday 22^nd February from 2:30am in the Men’s Halfpipe

 

Feature Athlete of the Week: Sam Tierney

Feature Athlete of the Week:

Sam Tierney 

How long have you been playing football for and how did you start?

I’ve been playing since I was 6 years old. I joined a boys team at first and when I was 8 I joined Sheffield United Academy.

What team do you currently play for? 

I play for Doncaster Rovers Belles in the FAWSL 2 as well as playing for Hallam.

What is your current training schedule?

I train with Belles on Tuesday and Thursday evenings as well as a technical session on Friday’s. I have S&C on Tuesday and Friday mornings and every Monday I do an individual recovery session. Games for Belles are on Sunday’s and I play for Hallam on Wednesday’s.

What is your best footballing achievement?

Representing England and scoring in a game against Holland at a camp in La Manga. 

How do you feel S&C has helped you develop as an athlete?

My programme has a huge power focus and I can feel the benefits of this when playing as I feel much faster. I have gained overall strength meaning I am stronger on the ball. 

Andrew Langford, Head of S&C says:

“This is one of Sam’s latest sessions. We’ve been looking at further developing strength qualities along with power output. Sam is fairly new to S&C but is progressing really quickly and is able to tolerate quite high workloads, even during the season. At the moment all of our aims are based around overall athletic development, which should lay a foundation for specific sporting qualities in the years to come. We’ve also used some force-velocity profiling with Sam, which is really useful to monitor progressions and to analyse how she produces force. In future we might also use this to prescribe loads depending on readiness. 

Sam is a really great athlete to work with and has a fantastic drive and work ethic that we love to see in our scholarship athletes. She is a great role model and ambassador for Team Hallam and I am sure will progress to the highest levels of achievement”