OFF-SEASON TRAINING FOR RUGBY PLAYERS

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30499, 22 July 1964, Page 15

OFF-SEASON TRAINING FOR RUGBY PLAYERS

THE standard of football A in New Zealand was going up because more footballers were realising their fuller potential by building

stamina as the basis of speed in the off-season, said the famous athletics coach, Mr A. L. Lydiard, when he addressed players and coaches at the Merivale Rugby Football Club rooms recently.

“Train out of season,” said Mr Lydiard. “Good footballers have to train hard in the summer.”

Mr Lydiard recommended half an hour’s jogging each day as well as light weights and callisthenics and isometric exercises in the offseason.

This was followed by about three months of sharpening up before the season started. “This should include plenty of uphill springing and later repetition 50-yard dashes, say 40 or 50 of them, just like our athletes do,” said Mr Lydiard.

He recommended also heavier weight training to put strength and weight into the forwards’ physique. “But get your stamina right before you build up the muscles,” he said.

In this way all the hard work had been done before the football season started and the player was ready to put full speed into his play. With the sharpening up on top of the stamina building during the summer, a man should be able to put on two or three yards of extra speed in the case of the five-eighths.

In the case of wingers, Mr Lydiard recommended them to take on track running, although on not quite an equal scale as full time track athletes. The Meads brothers were running eight miles a day in the off season to keep fit, on to 1 of their farming jobs, said Mr Lydiard. D. B. Clarke, Tremain and Whineray were also players who did a considerable amount of off season training.

From experiments with the Waitemata club it was plain that many of the players were not fit, Mr Lydiard said. In a 10-mile run taken in a time of about 69 minutes many of them could not make it, and one had to b' pushed up the hill. The players realised they were not fit. They had since got started on systematic training and had already shown marked improvement in match-winning form.

“If you develop more stamina and more speed you get a better footballer,” said Mr Lydiard. “We know it can be done,” said Mr Lydiard. “All you have to do is to have a coach with sufficient psychology to make the players do the training.” On the previous day, Mr Lydiard outlined the need for off-season training when he addressed about 100 boys ai the Crichton Cobbers Gymnasium.