Kickin' It

Just got my place-kicking tee. Anyone have any advice on learning to place kick?

Windy!

It was really too windy to practice kicking yesterday . . .

But I did anyway.

I've progressed from dropkicks from 10 m directly in front of the goal posts to kicking from 10m slightly to the left and right of the goalposts. Sometimes I even make them!

Practice: 5/13/2012

I drove over to the Clearwater High School practice fields today for a workout. Now that I think of it, I should have ridden my bike in. That would have been a good warm up.

Jog - 5 minutes

Dynamic warm ups

 - A skips

 - High knees

 - Butt kicks

 - Straight leg march

 - Walking RDL (inverted toe touch)

 - Low walk

Strength/plyo

 - Squat push - 4 x 6, each leg

 - Forward hops, both legs - 4 x 5, sprint 5 m at end

 - Forward hops, one leg at a time - 4 x 6 each leg (try to go 10 m each time)

Agility

 - Zig zag, using these focal points:

   - Hard cuts

   - Wedge step

   - Turn hips at last second

   - Keep head up

   - Stay aware of surroundings

 - Zig zap swerve

   - Turn hips

   - Accelerate and decelerate

   - Keep head up

   - Stay aware of surroundings

   - Shift ball to outside arm through each transition

Dummy practice

 - Dummy kick to inside, cut to outside (practice left and right)

 - Dummy kick to outside, cut to inside (practice left and right)

 - Dummy pass to inside, cut to outside (practice left and right)

 - Dummy pass to outside, cut to inside (practice left and right)

This is my passing target. Thank you, Clearwater High School Football,
for having this weird contraption sitting out on the field.

Passing practice

 - 6 perfect passes to target from 5 m on right

 - 6 perfect passes to target from 5m on left

Kicking practice

 - 5 chip kicks into a 5 m x 5 m square from 5 m away (left foot and right foot)

 - 5 chip kicks into a 5 m x 5 m square from 10 m away (left foot and right foot)

 - Practice grubbers with left foot and right foot

 - Practice drop kicks

 - Practice drop goals

Shuttle runs (down, back, down, through, touching line with each transition)

 - 2 x 10 m

 - 2 x 20 m

 - 2 x 30 m

A few notes:

- I feel good about my agility. Forcing myself to keep my head up will help with being more alert in a game situation. It doesn't substitute for practicing and playing with other people, but every benefit is a boon. My acceleration and deceleration are really good when swerving through the cones, from what I can feel. I'd love to have a coach to give me feedback, though.

- The dummy practice feels helpful. That's something I can use in play. I need to work on making my fakes more believable, though. I think agility comes down to waiting until the last moment to change your mind, then having the quickness and precision to change mid-movement, and still execute the next movement well.

- Passing through a tire is hard! I set my timer to devote 10 minutes to passing practice, and I was hoping to get through 6 on each side at 5 m and 6 on each side at 10 m. But the timer was going off and I had yet to get my sixth pass off the left hand! I could practice that every day, clearly.

- My left leg kicks like crap. It's better now than it was this morning, though!

- I made a drop goal! It was from somewhere between 5 and 10 m away, almost right between the uprights, but I made it!

- In case you want to do the shuttle runs: Begin with hips square, standing by a cone. Run to a cone 10 m away, touch your hand to the line/cone, run back to the first cone, then sprint through the second one. On that repetition, you should have run 40 m total, with hard cuts between. Practice the wedge step: planting your foot perpendicular to the direction you're sprinting and pushing hard off that leg to drive into the next phase of the sprint.

- The 10 m and 20 m shuttle runs weren't too bad, but that 30 m hurt!

- Progressions are important in training, so here's how I plan to progress my shuttle runs. Today, I rested as long as I wanted to between reps. Next week, I'll limit rest to 1 minute. The week after that, 45 seconds. The following week, 30 seconds. Then I'll do a pyramid workout: 2 x 10 m, 2 x 20 m, 2 x 30 m, 2 x 20 m, 2 x 10 m. Same progression with the rest periods. After I've finished both of those progressions, I'll try adding in 2 x 40 m!

Practice: 5/3/2012

This wasn't a practice so much as a workout, but whatever.

I've been following the Eagle365 training protocol, mostly to have a set program. As a personal trainer, I know first-hand how valuable it is to have someone tell you exactly what to do. Could I write my own training program? Sure. And it would probably be more effective than that provided by the Eagles' coaches, because it addresses my specific needs. But that takes work, a lot of effort on my part, and it's my job; I don't want to do it in my free time. Besides, when I write my own training plan, I'm always second-guessing myself. Not because I don't think my training plan is good, but because I'm always looking to improve it. When I change my workouts every couple weeks, it cuts into my consistency, which cuts into my results. I could write a better workout for myself than what I'm using, but it might not work as well. So I'm doing whatever Eagle365 tells me.

So my training plan looks something like this:

Monday: Cardio + weights (push/pull/legs/core)
Tuesday: Sprints + corrective exercises (I assigned these to myself), rugby practice
Wednesday: Cardio + weights (push/pull/legs/core)
Thursday: Sprints + corrective exercises
Friday: Weights, drills and skills (agility, ball handling, set pieces, and so on)
Saturday: Game/race
Sunday: Rest

Today was intervals day, and the recommended protocol is 4 x [5 x 15" 90-95% effort w/ 45" rest] w/ 3:00 min. rest b/w sets. Last week, I did my intervals on a treadmill (incline @ 8.0%, speed at 10.6 MPH), with one set on the rowing machine (hard to get my heart rate up high enough, and the hip extension gives me SI joint/piriformis pain). It didn't feel difficult enough, though. Today, I went outside to run sprints on grass. That's the most specific to the sport (at least in the backfield), and the most applicable conditioning for the work I want to perform.

I warmed up with a barefoot jog. The grass on the Bishop Carrol practice fields is lush and thick. Felt so good on my bare feet! I used Interval Timer (the ad-supported version) to keep track of my times. It plays a sound at the end of each period, so you know when to start and stop without having to look at your watch. Now that I think of it, though, a watch would probably be easier.

5 x 15 seconds does not sound very hard. That's only 1:15 of total work. That's minuscule in comparison to the rest of my day! But when you're in the middle of a set, 15 seconds is interminable. I did fine on the first set, felt a little nausea on the second, and really felt like puking after the third. I took an extra long break after the third set, waiting for my heart rate to get back to 115-120 BPM. I couldn't make myself do the fourth set. I decided that I would scrap it; I wasn't going to get anything out of it. It'd just be junk miles (or junk meters, in this case).

I regret skipping the last set. When confronted with that kind of pain, the real question is how badly you want to be excellent. If you really, really want to be excellent, you push through that pain. You go ahead and throw up. Sometimes the pushing through is the benefit you garner from the workout; that mental endurance is more valuable than an improved VO2 max, or better running economy.

I should have pushed through. I think I'll make up for it by doing that last set tomorrow, as hard as possible, to drain my legs of glycogen so I can load my muscles with carbohydrates for the match on Saturday. And maybe next week I'll be able to do all 4 sets.

Practice: 5/1/2012

There's not a women's rugby team in Wichita, so normally I practice with the men. However! The Wichita Barbarians WON the Western Rugby DIII Championships! So they'll be getting ready for that, I assume. I figure I won't get much out of the practices, and I'll just be in the way as they're trying to get things all lined out for San Diego in two weeks. So I decided to do my own thing tonight. I was on my own, so my options were limited. I headed to the practice field at the local high school with my ball and some cones. Here's what I did:

15 minute warm up
 - Jog 1 lap
 - Eagles 365 Lunge Progression Series
 - Light jogging (as I evaluated the best place to do my HIIT sprints)
15 minute HIIT + grass drills (That link goes to an audio file I made that will coach you through the workout. If you don't know what grass drills are, watch this video.)
 - 2 x 15" max effort + 45" rest
 - 20" rest
 - 2 x grass drills
 - 20" rest
 - 2 x 30" max effort + 30" rest
 - 20" rest
 - 2 x grass drills
 - 2 x 10" max effort + 50" rest
 - 2 x grass drills
10 minutes agility drills
 - 3 x 20 m swerve drill
 - 3 x 20 m cone and hold
 - 3 x 20 m sharp cut drill
10 minutes work with tackle dummy
10 minutes practice kicking
 - Drop kick
 - Punt
 - Grubber
 - Chip

My First Practice

Okay, so really I only got into rugby because of a girl.

Hey! Don't judge me! Are you telling me you've never done anything ridiculous because of someone you loved (or wanted to)? Please.

Anyway, a girl. She had been trying to draw me into that world for a while, and I was willing. Honestly, I'd been looking a new challenge for a while. Triathlon had lost its appeal. I was considering softball and kung fu pretty seriously. So when I started dating a rugger, I figured I may as well give it a shot.

I started learning a little bit about rugby. I started reading a book about rugby. I started asking some questions about rugby. Then one afternoon, my girl asked me if I wanted to go to practice.

The catch is, there's not a women's rugby team in Wichita anymore. So she practiced with the men. Which, honestly, shouldn't have been that big a deal. I mean, I played high school football with men. But I also got hurt a lot, once I moved from the freshman team to the JV. Because the men were big. And I was small. And I'm even smaller now. So I approached this situation with some apprehension.

We went to a big box sports store so that I could get a pair of cleats and a mouthguard. I got a pair of cotton shorts at Goodwill, and wore an old T-shirt. We drove across town.

And it was really pretty non-eventful. We did dynamic warm-ups and stretching (much like we did in football). We ran some sprints, which were hard for me (triathletes don't sprint very often). And then there wasn't much for us to do. So we worked on passing and kicking, and a little bit of light tackling. She said I was a natural. And nothing fuels me like copious praise.

And that was my first exposure to rugby. Not much of a story, now that I think about it.

So here's a link to a video that proves that I'm not the only one who is drawn to rugby by sexy ladies. I won't embed the video, though, because this is sooooo not what rugby is like.