abuse the trainers at the blatt ( or did they move that to the strom these days? i know they were talking about that) . They love the rugby guys and really treat us really well. I love that place they fixed my knee up, lower back, shoulder. you name it .
[quote]orourkei wrote:
abuse the trainers at the blatt ( or did they move that to the strom these days? i know they were talking about that) . They love the rugby guys and really treat us really well. I love that place they fixed my knee up, lower back, shoulder. you name it . [/quote]
Yea they are in strom now, they’ve got a real nice training room in there.
I’ve never been in there before. I get banged up all the time but I always end up putting off going in there and then whatever it is stops hurting after a few days
Scrimmage tonight
I played two 30 minute periods, the first at flanker (where I belong) and the second at prop.
The first period started off pretty sloppy, I dropped a pass and had a couple penalties, but after that I played well and scored a try.
The second period went alright, I wasn’t really around the ball that much.
I think I’m finally in decent shape now. After playing 60 minutes straight, I wasn’t winded at all.
Hell yea get em!
Training:
Deadlift
255x5
295x5
335x5
3 sets of lunges and situps
Today was a pretty good session considering I hadn’t lifted in almost a week. It felt good to get back into it. My shoulder is still bothering me, I’m going in to get rehab on it this week and hopefully it’ll be good to go as soon as possible.
Training
Press (5 chins between sets)
85x5
100x5
115x5
3 sets of dumbbell rows and dumbbell incline press
Today felt great. I was worried that my shoulder might give me problems, but everything was fine. The presses felt very light, and I set a new PR on dumbbell rows with 95x20.
Today’s Training
Squat
205x3
225x3
245x10 PR
3 sets of good mornings and sit ups
Today was a great session. 245 felt great, and I got a 2 rep PR.
For some reason, my post from this week’s practice and scrimmage didn’t show up. I’ll try it again
This past week of practice:
We practiced tuesday and thursday, same as normal
We scrimmaged again on friday night. It was pouring and I (and many others) played like crap fro the first 30 minute period. I played a lot better in the second period
I got my shoulder checked out again, and the guy told me that unless I strengthen my rotator cuff muscles and really work on my shoulder issues, the injury will keep happening more and more frequently until it gets to the point that I need surgery. We are rehabbing it with a bunch of rotation exercises with bands, and the trainer said he’s gonna try to get me some bands so I can do it on my own. It’s not something that will keep me out of games, but it is still hurting.
If you can afford it, olympic rings are great for rotator cuff strength. I was in a similar situation as you … constantly seeing the pt staff doing band exercises, constantly sore shoulders . once I started slowly working in some oly rings i noticed the rotator cuffs gaining stability and the pain going away. start just holding your self steady on the rings, then move to some dips if thats comfortable and pain free.
They used to have a bamboo bar at the strom . Ask one of the trainers for it he might be nice and get it out of the storage room for you ( back where the water fountain is/ where the deadlift platform was before the redesign). hang some 10 lbs weights on that thing with some bands and bench press it . It completely zaps the shoulder stabilizers
John Meadows using it.
[quote]orourkei wrote:
If you can afford it, olympic rings are great for rotator cuff strength. I was in a similar situation as you … constantly seeing the pt staff doing band exercises, constantly sore shoulders . once I started slowly working in some oly rings i noticed the rotator cuffs gaining stability and the pain going away. start just holding your self steady on the rings, then move to some dips if thats comfortable and pain free.
They used to have a bamboo bar at the strom . Ask one of the trainers for it he might be nice and get it out of the storage room for you ( back where the water fountain is/ where the deadlift platform was before the redesign). hang some 10 lbs weights on that thing with some bands and bench press it . It completely zaps the shoulder stabilizers
John Meadows using it. [/quote]
We’ve got some ring at the gym I work at (not at USC), I’ll play around with them next time I work.
The weird thing is, I do band pull aparts every day, I always make sure I have more pulling volume than pushing, I try to keep everything balanced. But when I was doing all that rotational stuff with the trainer, even with the super light band (it’s more like a ribbon) my whole shoulder is on fire. I think I need to get one of those bands and do some rotation stuff every day. That or take it to the gym with me and hit a couple sets each time I lift.
Practice from last night:
Spent the first hour doing various conditioning drills
The second hour was spent working on scrums and lineouts
Training:
Bench (chins between each set)
145x3
165x3
185x9
3 sets of DB rows, curls, and pushdowns
Rehab:
4lb bar overhead raise 2x25
external rotation 2x25
internal rotation 2x25
external rotation with elbows up 2x25
Ice
I moved in my grip about an inch on each side. I was pinkies on the outer rings, and know I have my index fingers on the index rings. It felt better, and a PR of mine with the wider grip was 190x12, so there wasn’t much of a strength dropoff. Rehab went well too.
Practice from last night
We spent the first hour and a half being run into the ground in a variety of ways
The last half hour was spent working on lineouts and scrums against opposition, and then a brief scrimmage
Our coaches have really made conditioning the main focus of our practices. My legs have been destroyed all week. In my opinon, we should be focusing on more actual rugby stuff, but I guess the coaches think we are out of shape. It’s pretty frustrating, because I know that I’m in good shape, and I expect my teammates to be as well. After each of our scrimmages (I played 60 mins in each) I felt fine, so it kind of gets on my nerves when I have to spend most of practice running my ass off.
Hopefully my teammates will put in the work to be in shape so we can actually focus on the game itself. We will see how it plays out this weekend. We are playing the local men’s team, so it won’t be top notch competition. They aren’t pushovers, but we should win by a large margin if we all play well. I’m playing number 8 this weekend for the first time as well. I think it will go well because I will have a lot more oppurtunities to get the ball in my hand. It seems the coaching staff is finally recognizing that I have decent ball skills if they would put me in a situation to use them. Before this season, they were trying to develop me into a prop, but they finally came to their senses. They have specifically told me that if I have any doubt of getting a perfectly clean ball to the scrum half out of a scrum to pick it up and run, which is great news for me. This game should be a fun one.
Recovery session today:
Spent about a half hour rotating between a hot tub and cold pool. I feel a lot better already. I’m gonna try to get a couple extra hours of sleep tonight and tommorow and I should be good to go.
Match Report from this weekend:
We started off the season against the local men’s team. We always play them as the first game, because it’s usually not that much of a competition so we don’t have to worry about losing if we play sloppy.
A side- they started off really slow and went into halftime with a 6-0 lead. The second half they looked a lot better, like the A side should. The finished the game 30 something to 0.
B/C side- I started at 8 man for the B side game. It was my first time playing 8, and I didn’t practice it too much, so I made a couple mistakes. Mostly I didn’t realize which side of the scrum the opposing scrum half was on, so on a couple picks I ran right into him. As a team, we have to play a lot better. We got shut out, which is just unacceptable. The other team didn’t have enough players for 3 games, so the first half was our B side, and the second half was our C side (mostly, we mixed a few older players in bc we didn’t want an entire team of freshman playing). I think the final score was 17-0, which is disappointing, but at the end our coach pointed out that probably 2/3rds of the B/C guys were playing their first ever rugby match, so when you consider that it isn’t that bad. They’ve got a lot of potential, they just need more practice/playing time.
On another note, about 2 mins into the game, on my first carry, the tackler put his head on my thigh, right where I already had a bruise. It hurts like hell. I’m gonna see if the trainers can do anything for it, bc running might be out of the question for a couple days, it hurts just walking.
We play a very good college team next week, at their place, so it’s going to be a big week of practice.
Also, the top 25 rankings came out last week, and we aren’t ranked. 3 teams in our conference are, and so is our biggest rival. That seemed to upset a lot of us, including me.
A-side: 1-0
B-side: 0-1
Overall: 1-1
Today’s training:
Power cleans
worked up to 185x3
single leg press 3x6
lateral/rear raises 3x10 each
Rehab for shoulders and deep thigh bruise
I’ve got a deep thigh bruise that is really hurting, so today’s training was a bit all over the place. I got some ultrasound treatment and ice on the thigh bruise, as well as my normal shoulder rehab.
I’m hoping this thing will heal up by this weekend. We have a big game coming up and I want to play. I don’t really even know what my status is for practice this week. I should be okay to run around, it’ll hurt but it will be bearable. I’m not sure what the plan will be with contact, because I read that some really bad things could happen if I were to take another direct shot before it heels up. I’ll find all this out tommorow.
Practice from last night:
Warm up, stretching, etc.
ball drill to work in hands (this is the basic “4 corners” drill that so many teams do, it’s not hard but a lot of the new guys were dropping the ball all over the place)
Conditioning (sprints)
Relay runs (this is really just more conditioning )
3 on 2 drill
Rucking drill
Live, fowards vs forwards scrimmage
I talked to the trainer and he had me stay out of all contact today, so I had to hold out after the 3 on 2 drill. He did say I should be ready to play this weekend, which was great news bc I had no idea what the call on that would be. Hopefully I can get in at least some contact stuff on thursday. Conditioning was hard as shit like it always is, but hopefully it’s all gonna pay off. It’s hard to tell by the way I wrote that down, but we are basically doing about 30-45 mins of conditioning with just a 2 minute water break in the middle.
I’m going to lift and get rehab later today, it’ll be a little bit all over the place like earlier this week was, but ill be able to get on an actual schedule (meaning there will actually be some programming involved) next week.
Training:
RDLs
135x5
185x5
225x5
Incline DB press
40x10
50x2x10
DB row
50x10
65x8
80x6
Like I said, training was a bit all over the place today. I wanted to get a baseline on RDLs because I’m going to be using them in my routine so I wanted to see where I was at. 225x5 was challenging but not really hard. I kept it light on DB presses and rows, and just kept my form strict. It wasn’t a bad day, and I’ll get back to my programming next week.
Practice from last night
relay runs
conditioning
worked on pod play in the fowards
scrimmaged for about 15 mins
Conditioning killed me like it always does, the rest of practice went well.
Match report from this weekend:
A-side: They played well in the beginning, scoring 2 tries in the first 10 minutes, and they held a 10-8 lead for most of the game. The other team scored 2 breakaway tried in the final few minutes however, and we lost 20-10.
B-side: This match went very well, especially considering all the new guys we have playing, and the fact that we couldn’t score a point last week. We took this game 43-19, and we played well all around. I also personally played the best I have so far this year. I played flanker, and I had several big runs, I poached a couple balls, including one about ten meters from the goal line that lead us to score about 30 seconds later. Scrums and rucking went well, so did my tackling (though it still isn’t great)
A-side: 1-1
B-side: 1-1
Overall: 2-2