To survive up to 63 high-speed collisions per match (impacts that would floor the average man) professional rugby players are put through a rigorous training regime, virtually year-round. It’s in pre-season, though, when they put in the real graft: the foundations laid that will see them through a gruelling ten-month campaign. Just before the 22-23 season, Sam Rider spent a day with Sale Sharks – one of the best teams in the Premiership – to find out exactly what’s required of these elite-level athletes.
It’s a balmy, late-August morning at Sale Sharks’ High Performance Training Centre in Carrington, West Manchester. The players are days away from the opening match of the 2022-23 Premiership season, determined to better last year’s sixth-place finish.
“Discipline” and “physicality”. Those are the buzzwords this season, Sharks’ co-head of strength and conditioning, Rick Swaby, tells me when we enter the gym. The weights room itself is spread across a giant warehouse in the centre of the facility that was formerly Manchester City’s training ground.
Flanking the sides of the room are rows of BLK-BOX power racks, cable stations, GHD machines and punch bags. In the middle, towering forwards – some as wide as they are tall – as the team nonchalantly work through a monster set of trap bar deadlifts, Bulgarian split squats, plyometric bounds and band-resisted vertical jumps. For now, they’re mostly ignoring the double-decker row of rubber clad dumbbells, which max out at
