Shoulder Health in Rugby
As you can probably imagine, it’s incredibly important to take care of your shoulders if you’re a rugby player. This goes both for during the season and outside of it.
One such way of protecting them is to build both your muscle mass, muscle volume and your muscular strength through the use of strength and hypertrophy training.
Whilst strength and hypertrophy do overlap in what they achieve, there are important distinctions between what the they produce.
Strength training does exactly as you’d expect; it increases the ‘strength’ of the muscles which means increases both the maximum load that they can handle as well as the maximum force that they can apply. Another way to look at it is that you are increasing the density of your muscles, making them heavier but not quite ‘puffing them up’.
When we look at hypertrophy training, however; this style of training ‘bulks’ the muscles, making them bigger. We can look at this as you are increasing the volume of your muscles as opposed to the density, this of course does still make you stronger as you have more but it won’t be as functional as muscle developed through strength training.
If we summarise the reasons and give them as a comparison, they would be:
Strength training will make your shoulder sturdier and keep it together more effectively in the large impacts sustained in contact
Hypertrophy training will increase the amount of muscle around your shoulder and act like a cushion that will reduce impact on the joint
This then leads into a third type of training called “prehabilitation”, often called “prehab” which refers to when we perform exercises specifically to reduce the chances of injury.
One example of prehab would be:
Regular stretching and yoga classes will develop your flexibility and mobility (which has the benefits of allowing you to move more freely, thereby reducing the risk of injuring yourself, but also allows you to generate more power).
Another example would be:
Doing Pilates and core exercises regularly, which will help to improve the strength in your joints and your core (like the above, this will reduce the risk of injury and allow you to generate even more power).
