Making your players 'Contact Confident'

Coaching confident

One reason why something might not be coached is that the coach isn’t confident in the material.

It might be that its too focused on the science, or the exercises are less appealing because there is no perceived connection to the game.

Contact Confident is certainly research-led, integrating science into a dynamic rugby situation. It also draws on the work of people like Dr. Katrina McDonald, Dr. Danielle Salmon and Janelle Romanchuk, who have all used neck-strengthening and martial arts principles, especially from judo, to develop training exercises.

Since rugby coaches aren’t martial arts coaches, they may feel they won’t be able to implement the ideas. That is why we have worked hard to make them practical.

First, it needs to be sold as a good solution. Players haven’t come along for a judo session, so it needs to look like rugby.

As it happens, our research into the impact of this programme showed that players felt valued by coaches putting time and effort into improving their safety. This is important for all stakeholders in the game, mainly because of the headline news more recently.

Once on the pitch, we can ’hide the vegetables’ - in other words, we put the good principles into our sessions while making them look like the game of rugby.

For example, plenty of ’animal walks’ exercises support players’ contact development. With younger players, you can easily mix these into a game or a warm-up. For older players, you might need to tailor it to their context.

Another example, in a touch game, if the player is tackled, they put the ball between your legs and bear-crawl forward, or you restart a game after a knock-on with three players from each team doing a gorilla squat walk in a ‘restart box’ area. You pass the ball to whoever shows the best form. This could also be used to trigger a live 1v1 tackle restart from a lowered position, which reduces speed and momentum. 

The game continues as touch but you could use live restart boxes to introduce different types/scenarios of tackle. 

A gorilla walk is where a player moves forwards and backwards three metres, swinging their arms, before they are allowed into the game. If they fall over, they can use the brace position.

Another idea, based on partner carries after a tackle, the tackler and one other player must form a piggyback and then get back into the defensive line; or a restart has a wheelbarrow back-and-forward movement.

Partner balance and bodyweight exercises are ideal in the warm-up phase. You could play a low-level game of touch rugby and then break for a minute to do some exercises before returning to the game.

The neck-strengthening exercises can be built into your pre-contact warm-ups. Lots of them are partner-based; some are competitive, so are ideal for the end of the warm-up to build energy. Others require more concentration, meaning they are best done more slowly. 

Players could do these as arrival activities before beginning a team warm-up, in the gym or even at home.

Training the principles

In a specific exercise, you will be laser-focused on the suitable technique you are looking at.

In the rest of the training, you need to keep your awareness high but you don’t want to stop and start training all the time.

There are two ways to keep the flow while feeding back on good and bad practices.

The first is individual hot feedback, where you speak to a player specifically when you see something that needs attention. It must be quick, with language they understand. You can then follow this up later.

Secondly, you can highlight points in the review after each section. Again, it should be just one point using the terminology you’ve been discussing.