Is your team contact ready? Training drills to use

If you are coaching adult rugby, then you are probably already beginning to put in some elements of contact into your preparation programme for next season.

If you are coaching youth rugby, then you need to carefully consider the regulations about contact rugby. For example, in England for under 11s and below, you won’t even start "contact" of any sort until the actual season starts.

When you do start, your players need to be ready for contact, though, of course, in an ideal world, you would want to avoid it!

For a change from the normal rugby routines, why not introduce some wrestling into training. We have a guide to setting up the right sort of safe environment to take advantage of this type of training in Wrestling skills for a warm-up drill.

Moving this towards more rugby-related activities, try out this Ruck warm-up drill. Paul Tyler mixes wrestling-type exercises before looking into the best height to drive into contact.

Ruck pads are a good way to reduce the bone-on-bone contact. Use them wisely to improve techniques with Mark Calverley’s activity to Safely introduce tackling contact.

Finally, give your players the edge in the contact area by giving them some of the best contact tips. Develop better contact readiness with these ideas.